Time to Sell Kingdom for Lion’s Share of NBA

N ews item: The NBA Minnesota Timberwolves announce they are moving to New Orleans, pending league approval, and will begin play there in the 1994-95 season.

So what’s New Orleans got that Anaheim doesn’t?

OK, besides Commander’s Palace . . . and Brennan’s . . . and Antoine’s . . . and the barbecued shrimp at Pascal’s Manale . . . and the jambalaya at Mother’s . . . and the beignets at Cafe Du Monde . . . and the hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s . . . and Bryan Lee at the Old Absinthe House Bar . . . and Sunday steamboat rides on the Mississippi . . . and Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras . . . and Bourbon Street before and after Mardi Gras . . . and a basketball tradition that dates back from Shaquille O’Neal to Chris Jackson to Pete Maravich to Bob Pettit?

Besides that, I mean?

How about a punch-drunk sports group called Top Rank of Louisiana--headed by boxing promoter Bob Arum--that considers it darn fine business to fork over $152.5 million for the second-worst team in professional basketball, a team that has averaged 21 victories in the five seasons since it was originally purchased for $32.5 million?

Well, Anaheim had the muscle to go toe to toe with New Orleans on that one. Anaheim had Disney, the heaviest hitter on the lot.

Now Disney would never spend $152.5 million on a basketball team. Never in a thousand years. The Seven Dwarfs worked for scale; 12 tall guys who can’t make a layup are suddenly going to dynamite the bank vault and line the gutters of Main Street with pictures of dead presidents?

Sorry, that just isn’t Disney’s idea of high concept.

Too bad, though, because Disney is missing out on the marketing bonanza of the century. You saw what the cross-promotion of a bad hockey movie and a better-than-advertised real-life hockey team did for the Disney coffers during the last fiscal year. It created the First Church of the Mighty Duck. All bow now before the souvenir stand at your neighborhood hockey arena--and that’ll be $24.95, thank you.

With the T-Wolves, Disney had the chance to double that again. Buy the team, change the name, tie it in with this summer’s sure-fire animated box-office blockbuster, leave the kiddies weak in the knees, tugging at Daddy’s pant leg.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . the Lion Kings of Anaheim.

Can’t you just picture it?

Lion King pump-up, flashing-red-light-in-the-heel, high-top basketball sneakers.

Lion King pint-sized backboard and hoop.

(Fur-tone Nerf basketball sold separately.)

Cute stuffed lion-cub dolls in even cuter tiny basketball jerseys and headbands.

James Earl Jones narrating the 1994-95 Lion King highlight video.

Isiah Rider and Elton John on CD, doing the “Lion King Rap.”

And, the once-in-a-lifetime season-ticket promotional come-on:

“Christian and the Lion Kings--They’re On The Same Side, Now.”

In the trailer now being shown for “The Lion King,” a wise old baboon instructs the lion who would be king to look for the image of his dead father’s face, which he finds reflecting on the surface of a pond.

A pond.

The Pond.

How many more mallet blows to the temple is it going to take?

Is this a marriage made in mass-marketing heaven or what?

And when you get right down to it, what’s $152.5 million to Michael Eisner, anyway? Last year, the Disney CEO’s salary was $203 million. Eisner could buy the T-Wolves and pay Paul Kariya whatever he wants and stash the remaining $48 million in a pickle jar above the refrigerator. Save it for a few thousand rainy days.

As the deal stands today, the Minnesota T-Wolves are headed for New Orleans, which has nothing to offer except great food, great music, the Superdome and a half-million basketball-looped natives who have been drowning their sorrows over the loss of the Jazz for so long that it has become a round-the-clock lifestyle.

Already, the new nicknames for New Orleans’ new basketball team are pouring in. Nominees include the Sinners (giving the city, yes, the Saints and the Sinners); the Rhythm (lending itself to such future headlines as, “Rhythm Method Fails Again”); the Blues; the Spice; the Crawfish, and the current frontrunner, the Cajuns.

Is Anaheim simply going to sit on the sidelines and chew on its seven measly Clipper games per season, watching the New Orleans Cajuns tear up the French Quarter? These professional basketball franchises don’t pop free every day. The most recent NBA franchise shift happened 10 years ago, when the Kings abandoned Kansas City for Sacramento. Expansion just took care of Toronto and Vancouver.

This could be Anaheim’s last chance for a full-time NBA tenant this century--and it’s about to float down the river.

At the moment, there isn’t much time, and there isn’t much hope, but there is this: The league still must approve the T-Wolves’ move to New Orleans. Consumer groups in Minnesota are organizing, lobbying for the sale to be voided. Should that happen, Anaheim has to be poised to pounce.

So get Michael Eisner on the horn.

Tell him to think big.

Tell him to think Mighty Ducks and Lion Kings. Tell him to imagine The Pond as his very own glass menagerie.

Today it’s Anaheim.

Tomorrow it could be Jungleland.