Las Vegas talks a good game from the bench

To hear Mayor Oscar Goodman tell it, this city of extravagance has everything: the best hotels, the best entertainment, the best retail shopping, the most spectacular events.

But the one sign of a major league city that it lacks is, well, a major league team. The mayor wants to fix that -- and he thinks playing host to Sunday’s National Basketball Assn. All-Star game will help his city’s case.

The NBA has never played its showcase game in a city without an NBA team. Goodman, who made his fortune as a defense lawyer representing Las Vegas mobsters, is prone to crowing already about its apparent Vegas success.

“You want tickets, fuhgeddaboutit, it’s sold out,” he says.

He sees local support for the game as evidence that his “great American city” would be a great home for a professional sports team.

But Goodman’s city also is Sin City, a community commonly regarded as a great place to carouse. And the mayor faces a tough sell.

For starters, NBA Commissioner David Stern says Goodman is mistaken if he thinks the league is using the game to test the Las Vegas waters.

The attraction of Las Vegas as an All-Star venue, he said, was the availability of hotel rooms and convention space for all the activities that surround the game.

“But that’s a different analysis from the one that goes on with respect to whether a city can support a franchise,” Stern said.

One problem: gambling

And then there’s gaming. Nevada is the only state in which sports gambling is legal.

As the NBA commissioner put it in an interview with The Times: “If they’ll take the NBA off the board” -- that is, eliminate betting on league games -- “we could consider Las Vegas for an NBA franchise.”

Many gambling and sports experts say Stern’s demand is anachronistic when 48 of the 50 states have legalized gambling in some form.

“There’s a little disconnect between the people in the leagues and the reality of what gambling is in the United States,” says David Schwartz, a gaming industry expert at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. “Gambling today is strictly regulated.”

That reassurance doesn’t seem to impress pro league officials, many of whom fear even the public perception that gamblers might fix a game to fill their own pockets. The nationwide prevalence of legalized gambling, moreover, has not fully dispelled its unsavory aura.

As for the NBA, Stern says, it is concerned about gambling more as a distraction than as a moral issue or a threat to the game’s integrity. He says he wants customers focused on what’s happening on the basketball courts, not among oddsmakers.

“Historically, there’s a notion that most of our fans are basketball fans,” he says, “not point-spread fans.”

The quest to bring a top sports franchise to town dates back years. With a population of 1.7 million, the Las Vegas metropolitan area is equal to or larger than many communities that have major league football, basketball, hockey and baseball teams.

Its population has more than doubled since 1990, but the prominence of gambling has been an enduring obstacle to major league interest.

More recently, Goodman has made landing a sports franchise a cornerstone of mayoral policy. In a January “state of the city” speech, Goodman pledged: “This is going to be the year that we are going to be involved with serious discussions about having a professional sports team locate in Las Vegas.”

Though sounding as if a specific deal might be lurking, he has refused to identify what sport or league it might be.

Since becoming mayor in 1999, he has tried various approaches to interest the big leagues. For example, he offered the National Football League a stadium to serve as a permanent venue for Monday and Thursday night games. “It would be a neutral site,” he says with a grin. “Sort of like how it was for the mob -- you know, Las Vegas was a neutral city.”

The mayor contends that 30 million annual visitors to the region should provide a solid source of attendance for a major league team. Others doubt that those numbers matter.

Not if, but when

“The fan base has to be the locals,” says Rossi Ralenkotter, chief executive of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and a member of a regional task force that recommended four sites for a publicly funded sports arena last year.

With a local population likely to reach 3 million within 10 years, the arrival of a major league team is “not a matter of if, but when,” Ralenkotter said. “One day a league will make a business decision that we’re big enough to support a franchise.”

Whether Las Vegas taxpayers would be willing to finance a stadium is unclear. And the casinos, which are accustomed to building arenas and showrooms with their own money, might well object to construction of a publicly subsidized entertainment venue.

“It makes no sense to us to take the tax dollars we’re creating and build another competitor down the street,” says Alan Feldman, a spokesman for MGM Mirage, a leading casino operator in Las Vegas.

By some accounts, the best fit for Las Vegas among the major sports leagues would be the NBA or the National Hockey League. Of the NBA’s 30 teams, seven play in metropolitan areas with populations as small or smaller than Las Vegas.

The NHL also plays in several mid- or small-market communities, and seems more tolerant of Nevada’s leading industry. “I don’t put Las Vegas in any different category from any other potential city,” says Bill Daly, the NHL’s deputy commissioner.

Las Vegas is frequently mentioned, along with Kansas City and Oklahoma City, as a possible destination for the NHL Pittsburgh Penguins, so far frustrated in efforts to obtain public financing for a new arena. Talks are underway involving Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania political leaders and the team’s owners, including Southern California billionaire Ron Burkle.

As for Major League Baseball, the Vegas metropolitan area would rank among the smallest in the game, about equal with Milwaukee, Cincinnati and Kansas City -- small-market teams that have struggled lately under baseball’s limited revenue-sharing rules. The Nevada desert’s midsummer heat also would require a covered stadium similar to that of the Arizona Diamondbacks, driving up the cost of a baseball franchise.

The NFL’s revenue-sharing formula, funded by lavish national television contracts, would relieve a Las Vegas football franchise of small-market blues. Its population is larger than at least five NFL cities -- Buffalo, New Orleans, Nashville, Green Bay and Super Bowl champion Indianapolis. With only eight regular-season home games, an NFL team would be almost certain to sell out its stadium luxury boxes to local casinos seeking another blandishment to offer to high rollers.

