After a long election, weeks of voting, and days of counting, I am proud to have been elected San José’s 65th mayor.
— Sam Liccardo (@sliccardo) November 12, 2014
Liccardo is expected to carry out many of the same policies as Chuck Reed, which means the lawsuit against MLB won’t be dropped. We’ll see if that matters in the long run. For now it means little. The Ninth Circuit is expected to drop the hammer on the lawsuit sometime in the coming months, followed by a San Jose appeal to the Supreme Court.
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Here’s a blast from the recent past: those blasted Maloof brothers are set to enter the pro sports ownership realm again, as part-owners of an expansion NHL franchise in Las Vegas. No date has been given for the establishment either the Vegas franchise or its companion. Both expansion franchises are expected to be in the Western Conference, which is currently two teams short of the Eastern Conference. Assuming that Seattle is the other franchise, realignment could get messy since both franchises should play in the Pacific Division. The most logical way of handling it would be to move the two Alberta teams (Calgary, Edmonton) to the Central, move Colorado to the Pacific, and add the two expansion teams to the Pacific. It would make the Western Conference look a bit different.
- Pacific – Vancouver, Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Las Vegas, Arizona, Colorado
- Central – Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Minnesota, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Nashville
Yes, it still sucks that Quebec City doesn’t have a replacement team. The flights from Alberta to Texas and Tennessee for division games would be brutal. Expansion would put the tally at 32 NHL teams, which is a sort of magical number from a scheduling standpoint regardless of sport. I wouldn’t expect that to grow for many years after this expansion round.
The Las Vegas venue will probably be the MGM-AEG arena, under construction along the Strip near the New York-New York casino.
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The Minnesota Department of Revenue reported that the sales tax impact from hosting the All Star Game this year was $21-55 million, well short of the projected $75 million windfall. (h/t Field of Schemes)
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The cities of St. Petersburg and Tampa, which are rivals and neighbors the same way San Francisco and Oakland are on the West Coast, may be ready to work out a deal in which Rays ownership could scope out potential ballpark sites in Tampa. St. Pete’s Tropicana Field is the current home. There’s a long way to go before everyone’s satisfied, so don’t get your hopes up yet and follow Noah Pransky’s excellent Shadow of the Stadium blog for more details.
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A profile of Ron Gobbell is available at The Tennesseean. Who is Ron Gobbell? He’s the lead architect for the Nashville Sounds new AAA ballpark, First Tennessee Park. The article includes key milestones. FTP is slated to open next April 17.
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Jon Streeter, the attorney for Keker Van Nest who negotiated the A’s new lease agreement for the JPA, today was appointed judge of the State Appeals Court 1st District by Governor Jerry Brown.
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The bowl game scheduled for December 30 at Levi’s Stadium has a new name: Foster Farms Bowl.
The interim name was San Francisco Bowl. When the game was hosted at AT&T it went by several names, including Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and Emerald Bowl. Foster Farms isn’t going anywhere, so maybe the name will stick around. As for the bridge iconography, well… I prefer a different logo.
newballpark.org 
If the NHL expands to Vegas, I will personally hunt down Gary Bettman and smack him across the face with a live salmon. What the hell are they thinking?
Vegas AND the Maloofs. And people thought Bettman had jumped the shark with the Phoenix debacle.
Typical NHL logic…don’t put teams where there’s actually demand for pro hockey, put ’em in 1) an already saturated sports market and 2) a highly questionable one.
If the NHL does do this ill-advised expansion, why not just move Colorado, which is east of Alberta anyway?
(disregard the Colorado part above)
At least from an intuitive standpoint Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, KC, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee would all be better NHL cities in the Western conference than Vegas.
What a wasted opportunity for a CHICKEN BOWL
The Maloofs are not as “influential” (the NY Post’s word) as they would have you believe. They only own 2% of the Palms, the hotel/casino they built. They lost the rest of it in bankruptcy. They were forced to sell their beer distributorship to make the Kings’ payroll. Any money they have would be whatever they made from the Kings’ sale. I doubt MGM/AEG would consider them viable business partners.
They’d clearly be minority partners which basically means squat.
The Maloofs sold 65% of the Kings for ~$350 million. Even if they’re a minority partner they can scratch together a pretty decently sized share of an expansion team, assuming the franchise fee is $500 million.
The very first game of the new Las Vegas Maloofs should be an exhibition game against the Sharks…at the new arena in Sacramento.
There are a number of good expiation options for the NHL, Seattle, KC, Indianapolis, and even Portland, as MSG mentioned. There are also opportunities for the NBA, in San Diego, St Louis, (or KC), perhaps even Baltimore, although that’s pretty close to DC, who about Seattle, I know I’m pushing it, but I think the Bay Area could support a second NBA team, if it were located in San Jose.
I think it was Mark that referred to Seattle being an over saturated market, but I don’t see why the Seattle metro/Washington state, could not support, the NBA and the NHL much the way Arizona, and Colorado do, and I do believe the Seattle metro may be larger than Phoenix, or Denver.
Unlike MLB there are a number of opportunities for the NHL, and NBA to expand their markets. I think one of the reasons the NBA has a few unique opportunities, is because they concentrated on secondary markets 30-45 years ago (Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake, Sacramento) and grew with those markets, as I said I think the Bay Area could support a second team, and while I know that’s a bit of a stretch, there is no reason an expation NBA team would not do well, in say Chicago as a second team, in a potential two team market, as the third largest market in the country, they have the population and the corporate structure to pull it off.
Sorry: “What about Seattle?”
There are NBA opportunities in San Diego? The city that has already spurned the NBA/ABA three times? Sorry but they’re never bothering with San Diego again. The NHL however might want to take a look if they can find an arena. Hockey is actually pretty popular oxymoronically.
California hockey is anomalous. There’s no reason it should succeed here, but it does. The same can’t really be said for the other ‘warm-weather’ markets in general.
That being said, SD is just a naturally fickle sports town in my opinion. I don’t see hockey succeeding there. Despite basketball’s history there, I could see it succeeding in this day and age. A new downtown SD arena seems like it would be a solid draw, especially if a way to connect it to the convention center could be devised.
All of this is just intuitively speaking of course.
It’s a null point anyway. No one in San Diego is building a downtown arena. Especially not with all the city’s moeny and efforts going into a downtown stadium for the team they already have.
It’d have to be totally private. There was never any question about that.
I was not personally pulling for a NBA franchise in San Diego, I was only pointing out that there are potential places for the NBA and NFL to expand, unlike MLB that’s somewhat maxed out.
BTW just because San Diego had had problems with basketball, doesn’t mean it can’t work there, DC. is doing OK with baseball even though they previously lost two team’s.
Damn, I mean NBA and the NHL, auto correct.
I agree that San Jose could have a successful NBA team in 15 years. But the timeline of events would have to be:
-Raiders go to San Antonio or LA
-Warriors finish moving into their new arena in SF
-A’s build a new stadium in the Coliseum parking lot
-Weathy Bay Area CEO is willing pay ~$1B for an expansion franchise*
-Sharks and future San Jose team cooperate on $150-200M of renovations to SAP Center, which they would share.
The appeal of the NBA in San Jose is that it doesn’t require the building of a brand new downtown facility, the way MLB does. There’s way less hurdles. But if any of those events above doesn’t happen, it nixes any possibility of NBA in San Jose whatsoever.
*Far easier to find this person in the Bay Area than to find a similar person willing to pay $1B to be second-fiddle to the Bulls in Chicago.