Category: New Orleans Pelicans

Friday roundup: Milwaukee County votes no on Brewers subsidy, Coyotes predicted to be moving everywhere and nowhere at once

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy May 26, the last day for stadium legislation to be introduced in the Nevada legislature, unless of course they wait till tomorrow. I’ll be keeping an eye out for any bills popping up, but in the meantime there’s lots of other news to occupy us:

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Friday roundup: Fighting stadium ignorance is taking longer than we thought

access_time personNeil deMause

And so this brings to an end another programming year, and what a year it was: The Buffalo Bills owners got more than $1 billion in public money by doing an end run around democracy, the Tennessee Titans owners went down the middle of the legislative process but are now in position to score their own billion-dollar-plus taxpayer-funded payday, the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles got over a billion dollars in state money parked in a slush fund that doesn’t have an easy football metaphor to go with it, and the owners of the Cleveland Browns, Kansas City Royals, Philadelphia 76ers, NYC F.C. all launched campaigns for new buildings and the public checks that come with them. Sure, the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal fell apart after the mayor who negotiated it turned out to be under FBI investigation for fraud and bribery, but overall it’s still undeniably a great time to be a billionaire who owns a pro sports franchise, or, you know, owns pretty much anything else.

Oh yeah, and this happened:

As economist J.C. Bradbury said in May in an interview on this site — which I’ve just made free for all readers rather than a subscriber exclusive — “It is quite eye-opening to talk to … policymakers, elected officials, business executives. They absolutely do not want to hear that this is a bad idea. And they cling to it in ways that you cannot imagine: This has to be good because I want it to be good.” And as I said back to him: Even if fighting ignorance is taking longer than we thought, we can at least try to help readers laugh to keep from crying.

Here’s to another year of that ahead, and thanks in advance for your support of this site’s work. And now let’s wrap up the final news of 2022:

  • The New Orleans Pelicans owners don’t plan to demand a new arena when their initial 25-year lease expires in 2024, but rather will just be asking for state-funded renovations in exchange for a five-year lease extension while considering a “long-term plan.” This is yet another reminder that owning a sports venue is seldom a good thing for the public unless they actually own the rights to the venue revenue — if that all goes to the team owner, you’re just setting yourself up for a subsidy that keeps on subsidizing.
  • Dallas Cowboys fans are really upset that the team’s new-ish stadium lets the sun shine in the eyes of its players sometimes — and also opposing teams’ players, but nobody wants to mention that — but the most amusing part is how SB Nation reports that “designers essentially banked on AT&T Stadium leading to mass development in Arlington, with the belief that new construction would eventually be built up and block out the sun problem inside the stadium.” You’d think Jerry Jones of all people would have been around long enough to know that stadiums that only host eight or so football games a year aren’t going to do much to spur surrounding development, or at least could come up with a simpler solution.
  • Somebody noticed that Phoenix city council members who voted for Suns arena renovations are now getting use of free luxury boxes in the arena, but the city says elected officials bringing business friends to NBA games for free is all part of standard “economic development” policy, which isn’t actually all that reassuring.
  • The owners of the Kane County Cougars minor-league baseball team have been stiffing Kane County on rent and are now being threatened with eviction in 2024 if they don’t pay up; it is exceedingly unlikely that this will end up with a tractor being parked on home plate, but one can always hope.

Happy new year, and don’t forget to write off your ape NFTs as a business loss! Definitely a good time to be rich.

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Friday roundup: Bills $1B subsidy not finalized yet, amid ridicule from pretty much every economist everywhere

access_time personNeil deMause

This was quite a week, bringing with it New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal of $1 billion (at least) in public money for a Buffalo Bills stadium and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal of $500 million (at least) in public money for a Tennessee Titans stadium and Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan’s floating of a possible bidding war between Missouri and Kansas to give umpteen gazlllion dollars (at least) to his team for a new stadium. For readers who are visiting this site for the first time as a result, first of all, welcome, and second, this is our weekly rundown of all the other news that happened while we were goggling at the even bigger news. Please breathe deeply, and we shall begin:

