FanHouse GeorgeShinn

The FanHouse Podcast: Because bloggers are much sexier on the phone.

Kevin Blackistone -- one of FanHouse's featured columnists -- has far too many accolades for me to mention here. The important thing is that he hit up the 'HouseCast this week to talk about, well, everything. And if that's too general for you, then you have problems. But then fortunately, we're not just bloggers, we're therapists, so here you go: we chat about the Redskins' draft, the problems that owners like Dan Snyder, Al Davis and George Shinn (to name a few) are dealing with right now, Michael Jordan's inability to run a basketball team, Mike Tyson's ear-chomping skills, the Ricky Hatton-Manny Pacquiao fight this weekend in Vegas and Barack Obama's first 100 days. Yes, it's awesome.

Forbes has its annual "Business of Basketball" package out for consumption tonight. As usual, it includes a good overall synopsis of the league's financial health and peeks behind the curtain into the revenues of the individual teams. Since the data is all from 2007-08 -- pre-financial crisis -- the outlook is rosy in most towns ... including New Orleans.

A year ago, New Orleans had a great little basketball team and an empty gym. The team's owner, George Shinn, was angling to cinch up the rights for Oklahoma City in an effort to slip in under Clay Bennett's Sonics and ditch post-Katrina Louisiana for good. (Shinn failed.) But then, something nuts happened: the fans in N.O. recognized a good product, the franchise's sales team got innovative, and the gym started selling out -- including 13 straight home games to end the season. And the team stayed great, wiping out Dallas in five games in the first round of the playoffs and taking San Antonio to seven in the conference semis.

That marvelous run, some say, saved basketball in New Orleans. History will judge that idea. But Forbes reports the run did save Shinn a lot of money.

The playoff success helped the team go from a projected $20 million loss at the start of the season to a slight profit.

Winning matters. (In fact, New Orleans is the only team in the bottom 10 in terms of team value which had a losing record last season.)

NBA Essentials ranks our six favorite stories of the day.

1. NBC Washington. As you can see to the right, NBC's D.C. local team got photographic evidence of Gilbert Arenas' presidential ink.

2. Los Angeles Times. Danger, George Shinn: reigning Coach of the Year Byron Scott indicates the Lakers top gig might be one of those "dream jobs."

3. New Orleans Times-Picayune. Speaking of Shinn ...Phil Jackson comments on the duality of the Hornets owner's strict Christian beliefs with the endless Harrah's Casino ads all about New Orleans Arena.

4. Orlando Sentinel. Dwight Howard will offer a defense of his Slam Dunk title. What more can he do? He'll be asking fans that question shortly.

5. Clips Nation. Losing to the Kevin Martin-less Kings at home on longer rest ... not so good.

6. Ball Don't Lie. Where Syncing NBA Commercials to Jewel Videos Happens.

Bruce Schoenfeld of the New York Times Magazine has an absolute must-read on the birth of the Oklahoma City Thunder, a striking profile that digs deep to expose the nuance of Clay Bennett (he doesn't own a pair of cowboy boots and owns a literary bookstore in Aspen), the circumstances which led to the brief post-Katrina visit from the Hornets, and the death of Seattle basketball.

The biggest news item in the piece, however, might be this nugget regarding David Stern's efforts to keep the Hornets in Oklahoma City permanently.

Convinced that the city was ready to go national, Bennett tried to buy the Hornets and keep them in Oklahoma. According to a letter [Hornets owner George] Shinn subsequently wrote to Stern, Stern recommended that he sell.

"You pressed me to sell the team," Shinn wrote. "You even told me that owners were asking you, 'What's wrong with George - why doesn't he sell his team[?]' " Shinn's response made it clear that he, too, coveted the new territory. "We need to immediately begin laying the foundation for what I believe will be great relationships in Oklahoma City," he wrote. "I believe there are several options that we have, none of which involve returning to New Orleans."

If you (note: Hubie Brown voice) are the New Orleans Hornets and you have a point guard under your control who is going to be a free agent in a few years, and you know that you need him to be competitive for an NBA title in a smaller market, you lock him up.

The Hornets -- despite notoriously "frugal" owner George Shinn's ways -- are doing just that, as John Reid of the New Orleans Times Picayune is reporting that Chris Paul and NOLA are getting ready to reach an agreement on a max-deal four or five year extension.

"We're going to try and get it done in the next 24 to 48 hours once I get down there,'' [Paul's agent Lance] Young said by telephone. "I think if you go back and look, there's nobody who did a three-year deal of all the max deals done in the last few years. I would say three years is not what he is going to do. It will be a four or a five-year deal.''

Paul's contract will range from $60 million to $80 million, depending on the length. Young said he and Bower spoke by telephone on Tuesday, the first day teams could begin negotiating contracts with free agents.

Let's be perfectly clear: if you are the the New Orleans Hornets, you give Chris Paul whatever money and how many ever years he wants. He is most certainly one of the top five players in the league, and while many might take Kobe or LeBron if they were starting a team, I think Paul is a legitimate candidate.

And even if you disagree, Paul was most certainly an MVP candidate last year, most certainly the reason for the Hornets resurgence and most certainly worthy of this kind of contract.

