Anaheim Hired Mikan to Find a Franchise : Arena: Hall of Famer works to attract existing basketball or hockey team. He also has been lobbying for NBA expansion.

If you’re trying to get the attention of basketball people, you could do a lot worse than have George Mikan plead your case.

Mr. Basketball, as he became known during his Hall of Fame career, is negotiating to bring either an existing NBA or NHL team franchise to Anaheim, where a 20,000-seat, $85 million sports arena is planned.

And despite the recent expansion by the NBA to 27 teams, Mikan said in an interview Thursday that he also is lobbying for a 28th team to be added to the league to play in Anaheim.

If this seems unlikely, it might be well to remember that the 65-year-old Mikan played an integral role on behalf of the governor of Minnesota in bringing the expansion Timberwolves to Minneapolis in 1988.

Last year, the former Minneapolis Laker center formed Major League Sports Franchises, Inc. to assist those interested in relocating or starting sports franchises. His efforts so far include an unsuccessful bid last fall to purchase the Winnipeg Jets and eventually move them to Anaheim.

“A lot of cities have been contacting us, but our No. 1 priority is Anaheim,” Mikan said. “It’s pretty exciting with that new (proposed) arena.”

Mikan said his inquiries on behalf of an Orange County investors’ group to purchase an existing basketball franchise have found the asking prices--which he declined to reveal--to be very high.

“But that doesn’t seem to deter our people,” Mikan said of the investors, whom he declined to identify. “Our investors prefer not to go public yet. . . .

“This is all preliminary, but we have real big interests from the hockey area.”

Mikan also declined to identify the franchises with whom he is negotiating.

“You know what happens in a town if they start speaking about leaving,” he said. “They lose fan support.”

Mikan said competing efforts to attract NBA or NHL teams to a nearly identical arena proposed to be built in Santa Ana have complicated matters.

“That’s always a problem when there are a lot of suitors,” he said.

An environmental impact report on the Santa Ana arena has yet to be adopted by city officials there. However, the adoption in December of an environmental report for the Anaheim arena has been challenged in court by the Rams and others, stalling construction. Critics claim Anaheim improperly rushed approval of its environmental report because of the competition from Santa Ana.