  • Speaking of that Bills stadium, it probably isn’t getting passed by today’s budget deadline, as legislators are still debating both that proposed expenditure and scaling back bail reform. State Assembly Republican Leader Will Barclay decried the “Democrats’ dysfunction [that] has resulted in little more than needless gridlock,” which, good work, criticizing members of the opposing party for actually wanting to discuss things before voting on them is definitely a way to reduce dysfunction.
  • Also speaking of that Bills stadium, USA Today checked in with a couple more sports economists who weren’t part of Tuesday’s press conference, and got some choice quotes: Kennesaw State’s J.C. Bradbury said, “I think it just goes to show that policy decisions don’t seem to be tied to actual knowledge,” while University of San Francisco’s Nola Agha said, “It’s like saying the bakery down the street receives $100,000 a year from the city government, just so they can bake croissants every morning.” Add in Smith College’s Andy Zimbalist’s New York Daily News op-ed saying, “If the people of Erie County and New York State … believe that retaining the Bills will provide hefty economic benefits, then buyer beware,” and West Virginia University’s Brad Humphreys’ retweets, and it’s pretty much a clean sweep of every single economist who’s studied these things.
  • And also also speaking of the Bills stadium, Hochul’s proposed memorandum of understanding is out, and it includes an item that the announced “ironclad” deal to keep the team in Buffalo for 30 years would actually allow the team owners to skip town for lower and lower penalties starting in year 15. They really don’t make iron cladding like they used to.
  • Okay, moving on from the Bills: Arena developer Oak View Group says it wants to build a new $1 billion arena in Las Vegas that could host an NBA expansion team, because none of Vegas’ six other arenas could possibly be used for that. No public funding has been mentioned so far, so it’s possible this is just part of a land rush to grab prominence in the Vegas arena market; though given that another Vegas arena project announced its groundbreaking in 2014 and still hasn’t actually been built, it’s also possible this is just hot air.
  • Despite the New Orleans Pelicans‘ lease on their 23-year-old arena expiring in 2024, definitely aren’t looking for a new arena until “the future,” says owner Gayle Benson, adding, “I don’t want anyone to think we’re using that as any type of leverage over the state of Louisiana.” She definitely doesn’t want state legislators thinking that, who would do a thing like that?
  • Cincinnati USA Convention and Visitors Bureau chair Jeff Berding says, “It’s time we have a modern arena in Cincinnati.” Berding is also co-CEO of F.C. Cincinnati, who already got a giant pile of public money for their own new stadium, maybe it’s not such a big mystery why these things keep happening.
  • Wait, Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk died? Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk died! Now it will be up to his college-age daughters, Anna and Olivia Melnyk, our sympathies to them, to decide whether to carry forward with his never-ending arena subsidy demands, our sympathies to them on that as well.
  • A Virginia state senator told WUSA-TV anonymously that legislation to spend as much as a billion dollars on a Washington Commanders stadium is moving slowly because “public reaction to this project has been underwhelming” and “the team lacks gravity,” and mostly it makes me wonder what about the Virginia legislature requires members to demand anonymity so they can “speak freely.” Anyway, team owner/accused toxic workplace enabler Dan Snyder has turned over direct control of the team to his wife, Tanya Snyder, that should take care of everything.
  • The Toronto Blue Jays are moving ahead with a “significant renovation” of the SkyDome or whatever it’s called these days, promising to “modernize the fan experience.” No public money request was attached to the announcement, or price tag on the renovations at all, but team president Mark Shapiro did say that the renovations are “probably for the next 10 or 15 years but we’ll probably still have a stadium issue,” so this ain’t over by any means.
  • A Nebraska bill would increase the amount on sales tax kickbacks to the state’s arenas and convention centers because, and I swear this is not an April Fools joke, they have hosted such important economic and cultural events as “a recent concert by the legendary Elton John, the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials and the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meetings.” No economists were consulted by the Omaha World-Herald for this story, though it’s always possible they were laughing too hard to comment coherently.
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Louisiana is paying Pelicans owner $3.65m a year to “create” basketball player jobs

access_time personNeil deMause

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years of covering sports subsidy shenanigans, it’s that no team owner — and, really, no owner of any American business — will pass up a chance at free public money. Which isn’t especially surprising, as which of us would, if we had the connections and the lobbyists to request large checks from the government? Not like, if we were in that position, we would really need another yacht, but then, another yacht would be nice, wouldn’t it, especially if some nice legislators were offering to pay for it?

