LukeNukem keeps his eyes and ears open for any/all sports stories and in doing so, floated me some of the grumblings that are taking place regarding the Indiana Pacers. Essentially, there was a deal that the Pacers organization would pay 15 million dollars for Conseco Fieldhouse (which is only 11 years old). But the cash-strapped organization is extorting, threatening, asking the city of Indianapolis to foot the bill, or else they will have to leave. Do you remember reading this article here? Remember how I said that sports teams do NOT help a city’s economy? This is a perfect example. The team AGREED to pay the bill and now they’re threatening to leave unless the city pays it for them (yes, I know there was a clause that allowed for re-negotiation, but it’s still slimy). This angers me to no end for several reasons.
Championship-caliber teams vs......eh....see ya later Pacers
First, there’s obviously something wrong with the way an NBA team is run. According to USA Today, even when the Pacers were the darlings of Indianapolis (pre-Peyton/Marvin/and the other Reggie) they were unsuccessful financially. What kind of business moron do you have to be that you can’t make money when your team has established rivalries with the New York Knicks, pushed Michael Jordan and the Bulls to 7 games, and had a respectable showing against the Shaq and Kobe show? And now you’re threatening to take the Troy Murphy, Mike Dunleavy Jr. and Jeff Foster show on the road? Indianapolis already has a team with scrappy white guys (see Butler Bulldogs). So what city would want this show? Seattle? Kansas City? Vancouver? Seattle and Vancouver lost franchises. Kansas City already has two turds in the toilet bowl of sports (Chiefs/Royals). Why would we (KC) want another?
Yep, the Pacers "choked" when it came to making money (thePhillyPhour).
Secondly, who cares? I read a blog on bleacherreport.com saying there’s “no way” the Pacers are leaving, essentially, that it would be sacrilege to have an NBA team leave the “State of Basketball.” Keep in mind, he supports none of his arguments with “facts.” He just “knows” Bird and Simon will figure out a way to keep the team in Indiana. He may be right in what happens, but his assumption that chaos would ensue is completely wrong. Why? Because, Indiana is a land of basketball. And there are much better products being put on display at the College and University level. Think about it: Purdue—Matt Painter is recruiting heavily in Indiana and succeeding. Who knows what may have happened if Robbie Hummel didn’t suffer his season-ending Injury. PU-Butler final? It could have happened. Oh yeah, remember Butler? A mid-major team with the swagger and confidence of an established power team. Lost to Duke by 2 points and nearly won the damn thing. Finally, there’s a little known team called Indiana. Sure, they’re in a slump. But they’re a historically relevant team. Butler resides in Indianapolis whereas Purdue and IU are a mere hour away. So why would you pay to see a bunch of overpaid NBA players (who don’t win and haven’t won in 4 years) when you can see future NBA players (potentially) play their hearts out and win. I say, let ‘em leave.
And finally, let’s talk about the quality of the product. The Pacers recently finished their worst season since 1988 I believe. The have failed to make the playoffs for four years running. And they have the gall to say, “Pay up, or we’re leaving.” Indianapolis needs to take a stand and say, “Win and then MAYBE we’ll pay up.” Indianapolis has a stellar professional sports team (the Colts). The Colts and the playoffs have become synonymous. The Colts have one of the greatest players/QBs/whatevers of all time. So guess what? They had a bargaining chip. And what made their bargain more useful: The fact that the Pacers were on the downward slide. Think about it. Peyton was drafted in 1999. It took him a while to settle in, but you could say he found his groove around 2003, 2004. What happened in 2004? The Malice at the Palace (Pacers/Pistons) brawl. You can look to that event as the event that destroyed the Pacers as Indiana knew them. So with a product declining in one area (basketball) and rising in another (football), the Colts were the easy choice. The ground broke on Lucas Oil Stadium in 2005. So the city is already on the hook for that
When not leading his team to AFC titles, Manning practices with real bears. Who wouldn't want to build a stadium for this guy? (shoelace.org)
stadium. Why would they want to attach themselves to a losing product that can’t make money?
It’s sad, really. Somehow, the people who make these decisions will be bribed convinced that the Pacers leaving would hurt the city. However, if one just looks at the facts: financially impractical and sub-par in quality with other products out there (NFL, College basketball), one would then say to Herb and Larry “Don’t let the door hit ya’ where the good lord split ya’!” Sorry Hoosiers, though I may be right on principle, that blogger I mentioned above is probably accurate—they’re not leaving and you guys will foot the bill. Until next time: keep it sweet, keep it smooth—like CocoaButter.
