Mexico City and Seattle please..
would love to put them on my nba cities travel list
Mexico is just a bad idea.
Seattle is the most obvious. After them St. Louis, Kansas City, Louisville, and Las Vegas would make the most sense (not necessarily in that order).
please elaborate. keeping in mind.
- Easy travel route
- Would be the most populated city in the NBA, huge market
- Only American sports franchise, huge market
i do understand the risks, but frankly that's any big city, IMO
- Transportation
- country politics/laws
Mexico is a 3rd World Country in turmoil. Crime is rampant. It is very poor. It is dirty and filled with smog and pollution. It is also extremely elevated (which affects play). Plus you then have the VISA and travel problems associated with a foreign country. The NFL has played games there and they were unmitigated disasters, imagine playing 40+ games there every season. Mexico is just a bad idea and won't happen. Sure some exhibition games there might be a possibility (and maybe even a couple of regular season games), but not a full time regular team.
Mexico is the 13th largest economy in the world, and is most definitely not a 3rd world country. The Mexico City metropolitan area is larger than New York or Los Angeles any way you slice it. The NBA and FIBA hold games there every year. The NBA has been a North American league and not a United States league for decades including passports and customs for all personnel. The United States has the second most native Spanish speakers in the world and Mexico has the most. It would be an excellent move in my opinion for Mexico, for the NBA, and for the sport of basketball.
TP for being reality based
Nothing I said was not based in reality. I mean just this week, you have things like this story popping up
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-07-21/mexico-city-spike-in-crime-violence-sparks-fears-of-cartel-warfare Some key points from the article
"All told, 206 murder investigations were opened in Mexico City between May and June, making it the bloodiest two month-period on record in the capital, official data show.
Mexico City and its urban sprawl form the economic heart of the country, accounting for roughly a quarter of gross domestic product, according to the OECD, and the rise in violence is a major embarrassment for the Mexican government.
The crime spree mirrors a rising tide of violence nationally that has exposed major law and order shortcomings by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and his ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, less than a year before the next presidential election."
"As these smaller groups jostle over the kidnapping and extortion rackets, violence has soared. The country's murder tally this year is on track to post the highest since modern records began in 1997.
Various factors are seen behind the capital's rise in violence.
Weak economic growth and chronically low wages drive youths in poor neighborhoods into crime. These troubled youths often extort small business owners, eventually shuttering them which makes jobs even harder to come by, according to local policeman Jose."
"Francisco Rivas, director of the National Citizen Observatory, a civil group monitoring justice and security in Mexico, said regardless of what constitutes a cartel, the days of the capital being isolated from the drug violence were over.
"What's happening in Mexico City reflects the national outlook," he said. "We have a crisis of organized crime."'
There was even a time when Mexico cared about the environment, but they let go of many of the environmental restrictions they had in place and Mexico City in the span of a couple of years, went from pollution levels on par with Los Angeles, to having them go completely out of control in the last couple of years.
The average daily wage in Mexico was 335.59 pesos in May. That equates to about $18.90 US per day (the US average daily wage in May was $22.03 per HOUR).
Mexico's Human Development Index ("HDI" - the new index for rating countries) is .762 which rates them as 77th in the World. While they have generally eliminated the term "3rd World", Mexico with that rating is right there in the mix of other countries that previously would have been known as 3rd World countries. Which you know makes sense, since Mexico still has significantly large portions of the population whose formal education stops (if they had any at all) before they are teenagers. There is a very limited middle class with the population generally either being very poor or very rich. Crime is running rampant with corruption at all levels of the government and police force.
And to be clear, I've been to Mexico many times. My sister's first husband was Mexican with a ceremony in Mexico and she lived there. Her second/current husband was born in Mexico and immigrated to the US when he was a child. The country has a lot of beauty and is a wonderful place to visit (though right now is the most dangerous it has been in a very long time if not ever), but it is a not a place that should have a full time NBA team (or any other US based professional sport). The socio-economic factors just don't rate enough for a team to realistically be there any time in the near future.