Anyway, all this is to say that even if this story in the Louisiana Illuminator about the New Orleans Pelicans isn’t entirely surprising, it’s pretty depressing:

The New Orleans Pelicans receive a $3.65 million cash rebate every year from Louisiana — more than any other company — by counting its professional basketball players’ positions as newly-created direct jobs under the state’s Quality Jobs program, an economic incentive that’s supposed to encourage companies to create well-paid, full-time jobs for residents.

In 2020, the Pelicans reported creating a total of 183 jobs with salaries averaging $608 per hour, according to documents from the Louisiana Economic Development agency received through a public records request. The wage rate is so high because it includes NBA players’ salaries in the Pelicans’ average wage.

Yep, that’s right: In order to encourage local companies to hire people at decent wages, the state of Louisiana offers to cover up to 6% of their payroll costs for up to 10 years. The program has been in place since 1995, and according to a recent audit has generated about $5 billion a year in household income in the state — though the same audit says that “the majority of that amount would have been generated even if the Quality Jobs program had not been available,” which must be a new meaning of the word “generated.” (The audit also reported that the state only gets back between 1 and 10 cents in new tax revenue for every dollar it spends on the program, which is a pretty awful ratio.)

I know what you’re wondering at this point, or at least I know what I’m wondering: How do NBA roster spots count as “new jobs,” since there are only 15 of them, same as there have been since 2005, when the roster limit went up from 12? The answer appears to be that the state legislature passed a law in 2002 saying that they would, in order to lure the team to New Orleans from Charlotte:

The state offered up the Quality Jobs incentive during its negotiations to bring the team to Louisiana in 2002. Pelicans spokesman Greg Bensel said the state included the 5% payroll rebate from the Quality Jobs program as a provision in its lease agreement with the team.

The Louisiana Legislature has amended the program many times over the years. In 2002 — the same year the state was trying to lure the basketball franchise to New Orleans — lawmakers passed a bill that allowed the team to qualify for the program.

The bill itself is hilarious: It only adds one item with three bullet points to the law, stating that it will now cover “a National Basketball Association team which relocates to Louisiana and enters into a contract provided for in this Chapter prior to November 1, 2003,” that the subsidy is capped at $3.65 million a year, and that owners can’t pay themselves a salary and include that in their “job creation” calculations. At least somebody in the 2002 Louisiana legislature thought to close one obvious loophole! Not that it would have mattered, as the Pelicans soon enough maxed out their subsidy even without owner Gayle Benson, who the Illuminator informs us is Louisiana’s single wealthiest resident, including herself as a job created, because there’s plenty of money to be made by crediting herself with creating Brandon Ingram’s $29 million a year wage.

Louisiana has “a long history of enormous corporate giveaways,” according to the subsidy watchdog Good Jobs First, including film production subsidies and industrial property tax breaks as well as the payroll-rebate program; it was also one of the first states to offer to pay a sports team to play there, when it agreed to give Saints owner Tom Benson (Gayle is his widow) more than $18 million a year in cash grants to keep his NFL team in town. Compared to that, $3.65 million a year is a bargain, I guess, but given that it’s a subsidy that will never expire, it adds up over time: The New York Knicks and Rangers tax break didn’t seem huge when it was passed in 1982, but look where it’s gotten to now.

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Friday roundup: Pelicans, T-Wolves arena demands floated by sportswriters whether owners are talking about them or not

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, remember just a few months ago when people could legitimately argue that the age of sports stadium and arena subsidy demands was coming to an end? That was before the Buffalo Bills, Arizona Coyotes, Chicago Bears, and Cleveland Guardians all joined the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays in seeking government money for new or renovated buildings, and now you can barely turn around without some new team joining the chase for the public purse:

