Why can't the Maloofs just sell the Monarchs?

#1
I don't get why the Maloofs can't sell the team to someone in the bay area. Clay Bennett got $10 million for the Seattle Storm and Seattle is half the market that the bay area is. I know that there's a recession but I have to think that with the amount of interest in women's sports in the bay area is enough to justify a sale of $10 million for someone.
 
#2
Maybe they did. Maybe they contacted the league office and they said to do it this way.

Or maybe they didn't want to go on and risk having no buyers then folding at a later date.
 
#3
I would guess that either there are no buyers due to the other recent folds/near folds and relocations or that the "profit" the Monarchs are generating is negligible in regards to the investment of buying the team. If its a 10 million dollar investment and it nets you a few hundred thousand a year you can do better with that 10 million elsewhere.

The only other scenario I could come up with is Section 101's where the league actually favored this move. That doesn't really seem plausible because it sends a horrible message, at least the relocations you can be spinned.
 
#5
I don't think the Monarchs were showing a "profit"...
Me either.

I also don't think the league minds having fewer franchises, if it means better franchises. Not that there was anything wrong with the Monarchs in particular, but contraction leads to better teams, because the talent is divided fewer ways. There have been calls for the NBA to contract because of horrible teams that never win, despite having a number of talented players. Can you imagine if the Clippers, Bucks, Bobcats and Grizzlies all went away, and their players were drafted off by the other teams in the league? It would make the remaining 26 teams more competitive automatically. It's not going to happen, but it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for anyone but the fans of those teams.

The WNBA might be looking at this as a way to make their product better. Sucks for Monarchs fans, to be sure. But if the Maloofs said that they were either going to find a buyer or fold, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the league told them to just fold.
 
#6
I don't think the Monarchs were showing a "profit"...
I honestly don't know, but there are quite a few who are adamant that they were (or were at least breaking even) in the other threads.

Supes, I agree that contraction is good for competition but its definitely a tradeoff if the public perception is that the NBA is keeping the WNBA on life support. If you are going to contract to put a better product on the court say so, when MLB seriously considered contraction they acknowledged that as a prime reason.
 
#7
Supes, I agree that contraction is good for competition but its definitely a tradeoff if the public perception is that the NBA is keeping the WNBA on life support. If you are going to contract to put a better product on the court say so, when MLB seriously considered contraction they acknowledged that as a prime reason.
It's not just public perception. Someone mentioned that the payroll of the entire league (players only) is about $10 million a year. The NBA gives the WNBA $12 million a year. Even if there are a handful of teams in the black, the league as a whole is not making any money. Otherwise, there's no need for the subsidy.

The main differences I see between MLB and the WNBA is that a) baseball is still popular overall, even if there are some struggling franchises, and b) MLB didn't contract; the WNBA is contracting. In the past seven years, six teams have folded. One of those six teams was the torch-bearer for professional women's basketball, proving that no one is really safe. I was shocked when the Comets folded, but if it could happen to them, it could happen to anyone.

And I wasn't really saying that the WNBA necessarily has contraction on the table, but if an owner called and said "these are our two options", it's not unbelievable that the league office would encourage them to fold rather than sell. The residual benefits that might come could benefit the league overall, even though you're losing a portion of your fan base. They might be counting on Monarchs fans still watching the games as they follow their favorite players; maybe they might even watch more games, because their favorites players are spread out. I don't know that it's the right way to do it, but I don't think you can take it off the table as a possibility.
 

6th

Homer Fan Since 1985
#8
Supes, the teams in the WNBA pulled away from NBA support a few years ago. And, that is why there are now so many teams that are not in NBA cities or owned by NBA owners.

The Monarchs have not lost money for a long time. They have either been showing a profit, or breaking even for several years.

The teams may not be getting subsidies any longer, but I do believe that the WNBA gets a subsidy from the NBA. That money is not used for teams, but for the organization, i.e. New York offices, personnel, etc. The money does not pay the player's payroll, but the execs payroll.
 
#9
The some people who were adamant about making profits? The Maloofs through their bizops people but also by their own crowing. They're about the only people who would know enough about their financials to make that claim and tell it to the world.

I also don't think President Orender was doing backflips when she got the news from Joe and Gavin because it will make her product better. If ithis was a good thing, then she's not scrambling to try to get Oakland viable before the end of the year. Just like she had to scramble to make Dallas viable or push deadlines for a new group in Charlotte. Both of those efforts ran out of time. The other sorta down side to this scramble, if precedence plays any role...is if Oakland/Bay Area isn't deemed viable in this 30-45 day crunch to beat the hourglass that market dies for the league in the future. Groups in Charlotte, Dallas and Denver ran out of time and were never tapped again. As neither were, the cities where franchises left although like Stern with Seattle, Orender has vowed to get another team Houston.

The league can't count on the fans continuing to watch their players if they are dispersed around the league. That could only work for leagues that have larger television packages and even then I think that puts too much value on retaining fan loyalty to the league when the fan has been dis-franchised. I'm not sure that works like that for the WNBA, or for any sport for that matter.

It really wasn't a surprise that the Comets folded. Les Alexander had been telegraphing that he wanted out for several years before he actually pulled the plug. The investor the league found to take over the team (on the surface, the league still controlled the operations of it behind the scenes) to keep it in Houston (I suspect until they found more solvent investors elsewhere) was a disaster until the league took it back over from him late in the 2008 season. What was a surprise to me was that the league had no soft landing ready for a team it had a direct pulse read on for two seasons.

So no, Donna O is not pleased. But she'll publicly spin it as a positive because that's what league presidents do. But they don't want 12 teams and at the same time, they don't want to lose a good opportunity for the Bay Area investors, that much I'm pretty confident about. If contraction was their ultimate endgame - they'd have set a date to disperse the Monarchs already so the teams can get on with the business of RE-booking travel and accomodations since the schedule which included the Monarchs existing was already finalized. Contract/Expand as a strategy reaches a point of diminishing returns in my eyes. You can only get so small before you begin to sap too many roster spots and players decide to go overseas where they can make more money and bypass the W altogether.



Re: contraction and baseball? Selig had an agenda and it wasn't competitive balance. If it were, they'd have a salary cap in the game.
 
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