In any of the professional league sports, when a new team joins the league, this club is always mediocre to downright awful. Why is this? Why can’t they put a team together from scratch? Get some first round draft picks, some free agents, hire a good coach and be competitive the first to second years?
Although not an expansion franchise, the Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA, was purchased and moved from Vancouver, where they were the worst B-Ball team ever. Memphis brought Jerry West in, and got some good talent together and now Memphis is third in the Western Conference and beat up Kobe Bryant like a rag doll the other day. The turnaround from a piss poor sub 25 game winner to a 50 plus winner took place in only a two year period.
Well, with free agent players now there’s certainly much more opportunity for expansion teams to get good faster than before. Note MLB with Arizona and Florida both winning World Series trophies within 10 years of launch.
Prior to FA, though, expansion teams were stocked with players that were effectively the discards or least talented players from the existing teams. This was designed to allow them to put the minimum effort on the field while they built their player development programs to build the pipeline of talent that would bring them to competitiveness.
In effect, an expansion team has to build, from scratch, an organization capable of competing with other, already established organizations when all the top talent available already belongs to those other organizations. And that’s not just players. That includes management, scouting, development, marketing, etc.
I don’t know that much about sports, but it does seem to make sense that even giving a new team a comparable amount of talent won’t necessarily mean positive results right away. It takes time to form a truly competitive team, and to form an organization capable of giving the players the support they need to perform up to their talent. How much time that is… will vary from place to place.
First of all, hard salary caps affect all sports (except basball) so you can’t go out and get a ton of free (very expensive) agents. Second, in the expansion draft, teams will only leave unprotected the people they want to get rid of viz. bad players, expensive players, or bad expensive players. Third, expansion teams only get one first round draft pick like anyone else.
No expansion team is ever going to get much in the way of players from the other teams. There’s no reason to weaken your own team. The expansion pool is nearly always has-beens and low minor league talent.
The Los Angeles Angels actually had a competitive team in its second year of existance, finishing in third place, with some good young players like Dean Chance, Lee Thomas, Leon Wagner, and Jim Fregosi (though Fregosi didn’t become a regular until the next year).
But they had an advantage: the first baseball draft in 1961 froze the 40-man roster before the end of the season. This meant that some good young players were left unprotected. In 1962, the NL froze the roster after the World Series, allowing teams to make available players who they were planning to drop anyway. The Mets made the disasterous decision to pick up every player available who had some connection with the Dodgers and Giants; it may have helped at the box office, but not on the field.
In any case, it took nine years (eight in the NL) until an expansion team made the postseason.
But established teams set the rules for the expansion draft, and are in no mood to help out the new kid on the block.
I’m no sports fan at all, but I seem to recall the Denver NHL and MLB teams playing to champinonship level in thier early (first even?) years, so the generalization does not always hold true.
Colorado wasn’t an expansion team, they moved from Quebec City. The Flordia Panthers, however, were an expansion team (1993-94) and made the run to the Cup finals in 1996.
In many [North American] professional sports, the “farm system” is a crucial part of the success of a francise. Baseball and hockey, in particular, benefit from having a large, well established minor league system that lets them cultivate talented players for the majors. As well, there’s an entire scouting (both for talent and opponents) and coaching system that needs to be implemented and refined. It is possible to get the mix right from the start, like the aforementioned Florida teams, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.
This is a little different. In baseball you can go out and get the best team money can buy. In fact, the owner of the team said he was buying the championship.
But this raises an important question - how long is a team considered an expansion team? 2 years, 5 years, 10 years?
Actually, the premier example of a quick trip to the postseason in baseball would be the Arizona Diamondbacks, who won the NL West title in their second year of existence, winning 100 games. The Marlins won a World Series in their fifth year, but they sucked up to that point.
The rules for expansion teams’ acquisition of players have differed from case to case, even within the same sport. In 1977, when the Blue Jays and Mariners were grudgingly admitted to MLB (one team was created by necessity out of a lawsuit, and the other would have been sooner or later) neither team was permitted to sign high level free agents at all, and could acquire only the worst sort of castoffs. The Diamondbacks, by comparison, got big names right out of the gate; Jay Bell, Matt Williams, Devon White and Andy Benes all played for the 1998 squad.
