LA Clippers to announce plans for new arena in Inglewood

BKIslandersFan

F*** off
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I mean the amount Ballmer paid doesn't mean anything except to the owners of other franchises.

I think owning one of two pro sports teams in the 8th largest city in the country would probably still be desirable
It maybe the 8th largest city but San Diego metro area is not that big.
 

PCSPounder

Stadium Groupie
Apr 12, 2012
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The LA market is also one where there has been no government assistance to pay for new venues. Rams stadium is private as was staples. It’s an investment to build the stadium.

Ideally teams share but they have to both be in the arena at the beginning like them mavericks and stars in Dallas if they have different owners. Some nba teams rent in big is markets like Boston and Philly. Depends on the market and your tv money.

I've been spouting here for years that the only NHL teams "sharing" with NBA teams ("sharing" in quotes because it only describes that two teams are in the same arena, and should not generally describe the contractual arrangements under which these teams actually operate) are in the top 10 markets... or Denver.

I could argue that it's probably not an accident that in MSP and Phoenix and Miami, there are multiple arenas. These are markets large enough to host both sports, but markets just below that top tier size that the NHL could coerce into separate arenas. Food for thought... Seattle is in that range, too.
 

BattleBorn

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It maybe the 8th largest city but San Diego metro area is not that big.
San Diego County is around 3.3 million people, 17th largest metro area in the US. Larger than a lot of cities with more pro sports teams.

The "issue" (if there is one) is that they're in the shadows of the LA market so they only really draw people in their actual area, there's little/no population on the periphery that would likely choose to identify with San Diego versus LA unless you cross the international border, then you get into money/exchange issues.

Clippers are worth what they're worth due to their market and it would seem to be a poor move to leave LA, but San Diego seems ripe for more sports if it's not the Clippers. Especially now that the Chargers are gone.
 

CHIP72

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Mar 16, 2013
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The "issue" (if there is one) is that they're in the shadows of the LA market so they only really draw people in their actual area, there's little/no population on the periphery that would likely choose to identify with San Diego versus LA unless you cross the international border, then you get into money/exchange issues.

One of the big issues with San Diego as a sports market is that its TV market only covers one U.S. county (San Diego County), and it really only has one other county that can be considered part of its secondary market (Imperial County to its east). Yuma is also tied into Imperial County (being across the Colorado River from the eastern portion of Imperial County), but the Arizona portion of the Yuma area (which comprises the vast majority of the population in the Yuma area) is going to associate itself more closely with Phoenix area teams due to the state tie and the fact the area isn't that close to San Diego.

Your comment does touch on a pet peeve of mine though - a tendency for many people to ignore secondary market areas outside the country when examining a team's potential market pull. San Diego's potential market to draw fans in all sports is much larger than is generally acknowledged, due to the presence of nearby Tijuana (and to a lesser degree Ensenada and Mexicali), which is a large metro area in its own right. We see that with a few other major league cities, most notably Detroit (Windsor) and Buffalo (Fort Erie, Niagara Falls, St. Catherines); it also comes into play a little bit with cities like Vancouver (portions of NW Washington), Winnipeg (NE North Dakota/NW Minnesota), and Montreal (NE New York, NW Vermont), though the added market for those last few cities is small. With San Diego though, much more than even Detroit or Buffalo, the added market is NOT small, even if Mexican wages are significantly lower than U.S. wages across the border. (Of course, some people in those border areas live in Mexico or Canada and work in the U.S. or vice-versa too.)
 

BattleBorn

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One of the big issues with San Diego as a sports market is that its TV market only covers one U.S. county (San Diego County), and it really only has one other county that can be considered part of its secondary market (Imperial County to its east). Yuma is also tied into Imperial County (being across the Colorado River from the eastern portion of Imperial County), but the Arizona portion of the Yuma area (which comprises the vast majority of the population in the Yuma area) is going to associate itself more closely with Phoenix area teams due to the state tie and the fact the area isn't that close to San Diego.

