The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
The National Basketball Association will be restarting its season in July after being shut down for more than three months due to the coronavirus. The NBA, you may recall, was the first of the major American sports leagues to be impacted by the pandemic when two of their players tested positive in March.
However, when the league returns in July, it will look nothing like the basketball we are used to. The games will be played at the Disney complex in Orlando in an arena without spectators; the remainder of the “season” will consist of eight games; the playoffs will be expanded to include a potential play-in game for the eighth spot in each conference; and, most importantly for fans here in Charlotte, only 22 of the league’s 30 teams will be participating. Those teams are the 16 that would be in the playoffs today based on their records on the day the league suspended play, plus six more who are within hailing distance of the last playoff spot.
The other eight teams will convene at the Best Western Inn and Conference Center in Dubuque, Iowa, where they will play a 14-game round-robin tournament where they will crown the NIT champion and earn Red Lobster gift cards. Just kidding. The non-contenders, our Hornets among them, will stay at home and sulk.
Given the extreme circumstances, it makes sense to keep the teams without a legitimate chance to make the playoffs at home. The logistics of keeping an entire basketball team safe and happy in a hotel complex in Orlando is daunting, and doing so for 30 teams would be exponentially harder than for 22. Still, as a Hornets fan, having my team excluded from the rest of the season feels a bit like relegation.
The idea of relegation comes from European soccer, where multiple leagues operate in a tiered structure. The closest analog in American sports is baseball. Still, that system is quite different since the players in the lower baseball leagues are owned by the top-level clubs, and the minor leagues serve as a training and proving ground. In the European model, each team is wholly independent, and every year the worst team or teams at each level are “relegated” to the league below, and the same number of teams from the lesser league are promoted. It’s an exciting concept that helps to prevent the kind of decade-long train wrecks we occasionally see in American sports. In theory, a team from the tiniest town could rise through the league structure by consistently winning its league and eventually find its way to the top level, and a team without a strong commitment to winning could soon see itself playing in a cow pasture. In reality, of course, financial and demographic considerations put a ceiling on how high a team can rise and a floor on how far they can fall.
From an American sports perspective, it is difficult to see how that system would work. Take baseball as an example. The Detroit Tigers, at 47-114, were the worst in the major leagues in 2019, and the Sacramento River Cats were the champions of Triple-A, the next level down. So, in a relegation system, the River Cats would replace the Tigers in the American League. Putting aside for the moment the fact that the River Cats players belong to the San Francisco Giants, swapping out the 36th largest city and its 10,000-seat stadium for the 24th largest city and 41,000-seat Comerica Park doesn’t seem like a great trade. And the Tigers play in the Central Division, so the other teams – Cleveland, Minnesota, Chicago and Kansas City – would have to continually shuttle to the West Coast.
Of course, the countries where European soccer leagues play are smaller geographically than the United States and, given the possibility of promotion and relegation, soccer stadiums are generally constructed with an eye toward future expansion with large standing-room areas and space for temporary seating.
The COVID-19 pandemic is playing havoc with all sports, and it remains to be seen how baseball, football, hockey and soccer deal with the conclusion or start of their seasons, but one thing is clear: If you are an NBA fan of Charlotte, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Cleveland, Minnesota or Golden State, your season is over.