No such discussion is complete without mention of the Washington Capitals’ debut season in the NHL, when they went 8-67-5. As far as I know, that record still stands. They didn’t even make the playoffs until 1983, and they only got to the final once, in 1998.
One of the problems with trying to go out and buy a championship right away (as the Arizona Diamondbacks did) is that it is very expensive to start a new sports franchise. In addition to all the startup costs and establishing an organziation and such, the existing franchises also want a sizeable fee from the new owners for granting the new team the right to play against them. (Note this is a U.S. sports phenomenon, European sports leagues are set up much differently.)
Both Arizona and Florida spent a lot of money and got a championship, but also found themselves in mountains of debt. In Arizona’s case, the owner tried deferring salaries and such, but ultimately the other owners forced out the majority owner (Colangelo) and sold off players to reduce payroll.
As for Florida, after their 1997 World Series title, then owner Wayne Huizenga decided that he wasn’t going to make enough money on the Marlins to keep going, so he just sold off the assets. Eventually the Marlins found their way into the hands of Jeffrey Loria who was able to squeeze enough out of them in 2003 to win the World Series, but in 2005, Loria, like Huizenga, decided he wasn’t making enough money so he has cut payroll again.
In sports with salary caps, it’s a little bit different as an owner can’t go out and spend like a maniac. However, basketball’s expansion teams have not been particularly successful. One of the few that ever won a championship relatively quickly was Milwaukee because they had the good fortune to add Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to their team. However, the Bucks still ended up with just one championship with Abdul-Jabbar on the team. Of teams added to the NBA in the 1990s, only Orlando has made it to the Finals and that was mainly due to the presence of Shaquille O’Neal on the Magic. Miami and Minnesota have a modicum of success too.
In hockey, the salary cap just started this year. But a lot of teams in hockey make the playoffs and it’s a little easier in hockey than in basketball to go on a run in the playoffs if you’ve got a hot goalie (like Anaheim or Minnesota in recent years).
In the NFL, you need a lot of players to become a good team. But some teams, like Carolina became respectable very quickly. If you can find a good QB and play some defense, you can do some damage quickly.
That’s funny. I thought the Bucks’ center that year was Lou Alcindor…
Didn’t Carolina get a better deal than the usual expansion team in terms of players? I forget what it was, but I think the other teams couldn’t protect as many players from the expansion draft. And possibly Carolina got an extra pick in the regular draft, too. Something like that, anyway.
I forgot that Jacksonville made the playoffs in its second year too as did Carolina. The expansion Cleveland Browns made the playoffs fairly quickly also.
Expansion football teams benefit from having shorter season and you get a more favorable schedule, the worse you play. Most NFL expansion teams get better by their third year. Most are contenders for playoff spots regularly after 5-6 years.
I think the key is that people under-estimate the importance of having a strong organization behind the players. Expansion teams are not just working to sort things out on the field and on the sidelines, they are working to efficiently run the business of sport.
This includes things like practice facilities, training staff, health professional, talent evaluation and scouting, as well a dozens of other details that few people know about or understand.
All of this stuff plays a role in putting together the best talent and coaches. The OP asks why the franchises simply don’t add a bunch of good players right away. There’s never a consensus as to who the best players are. What one expert thinks would be the best roster another person may disagree on. There’s nothing forcing these “best” players to some to that franchise either. Money isn’t always the only factor.
Usually the time put into establishing a quality organization helps a team determine who the best players, those which fit best more accurately, is what makes the difference. Not just power of the pocketbook.
Not only did they make the playoffs, both played in their conference championship game (losing to the Patriots and the Packers, who played Superbowl XXXI in 1997). Seems to contradict chinaglenn
IIRC, Jacksonville expanded at the same time as Carolina and got the same favorable deal. I remember that it was generally considered to be too good a deal and the next expansion didn’t get it. Anyone remember the specifics?