How about pro basketball for Montreal?
An NBA team would make more sense than bringing back the Expos
I visited Hogtown in the wake of the Raptors’ first game against the Golden State Warriors, in which the league’s northernmost team snatched an improbably easy victory from the much-favoured Californians. The result? Hockey no longer existed. That particular wound, inflicted by the Maple Leafs’ Stanley Cup-less half-century, was tucked away somewhere along with Mike Babcock’s bruised ego. In its place was a loud, colourful and notably young-looking explosion of happy basketball hysteria. Even Drake, noted auto-tune aficionado and the Raptors’ de facto mascot, was almost tolerable in this context. Almost.
As my Via Rail train chugged toward Montreal’s Central Station, past where Mayor Valérie Plante hopes to plunk a new baseball stadium, I thought, we’re making a huge mistake. The Plante administration seems likely to approve the development of just over 20 acres of prime downtown real estate by Devimco and at least one Bronfman, who would in turn build a new baseball stadium and, presumably, oodles of condos. For a government allegedly concerned about the housing crisis, it is a gobsmacking move that will begin with rampant land speculation and end in yet another phalanx of condo towers surrounding yet another professional baseball stadium.
Worse still, in chasing the return of the Expos, these developers (and the city by extension) are pouring billions of investment dollars into baseball, a sport whose fans are demonstrably growing older faster than those of any of the other major leagues. And they are essentially doing so in the shadow of the Bell Centre, a simply ideal location for the balm to our long-cupless Habs fans: an NBA basketball franchise.
To be sure, baseball isn’t dead. Major League Baseball pulled in $10.3 billion in revenue in 2018, capping 16 years of record revenues and a 377-inflation-adjusted- per-cent increase since 1992. But the revenue bonanza masks baseball’s deep demographic shortfall, which risk surfacing just as the paint dries on Montreal’s stadium. With half of its viewers 55 or older, the league has by far the greyest fanbase of all the major league sports. What’s more, it’s aging faster than other leagues; that 55-or-older demographic has increased by 22 per cent in just the last decade.
Blame long games and short millennial attention spans. Blame the league for not innovating. Or blame the salary cap, the lack of which in major league baseball has resulted in the disproportionate success of two impossibly wealthy teams, the Yankees and Red Sox, over the last two decades. Whatever it is, far fewer young eyeballs are taking in the game today than even 10 years ago.
By comparison, basketball is in its prime. At 37, the average NBA viewer is nearly 20 years younger than his/her baseball counterparts. Not coincidentally, it is the most diverse among major league sports, earning an overall A for racial and gender hiring from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.
This isn’t just a victory for liberal-minded types. Sports fans like seeing people like them in player and management positions. And the NBA looks far more like Montreal than the MLB.
There are other advantages to Montreal hosting a basketball team. The NBA salary cap would help ensure such a medium-market team could at least compete; the same can’t be said for the would-be medium-market Expos. In the city that is home to McGill, basketball inventor James Naismith’s alma mater, this basketball team would be rooted in history — but not strangled by it, as the Expos would surely be. The Montreal Naismiths. Not a bad name, actually.
A new stadium would cost more than a billion dollars, eat up prime real estate in the midst of a housing crisis and ensnare the downtown core in chronic traffic woes, while another baseball stadium sits in near-vacancy in the east end. And in the Bell Centre, the Montreal Naismiths already have a potential home — and, perhaps, an eventual winning narrative to compete with the forever frustrating Habs.