LukeNukem and KC CocoaButter- Would you like Nancy Duke to get all reporter-ey and settle this issue? Your Googling sounds fun, but this issue is interesting to me, so I’d rather make a few or 17 phone calls to some experts, etc. I know it’s absurd–blogs that report facts independently–but why not?
Part of me wants taxpayers to call the Pacers’ bluff, but the other half of me thinks Indianapolis losing an NBA team would make the city much more sad than it needs to be. Also, we have to remember that it’s much easier to say “good riddance” to a struggling team. (Actually, it shouldn’t be that easy, but unfortunately, it seems that Indianapolis is full of fair-weathered fans for their pro teams. Do you think New Yorkers or New Englanders would say “see ya later” to their basketball teams? Indy is a very “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately” town.)
Also, we can’t assume everything will be fine because Indy is a “football town” now. No, it’s not. That’s absurd. It’s a Peyton Manning town. I think a lot of Indy residents are like Cubs fans. They aren’t football die hards per se. They just really love Peyton Manning. Just like most Cubs fans aren’t Cubs or baseball fans, they are just fans of getting drunk in Wrigleyville.
Everything comes in waves. Soon, the Colts will suck, probably for a few years after Manning retires and maybe more than a few years. When that happens, attendance at Lucas Oil will dwindle and people will want another option and who’s to say the Pacers couldn’t be good by then? And you can’t convince me that the city wouldn’t rally behind a good Pacers team after years of sucking. Conseco would be full of about 20,000 people lying to each other with this: “I never gave up on ‘em! I’ve always stuck with the Pacers! This IS a basketball town!”
Sincerely,
Your Snarky Friend
I’ve written a column’s worth of material in these reply posts when I was supposed to be doing actual work that I get paid for, so anything you want to write on the subject would be fine.
You know, I really think the fans stuck behind the pacers for a very long time. But the organization didn’t respond to their needs/desires. After that Malice at the Palace, the organization moved way too slowly to remove the thugdom that the team had been built around. For me, it wasn’t the losing record that cost the pacers my love. It was the image I had of them becoming the midwestern version of the jail blazers. I supported the Pacers when Chuck Person and Detlef Schrempf were our go-to guys. At least when we lost back then, we lost with class.
I really believe my opinion, which this article was an opinion, would be vastly different if I thought the organization had moved faster to repair the damage that had been done in the brawl.
But finally: Indianapolis is a sad city not because of the presence or lack thereof of sports teams. It’s sad because it has no character. It’s sad because the general population would rather wait in line at O’Charley’s than visit an independently/locally owned restaurant. It’s a sad city because besides downtown, it’s not a very walkable city. It’s a sad city because during the housing boom, it chose to erect vinyl villages rather than soundly constructed homes with actual character. I don’t think losing a basketball team makes it any better or worse. I think the city needs to do some soul-searching before it decides whether or not to shell out the cash Herb Simon is asking for.
KC CocoaButter, your third paragraph almost made my head fall off I was nodding so much. Spot on. I think that city is such a waste of opportunity. Downtown is such a small condensed area, I don’t understand how city officials could get it so wrong. And on your food comment, I couldn’t agree more. When the Cheesecake Factory, the holy grail of unhealthy eating and criminally large portions, came to the Johnson County/ Marion County line, that whole population literally jizzed their pants. Truly depressing.
I should also mention that I bring up these sad things because I want Indy to be better. The city is like an overweight relative who has a special place in your heart. You’re hard on them because you want them to get healthy!
It’s not just the city planners’ fault. The main problem with the city of Indianapolis is that it’s populated primarily with people who have no interest in walking anywhere. They have no interest in walking anywhere because they all want their own pickup trucks. The trickle down has been detrimental, because cities that have no mass transit system (or no safe mass transit system, like Atlanta) never move away from 1950s segregation, which is the root cause of the problem (white flight + cheap suburbs = boring-ass city set-up).
Yeah, the city’s spread out and unwalkable and that’s not the citizens’ fault, but if they were going to use a mass transit system, the city would’ve developed one by now. If you’ve ever been to Atlanta, it’s like here, but replace all of the sketchy neighborhoods in Atlanta with strip malls and chain restaurants. For middle class people who enjoy suburban ranches (guilty as charged) Indianapolis is heaven; it’s affordable, everything’s 30 minutes away, the crime’s not as bad as Jamaal Tinsley and Steven Jackson would have you believe, there’s some big city commodities (Pacers, Colts, museums, restaurants, malls) but small-town traffic (except on the northeast, and southeast sides) and best of all, a lot of us still have jobs. You sacrifice culture, good beer and less fat people, but if you want that stuff, you’re 45-60 minutes from Bloomington, the cultural/hot girl mecca of the midwest United States.
