NLL expansion: Just say no

Casey Vock of ILIndoor.com posted an article yesterday talking about NLL expansion. This is the dumbest idea since "Hey, howz about we give fans lap dances at half-time?"

Vock says that "the timing could be right for an expansion team". This comes less than two months after the Boston Blazers shut things down. Right now is just about the worst timing for the league to be thinking about expansion. Since 2006, five new teams have been added; only one (Edmonton) remains. In that same time period, one team has moved, another moved and then failed, and five more teams have vanished. Last year Calgary came close to being removed mid-season; luckily the Flames bailed them out.

There are certainly some stable franchises but the league as a whole hasn't known stability in a quarter-century. Adding new untested markets or or places where the league has already failed will not help that.

In one paragraph, Vock talks about the "league's growing popularity" and then in the very next paragraph, he lists five teams that have failed within the past few years. He goes on to suggest possible locations, most of which have already failed in the NLL including Washington (failed twice – by the way the Power were in Washington for two years, not one), Baltimore (failed once, plus it's a stone's throw from Washington), and Pittsburgh (failed twice). In fact every city he mentions (in the article; there are extras listed in the poll) except Halifax and Texas have been tried and failed.

You can dream of NLL expansion all you want but let's be realistic. Wherever the league has failed once and tried again (New York, New Jersey, Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh), they've failed the second time as well. Does this mean it can't possibly succeed in markets that have been tried? No, in fact I think Vancouver could work as an NLL city with the right ownership. But you don't go back to a city that's failed (especially if it's failed twice) unless you've done a boatload of market research and you've got ownership that are not only committed to winning but are committed to keeping the team even if they're not winning. "It'd be nice to have a team in <wherever>" is just not enough.

Last year I posted a list of all the team changes in the NLL since 1993. You can now add "2012: Removed Boston" to that, extending the streak to nineteen years. How about some stability in the league before we start talking about adding new teams? Personally, I think that the league needs to keep the same teams in the same cities and see at least stable revenues in most of them for at least two or three years before they should even think about expanding.