Can the city support an NBA or NHL team?
July 24, 2008
After today’s announcement that Baltimore officials want a downtown arena big enough accommodate a professional franchise, the next obvious question is: Who could fill that order, and can Baltimore really support an NBA or NHL team?
It’s been 35 years since the Bullets headed down I-95 to play in the Washington area (where they became the Wizards in 1997) and Baltimore hasn’t even had a whiff of getting a pro basketball team since. Sure, the Seattle Sonics were available earlier this year, but Baltimore was never a legitimate contender to get them. (The Sonics’ new home, Oklahoma City, was announced this month).
And the idea of Baltimore supporting a professional hockey team, especially when the area’s handful of hockey fans can go to D.C. or Philadelphia to watch a game, seems even more unrealistic (see comments here).
Even the city’s professional baseball team has been struggling to draw crowds for the past few years as excitement over the new ballpark has faded and the reality of a mediocre ball club has set in. The Orioles are a perfect case in point: when teams do well, more people come to their games. A few weeks before the All-Star break, the team was playing above-.500 ball and Camden Yards was attracting more people than it had in recent years.
Today the team is 10.5 games out of first place in the American League East, sits three games below .500 and is 7-11 in the month of July. In the last four weeks, attendance at Oriole Park has dropped by an average of 2,000 per night.
So while a new franchise might draw sellout crowds the first few years, after the excitement wears off where will Baltimore stand? If the team isn’t any good, evidence so far points to all but the hardcore fans in this city being pretty indifferent about watching a lousy team in person. (The Ravens, of course, are the grand exception to that — despite a 5-11 season last year M&T Bank Stadium was packed for every game.)
And while it should be noted that an 18,500-seat arena might be easier to fill up than a ballpark that seats more than 48,000, do you think Baltimore could really support a professional hockey or basketball team?
LIZ FARMER, Business Writer
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No.
Of course it can’t. NBA ticket prices are outrageous, and the NHL isn’t any better. (Plus, it isn’t terribly popular.) The Blast put an entertaining, winning product on the floor and drew about 7,000 per game.
Let’s build a 14,000-seat arena near the stadiums, encourage more development along that corridor, and turn the West Side land over for redevelopment as an office/retail project.
nevermind if we would support a team or not–no team owner would analyze the marketplace and decide to make a substantial investment here with teams only an hour away in dc and 2 hours away in phillie. and we don’t have a sufficient number of large businesses here to buy the suites and season tickets. the orioles are renting their suites on a partial season basis– because they can’t sell for the full season. It does not take a genius for a prospective team owner to figure this out. This reminds me of building an Olympic Village without ever putting in an Olympic bid! Maybe they will come….someday. And the arena will be outdated by the time they do.