Your comment does touch on a pet peeve of mine though - a tendency for many people to ignore secondary market areas outside the country when examining a team's potential market pull. San Diego's potential market to draw fans in all sports is much larger than is generally acknowledged, due to the presence of nearby Tijuana (and to a lesser degree Ensenada and Mexicali), which is a large metro area in its own right. We see that with a few other major league cities, most notably Detroit (Windsor) and Buffalo (Fort Erie, Niagara Falls, St. Catherines); it also comes into play a little bit with cities like Vancouver (portions of NW Washington), Winnipeg (NE North Dakota/NW Minnesota), and Montreal (NE New York, NW Vermont), though the added market for those last few cities is small. With San Diego though, much more than even Detroit or Buffalo, the added market is NOT small, even if Mexican wages are significantly lower than U.S. wages across the border. (Of course, some people in those border areas live in Mexico or Canada and work in the U.S. or vice-versa too.)
I think the Canadian/US TV border issue is more contractual. I don't know if affiliates in border cities would sign up to broadcast a US company's feed, or if they're even allowed to. For example, someone in Windsor deciding to broadcast Fox Sports would essentially devalue the Canadian TV deal. Now that the vast majority of teams games are on RSNs instead of over the air, you get a lot more rights issues versus when games were over the air. As I recall, there were affiliates that would show a Canadian Red Wings feed in Western Ontario instead of the Leafs, but they couldn't get the game if the Wings were playing another American team.

Here in Seattle we can get Vancouver's broadcast networks on our cable packages, but I think that's only because parts of the metro area are within the broadcast area of Vancouver over-the-air. I think that's the trick that allows the cross-border stuff on cable networks. Since RSNs aren't over the air, I think that little trick is gone.

When it comes to a hypothetical hockey team in San Diego (only since I don't know if the NBA has a rights deal in Mexico,) I'm guessing some TV channel in Tijuana could pick up the San Diego hockey team's games since it wouldn't violate a deal the NHL has with a Mexican network that they'd rather have viewers watching.
 

Brodie

the dream of the 90s is alive in Detroit
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San Diego/LA strikes me as similar to Chicago/Milwaukee, DC/Baltimore, and NYC/Philadelphia as one of those markets that are essentially one metro with a legal fiction designed to keep them artificially separate

distinguish here from LA/Riverside and SF/San Jose which are even more fictional than the above
 

BattleBorn

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San Diego/LA strikes me as similar to Chicago/Milwaukee, DC/Baltimore, and NYC/Philadelphia as one of those markets that are essentially one metro with a legal fiction designed to keep them artificially separate

distinguish here from LA/Riverside and SF/San Jose which are even more fictional than the above
I think there's a major difference between all of those and San Diego/LA.

Chicago gets Illinois while Milwaukee gets Wisconsin. There's people outside the metro areas that identify with the cities and fall into the fandom of those cities. Same thing with Philadelphia getting Eastern PA and some of NJ. DC gets NoVA and Baltimore gets Maryland, and so on.

San Diego is just San Diego. It's almost like the San Francisco/San Jose thing with the exception that San Jose people consider themselves part of the Bay Area, they share plenty of stuff. Mass transit, media market, etc. It's all Bay Area.
LA/Riverside is a fake difference, those two metros are definitely connected in work, travel, almost everything.

San Diego is just San Diego. It's part of Southern California, but driving LA/SD not like driving to SF from San Jose. You've got different TV markets, different mass transit, different cultures, different everything. Plus, it's somewhat isolated in that the Mexican border is immediately south and the only major highways that take you anywhere but Los Angeles effectively take you "nowhere." In other words, in San Diego, the 3.3 million people that are San Diegans are likely all you're getting.
 