  • The New Orleans Pelicans suck, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune asks: Maybe a new arena would help? The resulting billion-word article doesn’t really answer the question, but it does reveal that owner Gayle Benson (who also owns the Saints) says she needs “some big arena investments to stay competitive,” meaning either a renovation of their 22-year-old arena or a brand-new one, and the team’s lease expires in 2024, and Benson is 74 years old and her succession plan is for the Pelicans (and Saints) to be sold on her death with the proceeds given to a charitable foundation, and she says one requirement will be that the teams stay in New Orleans, but you know they could potentially leave, so isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? (Why a billionaire who says she’s giving away her wealth to charity because “I don’t need any more money” needs more revenue to “stay competitive” is another question the Times-Picayune article doesn’t answer.)
  • Meanwhile in Minneapolis, Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez say they have “have no plans to move” the teams without a new arena, but that isn’t stopping the Minneapolis Star Tribune from reporting that they’ll move the teams without a new arena, because it’s been five whole years since their current arena got a $145 million renovation, and “I can vacuum the floor of my Chevy and repair the cigar burns on the seats. At the end of the day, it’s still a Chevy.” Also, Lore said that adding “augmented reality,” which apparently means fans wearing Google Glass-type glasses so watching in real life can be more like watching on TV, could be “incredible,” so this is totally something to dedicate an entire sports column to, how could anyone possibly think otherwise?
  • On the Bears front, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has declared that “I have not had any discussions, haven’t been approached by anybody, neither the city nor the Bears themselves, so it’s not something we’re currently looking at, like I said we’re focused on our own fiscal situation.” The headline that WLS-TV put on this was “New Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights won’t be paid for by IL taxpayers, Gov. Pritzker says,” which isn’t quite what he said, but I guess “New Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights won’t be paid for by IL taxpayers yet, Gov. Pritzker says” didn’t rank as high in SEO.
  • Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg isn’t putting up a sign inside his stadium for the postseason promoting his plan to move the team to Montreal half the year after all. “I made a big mistake, a real mistake in trying to promote our Sister City plan with a sign right now in our home ballpark. I absolutely should have known better, and really, I’m sorry for that,” said Sternberg. “I knew that a sign would bring us attention. And we do want the attention. I just didn’t completely process that now isn’t the moment for it.” Of course, one could argue that he’s already gotten the attention, so why does he need the sign, but that would be churlish, right?
  • Orange County Superior Court Judge David Hoffer has ruled that Anaheim city officials need to look harder for records on how they decided to sell 150 acres of land to Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno for a cut-rate price of $150 million. The ruling was part of a now-18-month-old lawsuit seeking to overturn the deal as being in violation of open-meetings laws.
  • Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer says he’s “become a real obsessive about toilets,” adding: “Toilets, toilets, toilets.” The Clippers’ new arena will have a record number of toilets per fan, and Ballmer says, “The architects keep getting on me. You’re supposed to call them ‘fixtures’ instead of toilets. But it’s the same thing. We’re putting a whole lot more toilets than anyone else in the NBA.” Also: toilets.
  • Hey, remember this crazy $1.7 billion lotus-blossom-shaped stadium for the Guangzhou Evergrande soccer team? You will be sad to learn that Evergrande is close to bankruptcy and doesn’t even have naming rights to the team anymore, and the stadium now looks like this and may never look like anything more. Unfinished, half-built stadiums are becoming quite the rage in international soccer, which if nothing else is making for some great vaportecture.
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Friday roundup: Tons of news, but you’ll forget it all once you see that Houston is spending public money on a pro rugby stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

And in other news that doesn’t involve proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium sites:

