Expansive Stern better focus on issues at home

So David Stern "accepts" the inevitability of the Seattle SuperSonics going to Oklahoma City. So he thinks the city is engaging in "bad public policy" in insisting upon the enforcement of the team's lease to Key Arena. So he thinks it's time to more seriously consider expansion to Europe, and with more than just one or two teams.

What? Huh?

Are those rose-colored glasses, David Stern? (US Presswire)

We grant Uncle Davey is a bit more forward-thinking than most, even if he does have those little bouts of crankypants, as he has with the Seattle thing. He has stridently defended the rights of Sonics owner Clay Bennett to complete the sign-and-trade deal with Oklahoma City, and has chided Seattle for not being more supine in its dealings with Bennett.

Hey, Bennett co-signs Stern's check. We get the relationship.

But the European expansion -- or as it shall be known, NBA Europa, after the miserable failure that was NFL Europa -- defies logic in search of the illusion of market growth. I mean, if you can't get Seattle down right, what's Stockholm gonna get you?

We accept the inevitability of Oklahoma City, too. Bennett's game was clear from the start, and he was not to be deterred by some citizens' group that chose to see the signs too late. But with as many soft markets (Atlanta, Charlotte, Indiana, the Los Angeles Clippers, Minnesota, Memphis, New Orleans, Sacramento, and until they got their new Brooklyn arena deal, New Jersey) as the NBA has now, putting a whole division in Europe seems more like leaving jobs undone than taking on new ones.

And we don't even want to consider the notion that European fans aren't attuned to paying the kinds of prices that fuel American franchises, thereby putting the new franchises at the same kind of disadvantage that the more marginal American franchises endure now.

The travel? The schedule? Problems, but logistics can be overcome. The idea that the game has not yet shown it can properly maintain 30 franchises would, however, seem to mitigate against adding six more, no matter how cool it might seem to replace the Indiana-Detroit-Cleveland trip in February with Madrid-Rome-Paris.

Plus, how would you like to be the one to find out that you've been traded from Phoenix to Moscow? I'm thinking gunplay would be a perfectly reasoned response there.

We get that Stern is frustrated there are only so many large American markets to go around. Las Vegas isn't viable because the gambling industry is too powerful and the three-shift town is too daunting. Vancouver already failed. St. Louis and Kansas City seem uninterested. San Diego is both -- a previous failure and uninterested. Baltimore, too close to Washington and not fiscally up to a new building. In other words, Oklahoma City, while an odd choice, is the only place receptive to a new team, leaving another eight teams with no place to go except their own already wobbly markets.

In addition, we can state with some certainty that there aren't enough smart owners for the 30 franchises that already exist, let alone a new set of teams. I mean, the league would want to set the bar a little higher than Jim Dolan and Donald Sterling, right?

Truth is, though, the NBA still has to figure out why its own audience seems to be static in America, and what to do about that before trying to figure out where additional demand can be found. This isn't about the poll that shows more fans have hockey as their favorite sport than pro basketball, which is dispositive of roughly nothing. It is however instructive that the march through the southeastern corner of the nation is now more than 30 years old, and no market from Charlotte to Miami to New Orleans to Memphis has ever thrived in winning years and losing ones. They run hot and cold, meaning there are fewer basketball fans than spectacle fans, there for the hot party in town.

If this is an unreasonable standard -- filling your building with a bad team as the lure -- well, how do you think that'll work in Europe? Better? Are Athenians more forgiving than Atlantans?

No, this looks like one of Uncle Davey's daydreams, making us think the NBA is a brand that expands like the universe itself because the world demands that it grow. It isn't, not yet. Neither is hockey. Neither is baseball. Neither is football. And no, neither is soccer, at least not as an American phenomenon.

And this is just how it is. Whatever Stern's vision for the far future might be, he's got enough issues on the home front to keep his mind working until he finally retires in 20 years or so.

Probably in Paris, watching the 76ers.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.