For Them, It’s Domain Event

The Anaheim Grizzlies might never materialize, but that hasn’t stopped an Anaheim ticket brokerage from reserving the Internet domain name, anaheimgrizzliestickets.com, and a Mississippi college student from reserving the name anaheimgrizzlies.com.

Michael Heisley, owner of the Vancouver Grizzlies, faces a March 26 deadline to tell the NBA where he would like his team to play next season, with Anaheim one of five cities under consideration.

If the Grizzlies move to the Arrowhead Pond, Jeff Jenkins would love to sell you a couple of tickets. The owner of Premium Tickets in Anaheim, registered the name anaheimgrizzliestickets.com so fans clicking onto that site could be linked to his ticket brokerage rather than to the official team site. Jenkins reserved the name Feb. 13, one day after Pond executives declared their intention to pursue the Grizzlies.

“I just took a shot, just in case,” said Jenkins, who rued missing out on https://lakerstickets.com, registered to an Arizona company. “I was too late for that. I would have loved to have that one.”

Jenkins said he would not sell his name to the Grizzlies. Brad Coburn, who registered anaheimgrizzlies.com, isn’t so sure.

Coburn, an economics major at the University of Southern Mississippi and a native of New Orleans, first registered the name neworleansgrizzlies.com so he could start a fan site for his potential hometown team. After reading media reports about other possible new homes for the Grizzlies, Coburn registered eight more names, including anaheimgrizzlies.com, lasvegasgrizzlies.com and louisvillegrizzlies.com. And he did it all within hours of the Feb. 12 announcement that the NBA had granted Heisley permission to look for a new home.

It is not uncommon for so-called “cyber-squatters” to register domain names--Coburn registered his for $15 apiece--with the hope of selling them for thousands of dollars. Sometimes companies pay; sometimes they don’t. When the Angels started their Web site and https://angels.com already was taken, Disney simply used https://angelsbaseball.com.

Coburn said he plans to offer free use of neworleansgrizzlies.com to an economic development group working to lure the Grizzlies to New Orleans. He is interested in keeping the domain names and developing a fan site wherever the Grizzlies land.

“I’m not really interested in selling them,” he said. “If somebody offered me a lot of money, I’d say sure. But I really don’t think that’s going to happen.”