Luke, about the city planners and “walkability.”
It seems to me this is like a chicken or the egg question. Do the citizens of Indianapolis desire to drive because the city is not walkable, i.e. they have no other options or did the city planners design an unwalkable city because they figured the citizens wanted to drive. I’m not sure, but I wonder if the city planners or at least current decision makers made the effort to give people the option to walk, might they?
It doesn’t matter what the intent once was. Now they’re mostly fat bastards with pickup trucks, who’d rather go through MacDonald’s drive thrus than walk down to the local “bistro” for a bean burritto with a gluten-free whole grain tortilla shell and a side of hummus. Why spend big money catering to the poor people who can’t afford cars, and/or the hipsters who would take advantage of mass transit just to have a place to write in their moleskins when the largest part of your tax base is in the fat-bastards-with-pickup-trucks contingent?
You point about the bar scene:
How many pacers games have you attended?
I’ve been to at least 15 pacers games at a drinking age capacity. The bars/etc are no more packed than they are on any other night. The 10,000 fans? How many are kids/families? You think they’re going to bars before the game? They’re not. Furthermore, you’re denying the many published articles on how professional sports teams do NOT help a city’s economy. Your line of thinking is exactly what professional sports teams prey upon when they lobby the local governments. Unfortunately, the data doesn’t support it. However, fancy accountants (you know, the same ones who figure out how to use mark-to-market accounting tricks) will convince people like you that the city would actually lose money.
I never said the Colts didn’t extort the city of Indianpolis. I actually said the colts waited until they had the superior product in Indianapolis to wait until they played their cards. The Pacers are trying to renegotiate a shitty product.
Your third paragraph: It’s a losing formula. So why keep it? You and I would probably agree that the NBA as a whole is fucked. It’s an awful product and the way it is structured, ugh! If anything, the NBA has such a diluted product it needs to constrict. Rather than shifting a team like the pacers (or supersonics), the NBA needs to become leaner…in this case, by attrition.
Finally, your fourth paragraph. My argument was never that the college sports teams serve their communities in a superior manner to the professional sports teams. My argument is: if fans are clamoring to see sports entertainment: you can A) Overpay for a shitty product or B) Overpay for a winning product. That’s a simple choice man.
Also, you’re a dirty liar. You began your post with “Couple things.” Then you proceed to blast me with your 687 word count response. Yeah, that’s right. I copied and pasted your response into Word and looked at the word count. Jerk face.
Your own unofficial bar census and phantom “published” articles about how professional sports teams don’t help a city’s economy aside, I’d say you’re still wrong.
First of all, the only way teams like the Pacers, Kansas City Royals and Jacksonville Jaguars can even stay afloat is because of their portion of revenue sharing from more successful teams. Their own cities aren’t doing them any favors. Remember that Marion County food and beverage tax that city planners used to fund the construction of Lucas Oil Stadium? Yeah, there wasn’t anything like that for Conseco Fieldhouse. On that note, why would city planners agree to literally fund the stadium with money out of restaurant and bar patrons if said stadium didn’t drive buisness to said restaurants and bars? I say the same trick could’ve worked with the Pacers if they had threatened to leave if Indy didn’t build Conseco, like the Colts did if Indy didn’t build Lucas Oil.
The assertion that “people like me” are being duped, and that the city of Indianapolis could just shrug off losing the Pacers is patently misinformed, even if your restaurant and bar figures aren’t made up. Think of it this way. You live in a condo cooperative with 20 units housed in the same building. 19 units, including the one you live in, pay the same amount every month into the association fees. The 20th unit is a huge-ass penthouse owned by a corporate executive. Besides him, the rest of you are middle class folks. Well, his penthouse is awesome so he pays three times the association fees that you do. All of a sudden he loses his job and can’t pay for his condo anymore, so he has to sell it back to the association. But it’s a tough economic time, and the association can’t find anyone to buy the unit at a fair price, so they just absorb the mortgage and his higher percentage of fees into your fees for years, driving the cost of living up for everyone else.
If the Pacers leave, there are three options for Conseco Fieldhouse, all of which are potentially devastating to the city’s economy:
Option 1-Keep paying the lease, keep housing the 100s of other events that take place there, and absorb all of the operating costs (food, parking, utilities, security, etc.) into the city budget, while you wait for another NBA team to move in. Without the Pacers there soaking up that unfair portion of the operating costs, who do you think’s going to be responsible for the excess when other events take place? Without raising taxes, it can’t be the city, which is already strapped after exhausting all those capitol improvement bonds for LOS. So the answer is, just like in the condo analogy, the people living in Indianapolis. What happens when the cost of living in Indianapolis goes up too much? Everyone moves out because it’s no longer affordable to live there (not to mention, there aren’t any draws like, I don’t know, professional sports teams). What happens when everyone moves out? People stop going to bars, restaurants and hotels, thus depressing the city’s economy.
