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Vancouver is a city that didn't care about the NBA when they had a team. They couldn't even sellout the last home game in franchise history.
ed to fall off after the lookout for good reason. Over the three previous seasons Vancouver had shown zero improvement, season 4 was no different. The team was garbage and was plagued by horrible managerial decisions. It was hard to put a good twist on our franchise player Bryant Reeves going home every summer and gaining 30 pounds from his mom's cooking. Vancouverites just needed some hope and some time to recover from the lookout. We were not given this though and as soon as Orcabay started losing money they decided they needed to sell going into the 99-00 season.
As soon as they announced they were selling there were strong rumours of relocation. A St. Louis business man (can't place the name) who I believe had ties to Walmart wanted to buy the team so he could move it to St. Louis. After one season of bad support it looked imminent the team would move. Support completely fell off because no one felt like supporting a horrible team that would not even be there in a season. David Stern did prevent the sale but the Grizzlies still had no owner and there was no real proof they would be staying in Vancouver. That's why when Heisley finally purchased the team attendance initially skyrocketed. It appeared we hade an owner that wanted to keep the team in Vancouver.
For the first couple months we were doing a great job of supporting the team. Considering up to that point we had one 20 win season out of five our attendance was impressive. Then Heisley started to complain that no one wanted to sponsor the team, which was @#%$. It became obvious what Heisley's intentions always were and attendance plummeted yet again. We were not going to take it up the @#%$ from this piece of @#%$. I guess the Grizzlies' franchise record 23 wins that season did not do enough to entice people to give their money away to a @#%$ liar.
Bottom line the Grizzlies were a bad team and Vancouver had enough of being screwed around.