Around the NBA 5.0

[JDR720]

NBA morning games?

http://basketball.realgm.com/wiretap/23 ... s-In-China

"Maybe when the audience gets big enough in China and you're reaching 100 million people in China, to say, 'So maybe once in a while a team will play at 10:00 on Saturday morning,' " Adam Silver said, mentioning the possibility of such games perhaps once every two months.

"We're not there yet. But, you know, I am watching the market closely."

I doubt it would happen to Charlotte since there isn't a big fan base in China, game attendance would take a big hit, especially during the weekdays with school and work

[LamarMatic7]

NBA morning games?

http://basketball.realgm.com/wiretap/23 ... s-In-China

"Maybe when the audience gets big enough in China and you're reaching 100 million people in China, to say, 'So maybe once in a while a team will play at 10:00 on Saturday morning,' " Adam Silver said, mentioning the possibility of such games perhaps once every two months.

"We're not there yet. But, you know, I am watching the market closely."

I doubt it would happen to Charlotte since there isn't a big fan base in China, game attendance would take a big hit, especially during the weekdays with school and work

I doubt that it would happen during the weekdays. There's a reason Silver used an example of 10:00 on a Saturday morning.

[TheKingofSting]

10 AM games would be brutal for me.

[Hornet Mania]

I'd love 10am games for my own selfish reasons (it beats staying up til either 3am or 6am local time) but it would be awful for attendance as mentioned above, regardless of the market. Even on Saturdays, how many people want to get up a 8am to commute for a regular season game? The television revenue from China would have to outweigh the likely loss of 6-7k ticket sales.

[fatlever]

so this is what the hawks owner said...

4. Regarding game ops, i need to start with some background. for the first couple of years we owned the team, i didn't much focus on game ops. then one day a light bulb went off. when digging into why our season ticket base is so small, i was told it is because we can't get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs and they are the primary demo for season tickets around the league. when i pushed further, folks generally shrugged their shoulders. then i start looking around our arena during games and notice the following:

-- it's 70 pct black

-- the cheerleaders are black

-- the music is hip hop

-- at the bars it's 90 pct black

-- there are few fathers and sons at the games

-- we are doing after game concerts to attract more fans and the concerts are either hip hop or gospel.

Then i start looking around at other arenas. It is completely different. Even DC with its affluent black community never has more than 15 pct black audience.

Before we bought the hawks and for those couple years immediately after in an effort to make the arena look full (at the nba's urging) thousands and thousands of tickets were being giving away, predominantly in the black community, adding to the overwhelming black audience.

My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant season ticket base. Please dont get me wrong. There was nothing threatening going on in the arean back then. i never felt uncomfortable, but i think southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority. On fan sites i would read comments about how dangerous it is around philips yet in our 9 years, i don't know of a mugging or even a pick pocket incident. This was just racist garbage. When I hear some people saying the arena is in the wrong place I think it is code for there are too many blacks at the games.

I have been open with our executive team about these concerns. I have told them I want some white cheerleaders and while i don't care what the color of the artist is, i want the music to be music familiar to a 40 year old white guy if that's our season tixs demo. i have also balked when every fan picked out of crowd to shoot shots in some time out contest is black. I have even bitched that the kiss cam is too black.

Gradually things have changed. My unscientific guess is that our crowd is 40 pct black now, still four to five times all other teams. And my further guess is that 40 pct still feels like 70 pet to some whites at our games. Our bars are still overwhelmingly black.

This is obviously a sensitive topic, but sadly i think it is far and way the number one reason our season ticket base is so low.

And many of our black fans don't have the spendable income which explains why our f&b and merchandise sales are so low. At all white thrasher games sales were nearly triple what they are at hawks games (the extra intermission explains some of that but not all).

Regardless of what time a game starts, we have the latest arriving crowd in the league. It often looks and sounds empty when the team takes the floor.

In the past two years, we have created a section of rowdy college students that has been a big plus. And we do a lot of very clever stuff during time outs to entertain the crowd. Our kiss cam is better done than any in the league.

We have all the same halftime acts that other arenas have but i question whether they make sense. people are on their cell phones during half time. i wonder if flashing on the scoreboard "$2 off on hot dogs during halftime tonight" just as the half ends would be a better use of our halftime dollars and make the fans happier.

We do all the usual giveways and the fans are usually their loudest when our spirit crew takes the floor to give away t-shirts. It pisses me off that they will yell louder for a t-shirt then for our players.

Our player intro is flat. We manufacture a lot of noise but because of the late arriving crowd and the fact that a lot of blacks dont seem to go as crazy cheering (another one of my theories) as whites, it is not great. Even when we have just returned from winnng four straight on the road, i am one of the few people in the arena standing and cheering when our team takes the floor. Bob has kicked around ideas like having the starters coming down aisles rather than off the bench during intros. Sounds cool but may highlight all the empty seats at the start of games.

Not enough of our fans wear hawks jerseys to games. i have just begun to push for ideas like discount food lines for folks wearing jerseys, special entrances, etc. I think we need a committed and perhaps incentivized fan club. We need to realize atl is simply different than every other city. Just adopting nba best practices is not enough. we have to create our own.

I am rambling and could probably go on forever. If you have any specific areas you would like my thoughts on, let me know.

Best,

Bruce

ps -- I have cc'd todd and ed so they can chime in with additional or different thoughts.

