Written by Jonathan Knight

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I’d always thought getting a professional sports team these days was an incredibly complicated process that required years of strategic thinking and planning coinciding with perfect timing and more than a little good luck.

Apparently not in our state capital.

Last week, Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman rose up confidently and declared, “Excuse me...yes, we’d like a National Basketball Association team, please,” as if asking for another round of breadsticks at the Olive Garden.

See? It’s easy.

For as silly and self-destructive as the NBA may be these days, you can’t visualize David Stern ordering in Chinese and working late into the night to make this happen. This idea, after all, is not really what a league that is gradually migrating into a five-or-six-team, big-media-market confederacy is looking for: the opportunity to put a franchise in a city where Bob Evans is considered a fancy restaurant.

To some, the mayor’s entitled demand (er...request) may have come across as arrogant, as if the NBA should consider itself honored by the news. But if you know anything about Mike Coleman, you know that this was just the latest example of the good mayor’s fairly well-documented detachment from reality. (Keep in mind he once called up Glenn Beck to set him straight on the air...and the mayor wound up unsuccessfully defending his own manhood.)

To Mayor Coleman, the thought process is as simple as downloading a book onto your Kindle:

Columbus has a colossal, antiseptic arena downtown.

Columbus also has a lot of people who watch March Madness on television.

Clearly, if you display something people enjoy in a big sports venue close to their house, they will pay money to watch it. And more money to park to watch it. And even more money to eat at Bob Evans before parking to watch it.

A good portion of that money will flow into the city’s pockets and wham! New manhole covers for everybody.

And yet, what’s really hysterical is the primary motivating factor behind Coleman’s request. The city is frantically looking for ways to create revenue in and around Nationwide Arena since Columbus’ lone big-league pro sports team - the NHL’s dyspeptic Blue Jackets - doesn’t draw frozen dick.

If you’re over the age of six and don’t see the paradox here, you should quickly run for public office.

Stern has said that the NBA has no plans to expand, so Columbus would have to take on the adorably whorish role of trying to lure an existing team to skip town and find an Art Modell out there willing to listen.

While several small-market NBA franchises may be struggling to turn a profit, I can’t see a team owner walking into a board meeting and declaring, “I’ve figured it out - we’ll move to one of the states hit hardest by the recession that already has an NBA team that has difficulty maintaining a fan base! Problem solved!”

Setting aside the first-week-of-American Idol fashion in which the subject was broached, let’s examine the possibility - could an NBA team possibly succeed in Columbus?

Putting it in terms everybody in the state can understand:

O-H!

N-O!

Columbus is a nice place to live and a great place to raise a family. Lots of the conveniences of big-city life with very few of the Irwin Allen-disaster-movie headaches.

It’s also a town whose sports interest begins and ends on Woody Hayes Drive. This is something The Ohio State University, Inc. itself struggles with when it comically tries to get people excited about its world-renowned synchronized swimming teams.

Surveys have shown that on any given day of the year, Columbus fans’ sports allegiance can be broken down into eight categories, ranked below in order of importance: 

1. The Ohio State football team

2. Whoever’s playing the Michigan football team

3. The high school where that one hot-shit football recruit is coming from

4. A bunch of birds fighting another bunch of birds on top of Woody Hayes’ tombstone

5. The Ohio State marching band

6. Chris Spielman’s nephew’s neighbor’s flag football team

7. Whomever Art Schlichter picked in this weekend’s big game

8. The Ohio State men’s basketball team (if they’re in the middle of a 30-win season)

If you happen to stumble into any type of professional athletic event outside of these eight categories, you’re likely to find less people there than at an Apple Store.

Take the Blue Jackets. Please.

Besides proving that hockey is a tough sell in any city that doesn’t have a chain law in effect from November through March, the Blue Jackets symbolize the complete futility of trying to sell something in central Ohio that isn’t lacquered in scarlet or gray or, preferably, both.

When the Jackets were born (hatched?) in 2000, they were one of the best-drawing clubs in the NHL. They were new. They were cute. They marked the city’s first legitimate pro sports team since Christopher Columbus didn’t land here in 1492. 

But over the past 10 years - presumably as the sellout crowds gradually began to realize that none of those guys in the helmets and the shoulder pads down there was Archie Griffin - the Blue Jackets’ attendance has declined as steadily as the Big Ten’s reputation. 

This past season, Columbus ranked 27th out of the NHL’s 30 teams in attendance and the year before, managed to lose $25 million. Things got so bad that the franchise desperately called for help as if lighting up the Bat Signal, leading to the city swooping in to rework the team’s lease and purchase Nationwide Arena for $42 million.

So by all means, let’s get an NBA team in here. 

There are any number of issues to address, but let’s start with the Cavs. While they’re not exactly ingrained in the sports consciousness of the rest of the state (or Cleveland for that matter), the Cavaliers would certainly raise some objections about another NBA team squatting into a market rooted with Cleveland sports fans.

For now, Dan Gilbert begged off the question, stating he hadn’t “studied the demographics of Columbus to know if they could handle two sports teams."

Apparently, neither has Mayor Coleman, because as illustrated above, they can’t handle one.

But let’s say the Cavs acquiesce and Columbus successfully woos an NBA franchise - likely by surrendering back to the team a good chunk of the revenue the city was counting on. What do you name this new entity? 

It may seem like a trivial point, but in Columbus’ long history of pro sports (albeit minor-league), naming its teams has been its Achilles’ heel.

“Clippers” isn’t terrible, but has forever been haunted by the NBA team of the same name that’s established itself as the most embarrassing sports franchise in America. It wasn’t much better before that, when Columbus’ minor-league baseball team was known as the “Jets” and “Red Birds,” both of which clinically classify as a cry for help.

Remember the “Quest” of a short-lived women’s pro basketball league a decade ago? (Please say no.) More recently, Columbus has declared guerilla warfare on plural-noun team names, with a hockey team called the “Chill,” the “Glory” of the World Football League, and now a soccer team called the “Crew.”

“Buckeyes,” the only really good choice, is obviously taken (and I now owe OSU $3.75 just for typing it). And judging by the PR bacchanalia the Blue Jackets went through after they revealed their name - “we’re named after Civil War veterans...no, just kidding, Deep South, we’re named after big, infected insects”) - coming up with something new and creative will probably end in disaster.

Considering the whole ATM “Fast Cash” spirit of this NBA idea, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the nickname envelop Columbus’ well-known corporate roots: The Nationwides. The Wendy’s. The Wonder Bras.

But there’s no need to waste time picking gnat shit out of pepper. No matter how effective the name, the best you can hope for by tossing another pro sports team into Columbus’ salad is wrangling together a pack of unlikable thugs who would get nowhere near the attention as a bunch of beefy college kids who are getting paid slightly less than the thugs are.

Since the near-dynasty of the OSU men’s basketball team under Thad Matta has garnered only marginally more notice than the results of Maurice Clarett’s knife fights in the showers at the Toledo Correctional Institution, it’s difficult to imagine Columbus fans getting a chubby about pro basketball at $67.50 a ticket.

No matter how you look at it, spending time, money, and energy in an attempt to bring a bad product to a city that doesn’t want it anyway in the name of fiscal heroism makes as much sense as trying to get John Cooper into the Ohio State Hall of Fame.

But let’s meet at Bob Evans to talk about it, anyway.

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