The Oklahoma City Hornets and the San Antonio Saints?
It just doesn’t seem right. For the Hornets, there has to be something to the turnaround, considering they were the lowest scoring team in the NBA last year. This year is a little different. They are 20-21, with a surprising hope of a playoff birth. While in New Orleans, they were 18-64.
In Oklahoma City, attendance at Hornets games is up by more than 4,000 from the 14,221 average attendance in New Orleans. The Saints were also warmly welcomed by San Antonio and rumors surfaced that the team might relocate to Texas, but the Saints announced a return to the Superdome next season.
In an interview with The Times-Picayune, NBA Commissioner David Stern said that the repeated sellouts in Oklahoma won’t factor into the league’s decision to bring the Hornets back to Louisiana. An agreement was made in early January to play three home games at the New Orleans Arena in March.
On March 8, the Hornets will play the Los Angeles Lakers in the first professional sporting event in the city since Hurricane Katrina. They face the Denver Nuggets on March 18 and the Los Angeles Clippers on March 21. The final decision on the Hornets’ home next season is expected to be announced by next week.
An easy thing anyone can do, for the love of sports, for the love of New Orleans, will be to attend one, or all, of these three games and support the Saints this fall. New Orleans has to show our athletic teams and their leagues that we can and will support professional sports or else we run the risk of losing them. Oklahoma City and San Antonio, two relatively sleepy towns, have given our teams tremendous support.
We can do much better, and I’m optimistic that we will. Everyone talks about the necessity of New Orleans to return to normalcy, but how normal will it be if our professional sports teams leave us? Before the hurricane, the possibility of the Saints jumping ship was plausible. Though it is true that both teams had dismal seasons in New Orleans, this city isn’t exactly home to the greatest fans in the leagues.
Pre-Katrina, we certainly took our NBA and NFL franchises for granted at times, and I hope that changes. After everything that we have been through, city pride should be at an all-time high, and that pride should be reflected in attendance at sports events.
Losing a sports team may seem trivial compared to everything else this city has lost. But through supporting our professional sports teams, we can gain a lot as a city. We can gain respect because, as evidenced by the Hornets massive improvement, teams play a lot better when they have a community behind them.
We can only hope that the improvement will continue and the national media will look beyond pitying New Orleans and begin to praise us for our victories on the field and court. A winning team will also bring self-respect and increase city pride.
We all came back to New Orleans. Our professional sports teams will come back, as well, despite tempting offers from Oklahoma City and San Antonio.
We all love this city, and so we, as fans, should show our sports teams more love.
