May 14, 2009

As a former news reporter and sportswriter for daily newspapers in the Rochester, N.Y., area, I believe I have a unique perspective on the coverage that the Hornets receive from the media. During my tenure as a reporter, I was required to cover a wide array of topics, from something as relatively inconsequential as high school sports, to something as serious as crime or – in one tragic case – the accidental death of a baseball player.

Partly based on that experience, I realize that it’s extremely easy to criticize reporters. The media can be an optimum target, because there are countless decisions that news organizations make on a daily basis that lend themselves to second-guessing. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve always been so hesitant to critique coverage of the Hornets.

However, over the three-plus years I’ve written for this website, I’ve noticed an alarming trend within the national coverage of the team. Ever since the day the Hornets announced their plan to return full-time to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, there has been widespread skepticism about whether the club could survive in the Big Easy. Some would argue that the rampant negativity was predictable, given the uncertainty of an NBA team returning to a city that was still recovering from the catastrophic disaster of 2005, when over 1,000 people lost their lives due to Katrina. No one knew exactly how the return of the Hornets would play out, but how could you have known? Without the benefit of a crystal ball, it was impossible to predict what would happen.

But the national media’s negativity toward the Hornets is not even what is most alarming to me. What’s more frustrating is that even today – two years after the Hornets returned to NOLA and have experienced unprecedented success here, both on and off the court – there continue to be countless articles that detail how the Hornets are “struggling” to operate successfully in the Big Easy.

Struggling? Over the past two seasons, New Orleans has won 105 games, the seventh-most in the NBA. During that same period, the Hornets have sold out 44 games in the New Orleans Arena and established one of the better homecourt advantages in the league. Make no mistake, attendance was a legitimate concern in November and December of 2007, the first two months of the regular season after the Hornets returned to the Crescent City. But inexplicably, there are writers from other cities who are STILL insinuating that the team is not being sufficiently supported, which is simply not the case. Yes, New Orleans is a small market – in fact, the Crescent City is the smallest market in the league. But the New Orleans Arena was filled at 98.7 percent capacity in 2008-09, ranking eighth out of 30 NBA teams.

During lengthy meetings with New Orleans TV, radio and newspaper reporters recently, Hornets team president Hugh Weber was asked for his reaction to the steady stream of negative national reporting about the team’s viability in Louisiana. Weber takes issue with many of the common premises that have been the basis of national articles about the Hornets.

“The national media looks at our team and our city through a prism of distress,” Weber said. “(Their perspective is that) the glass is half-empty, and that things are so bad (in New Orleans), and that no one is coming to our games. So when (national media members) see that the Hornets sold 10,700 season tickets, they say, ‘Oh, well that’s an anomaly. That won’t (happen again).’ “The national media is looking at things from a perspective that says that this small market (of New Orleans) can’t support two professional teams, so something has got to give.”

To the contrary, the NFL’s Saints have also generated staggering attendance numbers, selling out every home game at the Superdome since their full-time return to the city in the fall of 2006. Coming off a season in which average attendance for the Hornets was near 17,000 per game, the team is currently ranked among the NBA’s top five clubs in percentage of season ticket holders who have renewed for 2009-10.

A full two years after the Hornets’ full-time return here, there are far too many writers making assumptions about the team and city that have very little factual basis. As I mentioned earlier, the media is an easy target – but there is no reasonable explanation for why a portion of national reporters continue to seemingly put so little effort into their research.

“Sometimes (writers) look at (the Hornets) from the perspective of ‘It’s New Orleans, it’s a small market, so they can’t afford it,’ ” Weber said of one misperception, for example, that the Hornets are desperate to cut salaries from their payroll this summer. “Those are the same people who are saying that people are not coming to games, or that (New Orleans) isn’t supporting (the Hornets). They say that we have to rebuild the whole thing. But that’s just not an accurate view.”