Does OKC Make Memphis Look Bad?

What does the Oklahoma City Thunder having sold out their season ticket packages (13,000 of them) in a mere 5 days, mean to the Memphis Grizzlies?

Let's take a visit back to 2001. The inaugural season of the newly relocated Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis.

Michael Heisley is dead set on relocating his franchise, which was reportedly expected to lose $40 million dollars the 2000-2001 season, from Canada to the U.S.

The list of potential suitors at the time included New Orleans, Las Vegas, St. Louis, Louisville, and Anaheim but Memphis became the favorite after a group of Memphis investors offered to buy up to 49% of the Grizzlies and officials promised that public funds would be used to build a new $250 million downtown arena.

With a very lucrative deal secured, Michael Heisley immediately began to make plans to move the team to Memphis and the NBA approved the move in July of 2001.

After an initial report in the Memphis Business Journal that commitments for season ticket sales were doing well, the Memphis Grizzlies had to start selling 11-game 'power pack' tickets to try and move units. According to an archive found at RealGM, the Grizzlies season ticket sales had stalled at the 7,500 mark.

That is HALF of what the Thunder sold in just 5 days.

Season ticket sales for the Grizzlies had went on sale in May and they could only muster 7,500 season ticket purchases in 4 months.

That is not good.

Not when such huge financial commitments had just been made to Michael Heisley and the Memphis Grizzlies by bringing them here.

Both by Pitt Hyde and by the City of Memphis (and its tax payers), because of the City's agreement to use public money to build a new arena.

Now there could have been external factors involved in such low sales in the Grizzlies' case and such high sales in the Thunder's.

Oklahoma City in 2006, did have a higher median income than what Memphis had back as late as 1999 . So that means a bit deeper pocket for the Thunder to dig into.

Memphis also has a higher poverty rate than OKC.

OKC has a bit more star power in Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook than we had in Pau Gasol and Jason Williams.

Finally, it had been widely speculated for over two years that Oklahoma City would eventually get an NBA team after the love they showed the post-Katrina New Orleans Hornets in supporting them financially.

So not only was this a good indicator of potential success if they were to get a team, the citizens of Oklahoma had much more time to prepare for the arrival of their team, save money and do other things necessary to be ready to make the commitment of purchasing tickets. The Seattle SuperSonics have been the property of Clay Bennett's group for over 2 years now.

Due to Michael Heisley's reluctance to stay in Canada any longer, the Grizzlies were rushed to Memphis and the city needed to step up almost immediately to fork over hundreds/thousands of dollars to support a brand new product.

Not only that, it was still unsure until sometime in May whether we would be buying season tickets to the Grizzlies or the Hornets as they both had applied for relocation here. So they had been marketing ticket sales without any endorsements from any NBA players. And, to top it off, there was no pricing structure finalized early on to help fans in deciding how to properly spend their money and incorporate such an expense into their budgets.

On the flip side, Memphis is a larger city, is more metro and has a much stronger corporate base which is very significant in professional sports.

As a fan of the Memphis Grizzlies, I for one just hope that the lack luster activity that we saw 7 years ago when the Grizzlies moved to Memphis and what we now see with the Thunder's move to OKC, isn't a further indictment on Memphis as a 'Sports Town' and more importantly, not another event that we could look back on to predict the eventual demise of the Grizzlies and the NBA in Memphis.

If you take a look at floundering ticket sales through two losing seasons over the past 5 years and what some would term mediocre fan support even while the team was winning, then you have to come away feeling a bit...uneasy.