CHIP72

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San Diego/LA strikes me as similar to Chicago/Milwaukee, DC/Baltimore, and NYC/Philadelphia as one of those markets that are essentially one metro with a legal fiction designed to keep them artificially separate

distinguish here from LA/Riverside and SF/San Jose which are even more fictional than the above

You ever hear of the Northeast Megalopolis/Northeast Corridor? The WHOLE STINKIN' REGION is just one giant metro area with a few large nodes (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Baltimore), many smaller nodes (Providence, Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, Manchester, arguably Portland, New Haven, Bridgeport, Newark, Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton, Trenton, Reading, Wilmington, Lancaster, Harrisburg, York, Frederick, Hagerstown, Fredericksburg, arguably Richmond, and a few other peripheral cities, like Albany/Schenectady/Troy, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, and maybe Binghamton, that might also warrant inclusion), and countless suburbs and other towns that is just one big region that has a lot of common ties within itself, especially in its two halves (with New York being the uniting city of those two halves).

The corridors you mentioned above are true megaregions or multiple center metro regions that really do have a somewhat different dynamic, due to the close ties between the metro areas, than regions that are a little further apart and/or aren't as big. (A couple others you forgot to mention are San Francisco Bay Area/Sacramento and San Antonio/Austin. The Golden Horseshoe including Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener, St. Catherines, and arguably Buffalo is another, mostly Canadian megaregion.) And really, greater Los Angeles (which includes Orange County and the Inland Empire)/San Diego is actually Los Angeles/San Diego/Tijuana.
 

oknazevad

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San Diego’s original pro basketball team was the ABA Conquistadors. They lasted for four seasons (renamed the Sails the fourth year) and then folded in 1975. Clippers franchise came in three years later from Buffalo.

Even before that, the now-Houston Rockets began as the San Diego Rockets before moving in 1971. The following season the Warriors, still not entirely stable in the Bay Area, played a handful of games in San Diego as part of a plan to market the team to the whole state. Hence the name "Golden State Warriors". The arrival of the ABA franchise the following season, along with settling into the Oakland Arena as a permanent home, ended that, but the name stuck.
 

BKIslandersFan

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San Diego County is around 3.3 million people, 17th largest metro area in the US. Larger than a lot of cities with more pro sports teams.

The "issue" (if there is one) is that they're in the shadows of the LA market so they only really draw people in their actual area, there's little/no population on the periphery that would likely choose to identify with San Diego versus LA unless you cross the international border, then you get into money/exchange issues.

Clippers are worth what they're worth due to their market and it would seem to be a poor move to leave LA, but San Diego seems ripe for more sports if it's not the Clippers. Especially now that the Chargers are gone.
Oh yea I definitely think they can support an NBA team but an LA team is always going to be worth more.
 

Terry Yake

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yeah i agree with the comments about SD simply being SD. its not at all like LA/OC which are always grouped together

the padres fanbase in LA/OC is virtually nonexistent and the chargers prior to their move did not enjoy a sizeable fanbase in LA/OC. as others have mentioned, this is partly due to the area surrounding SD. its too far from OC to have any influence on sports fans there. imperial county to the east is the middle of nowhere, and mexico is to the south. it may be a big metro area with millions of people but its pretty unique as a sports town because of what i mentioned and it puts the city in a tough spot
 

Centrum Hockey

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Oh yea I definitely think they can support an NBA team but an LA team is always going to be worth more.
the NBA does not need another team in California the Lakers territory is almost all of southern part of The state and the warriors have the northern part and the bay
 

sexydonut

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If the Big 4 leagues didn't strategically limit franchise numbers to extract taxpayer subsidies and boost franchise valuations, we most likely would see San Diego gaining NHL/NBA franchises and keeping their NFL franchise.

San Diego sees itself as distinct from the Greater LA area. The giant marine base serves to separate the two. However, the SW parts of the Inland Empire has many links to San Diego, as their cheaper real estate costs have made that area a commuter suburb to San Diego.

BTW, that 50 year old arena in Point Loma is a dump, and no NBA/NHL team will play in San Diego until a modern replacement is built.
 

Terry Yake

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i think a NBA team would do very well in SD

they just don't have an arena for it at the moment and i doubt the NBA would be interested in expanding there
 

BigKing

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Camp Pendleton acts to effectively separate San Diego from the LA/OC sprawl so, even though it is very close, going to San Diego feels like something distinctly different than LA/OC.

