It is purely a coincidence; I had – and continue to have – exactly no inside information on the matter. Yesterday, I mentioned that folks representing the San Diego Chargers had sent an unusually blunt and direct message to the stadium advisory board for the mayor of San Diego regarding the Chargers’ desire for a new stadium in the city of San Diego. Those kinds of talks between the team and the city had been ongoing for at least a decade but it seemed to me as if the Chargers were sounding a new tone in this particular communication. And then this morning, CBSSports.com reports that the Chargers and the Raiders have both decided that the talks with their home cities needs more than a gentle nudge. The teams have purchased a plot of land in Carson California and they say that if the teams do not have stadium plans in place and in motion by the end of the year, they will jointly build their own stadium on the site.
Here is a link to the joint statement released by the two NFL teams.
For those of you who are not geography majors, Carson California is south of downtown LA and west of Anaheim. It is not – geographically – a huge move for the Chargers; it is probably not much more than 100 miles. For the Raiders it would be a much longer move but the Raiders have done this before so they would be going to an area where they already have a residual fanbase. I cannot recall a situation in the NFL’s past where two division rivals would share a stadium but that is what would be in the cards if this plan were to move forward.
Major stumbling blocks to previous stadium ideas in So Cal has been the reluctance of the local politicians to fund the projects. If the early reports on this joint activity are accurate, this project would cost $1.7B and for now the idea is to finance this privately. That is the kind of deal I would hope the folks in So Cal can get behind because it might set a trend for the rest of the country…
I said yesterday that I had never been to Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego and I have never been to the stadium in Oakland for a football game. I have been there to see baseball back in the early 1990s and I have to say that the stadium was starting to look a bit “threadbare” even then. With the reports of random sewage backups into locker room facilities hitting the papers last year in Oakland, I suspect that “threadbare” might have been the politest thing folks were saying about the facilities there.
I hope today’s news spurs some action on new stadia for both teams. It seems that both of then need one and it seems that they are prepared – on their own – to get a new one. They seem prepared to spend $850M each – plus whatever the cost of the land was – to achieve that end and that should give the two cities an idea of how they can put together plans to keep the teams in their current locales. That assumes of course that the cities want the teams to stay as opposed to political posturing regarding the importance and value of the team to the city.
Yesterday I said that in these matters, money talks and bulls[p]it walks. Well, as of this morning, it would seem that the Chargers and the Raiders have put some serious money on the table… Question for the local pols:
Are you going to talk or walk?
Yesterday was the NBA trade deadline and it seems as if there was a flurry of activity moving players around amongst – mainly – marginal teams. The top contenders this year stood pat seemingly happy with the rosters they have already assembled. Two potential playoff teams made moves that improved both of them:
The Heat traded for Goran Dragic from Phoenix. He is a quality point guard who can also score. He will not win the Heat a championship by himself but this trade might just be the beginning of the Heat’s rebuilding process.
The Thunder got Enes Kanter and DJ Augustin – two players who can provide alternative scoring threats off the bench – and they got rid of Reggie Jackson who was not happy with his role in OKC and who was about to become a free agent.
Here in Curmudgeon Central, I was fascinated with the moves made by the absolutely irrelevant Philadelphia 76ers. The Sixers have won 12 games so far this year and they managed to get worse by trading.
Michael Carter-Williams was last year’s rookie of the year. He is not a great player and likely will never become a great player, but he has shown that he is a competent NBA-quality player and that is a commodity in short supply on the Sixers’ roster. So, of course they ditched him…
KJ McDaniels might get more than a few votes as the rookie of the year this year. He was undrafted and the Sixers signed him to a one-year contract making him a free agent after this season. [Aside: Should he win the award, I believe he would be the first rookie of the year ever to be a free agent that summer.] Evidently, the Sixers did not think this potential rookie of the year was important enough to keep around…
In my opinion, those two moves are merely the tip of the iceberg because the Sixers had a “mirror-image moment” yesterday. Let me explain. We all know of the famous “addition by subtraction” trades; teams dump a player who totes far more baggage than his contributions justify. Well, in every such transaction there has to be a “mirror-image moment” because the other team in the trade experiences a “subtraction by addition”. And the Sixers got one of those in JaVale McGee. Here is the trade in a nutshell:
Sixers send the rights to Cenk Akyol to the Nuggets. Just in case you have no damned idea who Cenk Akyol might be, he is a 27 year old forward playing in the Turkish League who was originally drafted by the Hawks in 2005. He has never played in an NBA game. That is it; that is what the Sixers gave up.
Sixers get JaVale McGee PLUS a first round pick either this year or next year plus the rights to Chukwudiebere Maduabum. “Chu” was originally drafted by the Lakers in 2011; he is 23 years old and currently plays in the Estonian Basketball League.
The Sixers basically got a first round pick just to take JaVale McGee off the hands of the Nuggets. That is “subtraction by addition”.
Finally, Greg Cote of the Miami Herald had this NBA insight in a recent column:
“Looks as if Kobe Bryant might miss the rest of the season with a shoulder issue. Doctors have ruled out that the injury occurred from excessive passing.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………