Option 2: Shut the thing down all together. Don’t host events there at all anymore. Basically turn it into a freakishly huge Union Station with fewer creepy white plaster statues. That way you don’t have to pay for any operations, and as long as you keep minimal repairs up, you can still wait for an NBA team to swoop in and save the day in the future. Fine. Except for one thing. THEY STILL OWE A SHIT LOAD OF MONEY ON IT! So, just like our condo example, where the rich guy moved out and your association couldn’t find anyone to pay his mortgage, you’re going to have to divide and foot the bill, or lose all your equity in a sale to a bank…if there are any banks in the United States financially stable enough to take on such a foreclosure.
Option 3: Blow that bitch up. I was there when they imploded MSA. It was awesome. From a cool-to-watch standpoint, I’d vote this route. But you’re still in all that hot water you were in with option 2. The operating costs go away, but after the cost of demolition and cleanup, do you even save any money, especially with so much lease left to pay?
Luke,
Have you heard of google? If so, please type “sports franchises” + “city economy” and then hit enter. Notice I didn’t slant my search terms and I doubt anyone google bombed that topic to slant the results. That answers the “phantom articles” comment.
So the Pacers don’t get help from a food/beverage tax. You know what? Tough luck. For whatever reason, the Colts were able to sell their case and get their demands whereas the Pacers might not be.
Why would City Planners agree to Bar/Restaurant tax: Who else are they going to tax? Grocery stores? The Gap? Those “food taxes” are the whole crux of the argument that is “pro-sports team/good economy.” Those who propose city funding of the new stadiums couldn’t possibly argue to tax anything other than bar/restaurants. It wouldn’t make sense. You bring up revenue sharing that keeps small market teams afloat that the cities aren’t doing them any favors. Good! If those leagues want to continue a revenue sharing based model of business to keep those small market teams alive, so be it. But if they don’t, then I think the teams should A) move to a market that can support them or B) die (see contricting the NBA to increase quality).
You bring up the options left with Conseco Fieldhouse and the lease that’s on it. First, I’d like to bring up how the city is “on the hook.” You see, despite whatever economic gains the pacers MAY have brung (negligible at best), the city is now on the hook for them. The Pacers/Conseco have become a liability, not an asset. And from the data, (not being profitable, even in winning seasons), it’s likely to remain that way.
Furthermore, according to the recent IBJ article: http://www.ibj.com/pacers-would-pay-big-if-they-moved/PARAMS/article/19345, the pacers would be on their own hook for a big portion. Even conservative figures (conservative here meaning the pacers don’t owe as much as thought), Conseco could be run/operated for 3-4 years. With 3-4 years, I bet we could figure out something to generate revenue. If not, a big portion of what’s left is paid and “blow the damn thing up.”
By the way, your “Option 1″ with housing the 100s of other events. The pacers keep 7-9 million annually of non pacer revenue. Well, that 7-9 million would then have to go to the new “owners” the City of Indianapolis.
Finally, you act like the people of Indianapolis aren’t used to paying taxes on things that don’t exist anymore (The Dome). So let the pacers leave, take their fine, figure out what’s best from a revenue stand point (events and take the 7-9 mill annually) or “tax and destroy”. But I highly doubt your apocalyptic emigration to the burbs-urban plight scenario would go into effect, or at least not nearly to the effect in which you have painted.
Based on a couple of the articles I read from your search, the data would indicate that sports franchises don’t necessarily bolster a city’s economy. But my general finding is that researchers are leaving out the most important component of said sports franchises to city economies…the venues they require. A sports team can stink it up for decades and fail to improve ANYthing about commercial development, but if they don’t cost the city much to operate their mega-huge stadiums, they’re absolutely an economic boon for the city regardless. I have it on good authority that Marriott would not have invested nearly half a billion dollars into a decade of hotel development in downtown Indianapolis, nor would Hilton have built one of the only luxury “Conrad” hotels in the world on Washington street had it not been in part due to the stadium proximity. Concerts and other huge performances, NCAA events, circuses, monster truck rallies (which are so popular that only LOS can house them). You name it, we’ve got it. But as I’ve said before, without the Pacers agreeing to foot the majority of the bill (or without the LOS bar tax we all voted yes on) there’d be no money to pay for the stadiums. None of the articles I read from your google search directly addresses my argument. In fact, the researchers (and you) are committing a pretty common logical fallacy called denying the antecedent:
If the Pacers helped the city’s economy, the city of Indianapolis would need them. The Pacers don’t help the city’s economy. Therefore the city of Indianapolis doesn’t need them.