Nobody cares about the Padres up here. Charger support was a little stronger--especially in south OC--but that probably had more to do with the Chargers being the only game in town since 1995 or whatever.

I do think San Diego could support an NBA team quite well but it would be foolish for Ballmer to leave LA.
 
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Cellee

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Not a fan of Sterling and don't really know what his motivation was, but Staying in LA was and is absolutely the right decision, especially for a franchise in a globally popular and marketable sport like Basketball. To the rest of the world orange county doesn't exist. It's completely anonymous. Reason why Arte Moreno changed the Angels name.

Watch yer mouf

 

Brodie

the dream of the 90s is alive in Detroit
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LA/Riverside is a fake difference, those two metros are definitely connected in work, travel, almost everything.

This is a tangent, but I really believe the Census Bureau is self serving and was shook by the negative reactions to consolidating Baltimore and DC into one CSA (which was obviously correct) and so therefore adds an unhelpful political dynamic. If Riverside-San Bernadino were properly added to Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, that MSA would be on track to surpass New York as the nation's largest by the 2030 Census (The CSA is growing at twice the rate of NYC's and probably will pass it within 10-20 years). And there are a lot of people who would be sour about that.
 

Boulder Avalanche

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The arena makes sense if it is privately funded. Sharing a stadium with two other tenants is difficult especially when they have the same long seasons as you. Making Inglewood a secondary hub for sports and entertainment makes a great deal of sense and encourages devlopment near the complex. It is not always about maximizing profit in the short run but setting up your team for long term success.
 

BKIslandersFan

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I ask LA natives, is Inglewood a good location, in terms of accessibility? I am concerned about lack of public transit, but its LA, its California and everyone drives.

Or could it end up being Glendale for NBA?
 

gstommylee

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I ask LA natives, is Inglewood a good location, in terms of accessibility? I am concerned about lack of public transit, but its LA, its California and everyone drives.

Or could it end up being Glendale for NBA?

is it better for the clippers to be in their own arena than share one with the lakers? I don't think you can really compare the two. The distance is not that far away from where the clippers are playing now.
 

TheLegend

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I ask LA natives, is Inglewood a good location, in terms of accessibility? I am concerned about lack of public transit, but its LA, its California and everyone drives.

Or could it end up being Glendale for NBA?

Not an L.A. native but have been through the area hundreds of times over the decades.

This is a basic map of the area...
screen_shot_2017-06-20_at_1.31.36_pm.png


NFL = L.A. Rams Stadium (currently under construction)
NBA = The proposed Clippers arena site.

LAX is just to the west. You have both the I-105 and I-405 and Metro Rail feeding the area.

The FAA might chime in on the site since it's in direct line with the runways at LAX and most flights land from the east. Arizona Cardinals could not build there new stadium near downtown Phoenix as they originally intended to because of it.
 

sexydonut

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May 12, 2009
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Inglewood is a dump. Always has, always will. It isn't even all that convenient, and it is congested most of the time. Think of getting to that (dump) LAX, and how the traffic is ensnared. The football stadium and basketball arena aren't going to help.

If a new arena could be built in San Diego, the NBA and NHL would be very tempted to enter the market. It's not the largest, but it's big enough and because of the recession-proof military budgets, there's plenty of money around. If indoor soccer could ever be revived, it would work in the new arena too.
 

BKIslandersFan

F*** off
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Inglewood is a dump. Always has, always will. It isn't even all that convenient, and it is congested most of the time. Think of getting to that (dump) LAX, and how the traffic is ensnared. The football stadium and basketball arena aren't going to help.

If a new arena could be built in San Diego, the NBA and NHL would be very tempted to enter the market. It's not the largest, but it's big enough and because of the recession-proof military budgets, there's plenty of money around. If indoor soccer could ever be revived, it would work in the new arena too.
With Rams stadium and Clippers arena, the area will become very gentrified and will not be a dump.

Of course there is the moral question of what happens to people who then can no longer afford to live there.
 

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