  • United Airlines is spending $69 million on naming rights to the Los Angeles Coliseum in advance of the 2028 Olympics, but IOC rules prohibit corporate names during the Olympics, oops. Hope you enjoy the most expensive college-football naming rights deal in history, United!
  • Hotel revenue fell 16% in San Diego last year after the Chargers left town, but went up 0.2% in St. Louis after the Rams left. I’m not honestly sure what if anything this means — you’d really have to look at hotel revenue on football weekends to do this right, and it doesn’t look like this study did — but feel free to speculate wildly.
  • Did I mention the Yahoo Finance article yet that compares the Amazon HQ2 chase to the competition to host the Super Bowl, and cites me saying that while Amazon will bring more jobs, “that said, there’s almost no way it’s worth the kind of money that cities are talking about”? Well, now I have, enjoy!
  • AL.com has recalculated the public costs of a proposed University of Alabama-Birmingham football stadium and come up with a total of $18.2 million a year — $10.7 million from a bunch of county taxes, $3.5 million from a new car rental tax surcharge, $1 million from other county funds, and $3 million from city funds — not the $15.7 million I had previously reported. UAB and a naming rights sponsor and other private contributors, meanwhile, would only put in $4 million a year, and only for the first ten years. Out of his goddamn mind, I tell you.
  • Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report filed a Freedom of Information Law request to see the competing bids for the Belmont Park site that eventually got awarded to the New York Islanders, and was shot down on the grounds that it would “impair present or imminent contract awards.” Wait, wasn’t the contract already awarded? Will it be okay to ask again once it’s too late to do anything about it?
  • The WNBA’s Chicago Sky are moving to the new DePaul basketball arena that the city of Chicago helped pay for, which I guess is marginally good for Chicago in that it gets to steal a tiny sliver of economic activity from Rosemont, screw those guys, right? (Actually, Rosemont is apparently a gated community, so maybe screw those guys.)
  • A New Orleans Pelicans game was delayed because the arena roof leaked. No one is demanding that a new arena be built just yet that I’ve heard, but given that the current one is 19 whole years old, it’s gotta to be a matter of time, even if this one does have a fire fountain.
  • The Pittsburgh Pirates are threatening to sue the city-county sports authority over who’ll pay how much for $10 million in improvements to their stadium, because apparently the people who write these stadium leases are idiots.
  • If you enjoy this site but were thinking, “Wouldn’t this be better as a YouTube video with lots of animated charts?”, Vox has got you covered.
  • The Houston city council has approved spending $3.2 million in tax dollars on a pro rugby stadium for the Houston SaberCats, who are a pro rugby team that is going to play in a pro rugby league, which councilmember Jack Christie calls “a beautiful example of public-private partnerships that we ought to look at in the future, because as far as I have heard, there’s not been one city tax dollar used for this development.” I’m done. Have a good weekend.
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Shreveport, Pensacola duking it out to throw $30m or so at minor-league Pelicans affiliate

access_time personNeil deMause

I have a pretty good system of Google alerts (and helpful readers who send me links — thanks, helpful readers!) to let me know about stadium and arena battles large and small, but somehow the New Orleans Pelicans‘ bid to start an NBA D-League* team somewhere in the south in 2018 slipped through my net. Fortunately, Deadspin’s Patrick Redford has the scoop, courtesy of the Shreveport Times:

The Pelicans will apparently announce the winner in September, which is also when Shreveport will decide whether or not to go forward with one of the saddest and dumbest arena financing deals in recent memory.

As the Shreveport Times reported, Mayor Ollie Tyler announced plans to move forward with a $100 million complex in downtown Shreveport. More details will be revealed at a city council meeting tonight, but the complex is a mixed-use deal, which will include a 3,000-seat arena as well as condos, shops, and a sports complex. Tyler’s plan calls for the city to kick in $30 million of public money.

The plan actually calls for the city to sell $30 million in revenue bonds, with the revenue to come from … hang on, I’m sure it’s in the proposal somewhere … scroll, scroll … okay, it doesn’t actually indicate that at all. Maybe the team will pay lots of rent! Or maybe, considering that the Pelicans are owned by the guy who has a 13-foot statue of himself outside the stadium that he successfully got the state of Louisiana to both pay to renovate and to pay his team an annual fee to play in, it’ll just be tax revenue that the city would get anyway.

From what I can tell from this very uninformative TV report, the Shreveport city council voted 5-2 last night to approve … something, though whether it actually commits the city to go through with it if the Pelicans select it as a D-League site isn’t entirely clear. Meanwhile, Pensacola is pitching its own $80-100 million arena and mixed-use complex, with a “not specified” amount of public money. This is the problem with minor-league sports venue deals: With no shortage of small cities thinking this is just what they need to put them on the map, but a minuscule economic impact even by the usual not-very-impressive sports standards, it’s a perfect recipe for a costly bidding war. C’mon, Shreveport and Pensacola councilmembers, be like Nashville and read Deadspin before discussing your local sports venue deal!

Meanwhile, here’s an image of the Shreveport arena rendering. Do we think that there’s some kind of sports-pedestrian clip art that renderers use for these? If not, why is that woman in the sunglasses chewing her fingernails?

*Yeah, I know the D-League has a new name thanks to a corporate naming-rights deal, but neither Deadspin nor I play that game.