As hoped, attendance in New Orleans has picked up since All-Star Weekend. With just one Hornets sell-out before ASW, the team's seen three more in the five games since. John Reid of the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports the to-date average attendance is up to 13,743, still short of the necessary 14,735 fans a night needed to prevent an opt out clause from being available to heretofore skeezy owner George Shinn.

Reid projects the Hornets need to average 15,174 tickets sold in the remaining 52 home games before the deadline. Assuming there will be some empty seats to begin next season, it makes plenty o' sellouts during this stretch run as a top Western contender this season valuable and necessary. For those non-crucial games -- such as visits from Atlanta and New Jersey this week -- it makes promotional work all the more vital

This also deserves a mea culpa of sorts. The attendance figures needed to prevent the opt out seemed ridiculously out of reach when announced, and Mark Cuban seemed equally ridiculous in insisting Hornets staff was not working hard enough to sell tickets. But reaching the attendance threshold seems plausible all of a sudden, and maybe Cuban was right. Something (beyond All-Star Weekend) has changed.

Virtually unnoticed in the preparations for All-Star Weekend, the home attendance in New Orleans for the Hornets was recently a positive story for a change. Against Memphis last Saturday, the Hornets sold out the building, an occasion the New York Times' Jere Longman thought might be a prelude to a consistently full house.

Perhaps Saturday's full house signaled that fans are eager to support the Hornets, now that football season has ended and the hangover from Mardi Gras has eased. If so, the All-Star Game could serve as a kind of anchor, mooring the team to its home community after it was windblown by Hurricane Katrina to Oklahoma City for most of the previous two seasons.

Certainly, the on-court show demands an audience. Mark Cuban recently insisted the Hornets could do a better job selling the team locally (something coach Byron Scott calls 'a crock' in the Times story), but some sudden swell of interest might fit into Longman's arguments more cleanly. Surely the spectacle of All-Star Weekend helps local awareness, but the removal of diversionary options (LSU football, the Saints, and Mardi Gras preparations) could very well mean more in a market stretched thin of eyeballs and dollars.

But can a surge get the seasonal average where it needs to be to assure the Hornets long-term presence in N.O.? They'd need to (basically) sell out the rest of the season to climb above the baseline which, if not surpassed, allows the franchise to uproot in 2009. And (whole 'nother can of worms alert): do the franchise's string-pullers even want that option off the table?

Everything the NBA is doing and has done and will do for the city of New Orleans is great, fantastic, commendable and important. But reading this Chris Paul quote, captured by the Washington Post's Michael Lee, may throttle you and David Stern a bit.

"I have a different perspective from any of the other all-stars," Paul said. "Everybody else that's here for the weekend, they got to give back and do different things, then they go back to their cities. This is it for me. I'm facing these things every day. These are my people."

This, I think, gets to heart of why professional sports are important during our times. By all accounts, New Orleans has plenty of advocates -- Louisiana has two United States senators and a sturdy congressional delegation. It has a host of celebrity natives who help raise money and awareness.

But Chris Paul will be on national TV at least 10 times a year for the next decade. He clearly feels like New Orleans is (at least in part) his responsibility. That's huge, and it can only be good for the city... the brand of "good" you cannot squeeze into objective measures like dollars and cents. It's unclear if N.O. needs the NBA. But N.O. certainly needs advocates like Chris Paul. If that is dependent upon the NBA's continued presence in the city, then yes, N.O. needs the NBA.

Mark Cuban has some advice for George Shinn, whose Hornets are struggling to draw 13,000 fans at home games: try harder. From Gary Washburn of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (via SbB):

"Somebody's got to get off their ass and sell tickets," Cuban said earlier this month. "They've got the best record in the Western Conference and they can't get people to come? That's not New Orleans, that's effort. There's enough people. There's enough basketball fans to get 16, 17,000 people to come, even if they're weekend games. So they have bad nights Monday and Tuesday." [...]

"When I took over the Mavs, we sucked," Cuban said. "I hired 40 salespeople to get out there and get on the phones and I got on the phones and was calling people. Whatever it took. We had concerts after games. If I found a pretty girl, I gave her free tickets so she would tell her guy friends to bring people. Whatever it takes to get people in the arena, you gotta do it and that's what they're not doing down there."

Rather large news with Byzantine ramifications: the federal judge in charge of the city of Seattle's lawsuit attempting to prevent the SuperSonics from walking out on their lease to move to Oklahoma City set a June 16 trial date. The Sonics wanted the trial ASAP (March); the city pushed for next fall. The compromise means... something. But it's not clear what.

Why? As the Tacoma News Tribune's Eric D. Williams relates (at the link above), the NBA will set its 2008-09 schedule in June... but it's not released to the public until early August. (Some games do begin to get leaked out in July, mostly marquee matchups and the like.) The trial should be short (six days), and the judge won't likely protract her verdict phase (which is being quoted as less than two weeks). Theoretically, if the matter is resolved by July 1 (probable) in the Sonics' favor, the NBA could make some quick alterations to the schedule and Johan Petro could be filming commercials for used car lots in Chandler, OK, by September.

Before then, in March, the NBA's board of governors (err, owners) will consider Stalin's Clay Bennett's relocation application. And unless George Shinn invites Monty Hall, the NBA will approve the relocation application. Hopefully, David Stern will make a decision soon on whether the June trial will leave enough time for a summer move, so we at least know whether to get cracking with the 'Farewell, Seattle' stories.