That’s invalid because there’s lots of other reasons why we need them, the most important of which is that they pay for their large stadium that draws events and conventions (for which our city’s scant tourism base is highly invested), thus indirectly helping the city’s economy, and the demolition of which/operation of which without their portion of the bill would be crippling (as I already said).
Concerts and other huge performances, NCAA events, circuses, monster truck rallies (which are so popular that only LOS can house them). You name it, we’ve got it.
So what’s losing a crappy NBA product really going to do?! Do you think the Pacers command THAT much respect? I am not saying “Get rid of colts, pacers, and everyone else.” I’m saying that “If you can’t run your organization in such a way that you can sustain yourself, and you have to wait 10/11 years so that you can renegotiate, and you did so at a time when your product was lackluster compared to your competition…well, then sorry.” The fact of the matter is, the Pacers organization didn’t play their cards right and now they’re asking a cash-strapped city for money. And they’re doing so with the looming possibility that they could leave for greener pastures.
You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. Like I said in my article: the city of Indy will cave and work something out. You and I disagree on whether or not it should happen. You paint an apocalyptic picuture of a decaying city. I paint (probably a too happy) picture of blissful indifference.
Couple things.
First of all, I think you’re understating the importance of ANY professional sports franchise to a city’s economy, especially a small market with no discernable tourism industry, like Indianapolis. Yeah, sure, the Pacers only average about 10,000 fans per home game, but that’s 10,000 more living, breathing people in downtown Indianapolis, 41 times per year, than would probably be there if the Pacers weren’t around. You think the downtown Indy bar and restaurant scene wouldn’t miss approximately 410,000 potential customers each year? That’s the Pacers’ bargaining chip right there, which brings me to my second point…
You’re making an unfair comparison with the Pacers vs. Colts, and an even more unfair comparison with your Butler/IU/Purdue argument. I’ll start with the Colts. Fact: The Colts do not pay their own operating costs for Lucas Oil Stadium. The city’s Capitol Improvements Board does. Fact: Had the Colts not drafted Peyton Manning and enjoyed the first half of the most successful decade in NFL history, the Colts would either have left in 2000 or 2001, or they’d still be playing in what would amount to the smallest stadium in the NFL, the RCA Dome. Fact: The “extortion” you’re referring to is the same tactic that the Colts, and nearly EVERY professional sports team uses when they want a new stadium. Fact: The Pacers pay a higher percentage of their operating costs for Conseco Fieldhouse than the majority of the rest of the NBA teams.
The Simons Ownership partnership, when it first bought the Pacers, was literally sacrificing money so the city could have NBA basketball. The Pacers Organization has made money ONE YEAR that the Simonses have owned it, yet despite several cities (Kansas City included) clamoring for NBA teams in the last three decades, they’ve kept the team in town and even worked out a deal for a stadium that itself is one of the major reasons they can’t make money. If this were any other ownership group (like say, the Seattle Supersonics owner) the team would’ve skipped town before Conseco was even built. As you stated, the winning formula that the Colts use just doesn’t work for the Pacers, and the reason is because you pack 17,000+ people into that bad boy for every home game, and win 82 games a year, and you’ll never make money when you’re paying that much of a yearly operating cost and have to compete with overspending teams that are willing to take advantage of the NBA’s soft cap in able to lure stars. It’s lose-lose for small market, poor and unpopular franchises like Indiana.
Finally, your college argument is absurd. You know as well as I do that the NCAA keeps all of that revenue, and the only way college teams boost their city’s economy is through food/beverage sales. But Butler’s not drawing any more people to Broadripple than the ones who already go there (remember, Butler only has like 4,000 full time students) and IU and Purdue have their own towns. Seriously, as much as I love Bloomington, do you think I would drive down there every four or five days for a basketball game, even if the Hoosiers were as good as I want them to be? No. The people spending money in Bloomington and West Lafayette are drunk, broke, college kids, not rich people drawn to the corporate atmosphere provided by a professional sports franchise. Those kids are fun to hang with and all, when they’re not throwing up on you or climbing all over parked construction equipment, but at the end of the day advertisers could care less about them until they join the professional world. What relevance do they have in this argument?
When it’s all said and done, the Pacers may be ill-conceived and poorly-run, but unlike the Colts, no one is fallating them with awesome stadium deals. They’re screwed royally on a daily basis, and what they bring to the table is better than what they’re getting out of this deal. They have a right to ask for a little assistance. But unfortunately, they just don’t have a very good argument for some.