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Smoothie chain that bought Pelicans naming rights tests positive for steroids, no really

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t even know what to say about this, except that it’s incredibly not a joke:

Before New Orleans Arena naming rights deal, Smoothie King had to pass a banned substance test

To save you the trouble of scrolling through and boggling, as I did, here’s the key section:

Smoothie King CEO Wan Kim, who purchased the company from founder Steve Kuhnau in July 2012, said the NBA wanted to make sure its athletes could eat and drink Smoothie King products and still pass the association’s mandatory drug tests.

“Say we become the official smoothie of the NBA,” Kim said. “If a player consumes one of our products and then fails the drug test, he could go to the NBA and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ All of a sudden it’s the NBA’s fault.”

That sort of makes sense, I guess, but what the hell kind of smoothie contains banned substances? None, it turns out, but Smoothie King does sell certain “nutritional substances” that turn out to contain two steroids: dehydroepiandrosterone and androstenedione. The company says it will now stop selling them.

NOLA.com presents all this as a sort of amusing sidelight to the Pelicans‘ already-plenty-amusing naming-rights deal, but really the big news should be you can fail a drug test by consuming stuff you buy at the local smoothie outlet. This is something we all might want to consider before decrying as evil any athlete who now uses or has ever used (or is rumored to have used) banned substances. Except for A-Rod, anyway, because you just have to hate that guy, right?

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Rangers, Pelicans cut deals to make you call their buildings by ridiculous names

access_time personNeil deMause

The Texas Rangers announced yesterday that they’d sold the naming rights to the Ballpark at Arlington (formerly Ameriquest Field, until Ameriquest broke the economy and went belly-up) for an unknown sum, and that the stadium would henceforth be known as “Globe Life Park in Arlington.” Which is one of the worst names for anything ever — the Fort Worth Star Telegram helpfully noted that “fan reaction to the new name on social media sites ranged from unimpressed to outraged, with comments such as ‘barf,’ ‘lame’ and ‘at least they kept Arlington in the name’” — or at least was, until this a couple of hours later:

The New Orleans Pelicans and Louisiana-based Smoothie King have reached a 10-year agreement to rename the New Orleans Arena as the Smoothie King Center.

On the bright side, at least it’s clear what a Smoothie King sells, unlike a Globe Life. Still, it’s getting increasingly hard to see why anyone should be using these branded names for buildings, since they change about as often as soccer jersey logos. (Thankfully, no one has tried to insist that we call them “Qatar Airways FC Barcelona.” Yet.) It’s easy enough to call the Rangers’ ballpark “the Rangers’ ballpark” (in fact, it’s officially been “The Rangers Ballpark in Arlington” the last few years, not that I’ve noticed), call the New Orleans arena “the New Orleans Arena,” and so on. At least until the teams give us a cut of the product-placement moolah. Hey, New York City’s transit agency does it!

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Pelicans arena subsidies buying wine room, fire fountain for well-heeled fans

access_time personNeil deMause

The freshly remonikered New Orleans Pelicans hold their preseason home opener tonight, which will give Pelican fans their first chance to see the just-completed renovations to the New Orleans Arena:

Now there are 16 new loge boxes in the lower bowl, which are already sold out for the upcoming season, that includes swivel seating and LED monitors. There’s a party perch in the upper bowl where fans can order drinks and mingle at a bar and the Pelicans are considering adding live entertainment that could include a band playing during games.

Most of the new gimmicks, though, are for fans in the expensive seats: a 12,000-square-foot “Chairman’s Club” that will allow 150 courtside season ticket holders to see into the hallway outside the Pelicans’ locker room, plus another club expanded to include a wine room and fire fountain. (Editor’s note: No, I have no idea what a wine room and fire fountain are. And I’m not going to Google them either, as I prefer to stick with my mental image, which looks a lot like this.)

Pelicans owner Tom Benson no doubt hopes to make a bundle on selling high-priced tickets via the lure of these glitzy amenities, but even if he doesn’t, no worries: It’s all being paid for by the state of Louisiana, as agreed to as part of a ten-year lease extension when Benson bought the team last year. Plus he gets $3.65 million a year in tax breaks, in case he can’t boost his profits by his own self. Which is just as you’d expect Benson to negotiate, given that as owner of the Saints he pretty much invented pay-to-play leases.

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