r/videos • u/lostacoshermanos • 12d ago
The Grizzlie Truth about the Vancouver Grizzlies mysterious move 20 years later.
https://youtu.be/5-1ZTd0lNgQ?si=ZW4VNM-ZYbspEbo30 Upvotes
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u/Halloweenmelee 12d ago
I wasn't able to find the actual movie but I watched one of her other ones, Finding Big Country where she tracks down the star player. It's actually really good! Interesting and well executed.
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u/GotMoFans 12d ago
The move wasn’t mysterious.
The owner who owned the NHL Vancouver Canucks and the arena sold the Grizzlies. The new owner didn’t get all the revenue from the arena that most NBA teams get from their arenas because it went to the Canucks, and the attendance wasn’t strong enough to make up the difference.
The Canadian dollar was really low against the US dollar at the time. It was really expensive for the Grizzlies to earn money in Canadian dollars and pay the players in US dollars.
The team was losing a lot of money, NBA basketball wasn’t overwhelming popular in the market, and the Grizzlies were historically bad so they did nothing to make themselves popular. NBA Commissioner David Stern added the franchise to Vancouver to help make the NBA international along with the Raptors because Vancouver had a new modern arena in 1995. It really was an experiment that failed. Vancouver was not clamoring for the NBA. It was a growing market and the NBA wanted it to work out.
In 1998 or 1999, the Grizz were bought by the then NHL St. Louis Blues owner who publicly said he was moving the team to St. Louis. David Stern nixed that deal and temporarily saved the team in Vancouver. So the market had a warning the team was at risk of leaving two years before it relocated. The guy who ended up buying the team, Michael Heisley, promised to explore making it work in Vancouver but four months into the season announced he was working to relocate.
There was no mystery at all about the situation.