Sent from my iPad

[Hornet Mania]

Holy crap, that is damning for that moron. Atlanta is often referred to as the black capital of America...not a shock that the majority of fans would be black. What he's essentially saying is "we don't actually want people that live in Atlanta to go to the games, because those people are black and I assume poor cuz casual racism."

Atlanta is a really sub-par sports town, but it's not because of racial demographics. Even the Falcons and Braves have problems bringing in crowds occasionally and both their audiences skew white. It's transplant city syndrome, a lot of the residents just support other teams because their roots are elsewhere. Dude just ran a clinic on how to completely misdiagnose the problem and alienate the majority of your fans in the process.

[fatlever]

the braves are moving their stadium from downtown atlanta to the suburbs, fwiw.

[JDR720]

Move the Hawks to Seattle (they become part of Northwest division) OKC goes into the Southwest division and Memphis goes into Southeast division

[fatlever]

TNT has their headquarters in Atlanta.

[MasterIchiro]

blacks dont seem to go as crazy cheering (another one of my theories) as whites, it is not great.

/green font

It's true. He's right.

Blacks don't scream, they SING



(another one of my theories)

OH I WANT TO DANCE WITH SOMEBODY

I WANNA FEEL THE HEAT WITH SOMEBODY

[TheKingofSting]

Move the Hawks to Seattle (they become part of Northwest division) OKC goes into the Southwest division and Memphis goes into Southeast division

Bam!

[HornetJail]

The Hawks aren't moving anywhere. I'm pretty sure of that one unless they are guaranteed an expansion team in a year or two. But this is interesting timing for something like this ot come out:

Clippers owner spews racist bull $#!@, gets to sell the team for $1.8B
Hawks owners spews racist bull $#!@... ????????

[LamarMatic7]

I don't think he wrote anything that bad. Sure, he stereotyped a lot in the letter but we can't act as if some of those things aren't real and don't affect ticket sales. In a way he was doing the job he had to do - analyzing the situation and trying to improve sales. He didn't sound that racist in the letter, he seemingly just acknowledged that these are stereotypes that exist in America and looked at it from a business perspective.

It just shows how sad this world can be and what businessmen like him have to consider.

Sent from my C5303 using RealGM Forums mobile app

[EwingSweatsALot]

The Hawks aren't moving anywhere. I'm pretty sure of that one unless they are guaranteed an expansion team in a year or two. But this is interesting timing for something like this ot come out:

Clippers owner spews racist bull $#!@, gets to sell the team for $1.8B
Hawks owners spews racist bull $#!@... ????????

Oh it definitely is. If I read it correctly, apparently he turned himself in. This was his "Get of the Hawks free, but I will still make close to a billion dollars from the sale so I might as well get out now card."

[LamarMatic7]

The Hawks aren't moving anywhere. I'm pretty sure of that one unless they are guaranteed an expansion team in a year or two. But this is interesting timing for something like this ot come out:

Clippers owner spews racist bull $#!@, gets to sell the team for $1.8B
Hawks owners spews racist bull $#!@... ????????

Oh it definitely is. If I read it correctly, apparently he turned himself in. This was his "Get of the Hawks free, but I will still make close to a billion dollars from the sale so I might as well get out now card."

Latest reports from Stein say that it isn't exactly so. He turned himself in a timely manner before his reputation from such a controversy could affect the value of the franchise. But otherwise an investigation on the Hawks had already begun (due to GM Danny Ferry who had read a racist remark from a report on Luol Deng's background report, instead of editing it) and the NBA had been notified about the e-mail.

[yosemiteben]

The Hawks aren't moving anywhere. I'm pretty sure of that one unless they are guaranteed an expansion team in a year or two. But this is interesting timing for something like this ot come out:

Clippers owner spews racist bull $#!@, gets to sell the team for $1.8B
Hawks owners spews racist bull $#!@... ????????

Oh it definitely is. If I read it correctly, apparently he turned himself in. This was his "Get of the Hawks free, but I will still make close to a billion dollars from the sale so I might as well get out now card."

Or he could just sell without bringing to light racist remarks? It's not like he's locked into his ownership.

[LamarMatic7]

damn... Marvin Barnes has died....

R.I.P.

[SWedd523]

I don't personally see where that could be taken as racist. Sounded like a business owner trying to alter his product to be more attractive to a target audience so that they could be more profitable. It's kind of the dirty truth of marketing that people don't want to admit.

This and the Redskins thing just confirms to me that the world is getting so far down the PC rabbit hole that it's starting to become unbearable.

[fatlever]

I hate to pour gas on this fire, but there was a very noticeable shift in the demographics of the audience at Bobcats games about 4-5 years ago, which coincided with a noticeable change in music at the games as well as other marketing aspects. Who knows, it could have been a coincidence. And this coming from a team that has always had a black owner. Is there a smoking gun e-mail floating around the front office from 5 years ago?

[LamarMatic7]

now this is bad. hard to tell what the conference call was like and whether Ferry just unluckily read something of a report that he didn't expect coming, but still... you should be able to switch up and not finish the sentence, right? especially if you're talking with several people on a business call.

"he has a little African in him. Not in a bad way, but he's like a guy who would have a nice store out front but sell you counterfeit stuff out of the back." Ferry completed the racial slur by describing the player (and impliedly, all persons of African descent) as a two-faced liar and cheat.