NFL? Not likely to make it

But the NFL is openly averse to any association with gambling, legal or otherwise. At a news conference in Miami during Super Bowl week, Commissioner Roger Goodell reiterated the league’s intention to keep “a very strong line between the NFL and sports gambling.”

“I don’t think it’s in the best interests of the NFL to have any association with sports betting,” he said. A league spokesman said later that placing a team in Las Vegas might look like an “implicit endorsement of gambling.”

Goodman’s relations with the NFL, in any case, are at rock bottom. In 2003, the league vetoed a Super Bowl TV commercial purchase by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Goodman, then the agency’s chairman, threatened to sue.

Goodman and the league clashed again when several casinos were barred from airing the Super Bowl on large-screen televisions in a dispute over broadcast rights.

Nevertheless, Goodman this year approached San Diego Chargers owner Dean Spanos, who is unhappy with the condition of 40-year-old Qualcomm Stadium. The team fended off the overture, stating that it plans to investigate a move elsewhere in San Diego County before looking further afield.

Las Vegas is no stranger to team sports. The Las Vegas 51s, the Dodgers’ triple-A farm team, plays in Cashman Field just north of downtown. Hockey’s Wranglers, an affiliate of the NHL Calgary Flames, attracts about 5,100 fans a game to an arena attached to the Orleans Casino. And the NBA’s Utah Jazz played a handful of home games in Las Vegas in the mid-1980s.

At the collegiate level, the UNLV Rebels are fixtures on the local scene in basketball, football and other sports.

None of this indicates how well a big league team might fare in Las Vegas. After an encouraging start, attendance at Jazz games in Las Vegas fell below the team’s average in Salt Lake City.

UNLV basketball attendance peaked at an average 18,658 in 1991, the year after the team’s NCAA championship and shortly before the departure of its popular but controversial coach, Jerry Tarkanian. Since then, attendance has fallen to between 10,000 and 12,000 a game.

Tough competition

One problem may be the surfeit of entertainment options in town.

“Imagine coming to a city that has 20-40 shows a night, and thousands of hotel rooms, and saying, ‘We have something that would really spur development and media attention,’ ” MGM Mirage’s Feldman says. “You’re going to get laughed out of the room.”

Still, the chief obstacle to a major league franchise is sports gambling.

Nevada sports books account for a mere 1% to 1.3% of statewide gambling profits, but that doesn’t mean the casinos are eager to give them up. They regard their sports books as important marketing tools -- attracting customers who spend hours at the more profitable table games and slot machines after placing their sports bets.

Casinos occasionally have agreed to limit certain wagering in special situations, such as when investments in teams and casinos are held by the same owners. The Palms, a Las Vegas casino-hotel owned and operated by the Maloof family, owners of the NBA Sacramento Kings, accepts no bets on NBA games as part of an agreement with the league. Similarly, Caesars Palace stopped taking bets on NBA and NHL games when its corporate parent, ITT Corp., acquired the NBA New York Knicks and the NHL New York Rangers in the 1990s. (The casino and teams are no longer commonly owned.)

A state-imposed ban on wagering on Nevada’s two state universities, UNLV and Nevada Reno, existed for years, until Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was pushing for federal prohibition against betting on all intercollegiate sports, asked if the ban wasn’t inconsistent with the casinos’ insistence that legal gambling posed no threat to college sports. Agreeing with that logic, Nevada regulators lifted the prohibition in 2001.

The NBA stipulated that betting be banned on the All-Star game this year as a condition for holding it in Las Vegas. After the city’s major casinos signed on to a voluntary ban, gaming regulators imposed the restriction statewide to prevent smaller sports books from stepping in.

Although Vegas casinos might be willing to stop taking bets on a local franchise, it’s unlikely that they would take kindly to an attempt to ban all betting on a local team’s league, especially if it were the NBA, which generates 10% to 15% of all sports-book action.

“There’s [probably] more wagering going on inside the Staples Center when the Lakers play than in the entire state of Nevada,” Feldman says. “To say you can have a franchise in New York or L.A., where illegal betting is rampant, and say we have to stop is absurd.”

“The avenue I’d like to pursue is coexistence,” says Jay Kornegay, director of the sports book at the Las Vegas Hilton. “We’re so highly regulated and policed, there’s no reason why we should not take bets if Las Vegas landed a franchise.”

Some promoters of the major league idea fear that their efforts will stalemate over the gambling issue.

“I don’t see a solution if the NBA is going to be steadfast” against wagering on its games, says Joe Maloof, who holds a family interest in the Palms and operates the Sacramento Kings with his brother Gavin. “I don’t think the casinos would want to do that, and I don’t think it’s necessary. We have the cleanest gambling in the world.”

michael.hiltzik@latimes.com

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Small towns, big leagues

The Las Vegas area, which was estimated to have 1,710,550 residents in 2005, is larger than many U.S. communities with one or more big league sports

*--* City Population Franchise(s) Columbus, Ohio 1,708,551 Blue Jackets (NHL) Indianapolis 1,640,591 Colts (NFL), Pacers (NBA) Charlotte, N.C. 1,521,278 Carolina Panthers (NFL), Bobcats (NBA) Milwaukee 1,512,855 Brewers (MLB), Bucks (NBA) Nashville 1,422,544 Tennessee Titans (NFL), Predators (NHL) New Orleans 1,319,367 Saints (NFL), Hornets (NBA) Memphis 1,260,905 Grizzlies (NBA) Jacksonville, Fla. 1,240,371 Jaguars (NFL) Buffalo, N.Y. 1,147,711 Jaguars (NFL) Salt Lake City 1,034,484 Jazz (NBA) Raleigh, N.C. 949,681 Carolina Hurricanes (NHL) Green Bay, Wis. 297,493 Packers (NFL)

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Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB