Columnist Dean Juipe: Bandits did little more than survive

Dean Juipe

Friday, May 19, 2000 | 9:48 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

As debut seasons go, the best that can be said for the Las Vegas Silver Bandits is that they survived and made it to the finish line. They didn't pull a Baltimore Colts and call in the moving vans for an unexpected late-night exit.

Of course, unlike the Colts in 1984, the Bandits had nowhere to go. Indianapolis wanted Baltimore's NFL franchise and took it in rather clandestine fashion, while few if any cities in the country are clamoring for a team in the International Basketball League.

No offense to the Bandits' 300 fans, but it's a blessing the season is over just to get the team's awful trade-out ads out of the newspaper.

By all accounts the team will be back for a second season, assuming the league itself doesn't fold. And the key to its sustained existence is selling tickets at the corporate level.

Attendance figures were routinely fabricated, yet the empty seats were inescapable and told their own tale. The Bandits, and the IBL, haven't found Las Vegas hospitable and are here only as the result of some misguided belief that sports fans in America can never get enough mediocre basketball.

To review: the Bandits lacked local ownership until late in the season when the league gave the franchise to a couple of old UNLV players; the team's best player made it clear he wouldn't be back for another season here, and, overlooked as it was in the gushing praise he received from the other paper in town, which, not coincidentally, owns a share of the team, allegedly led an insurrection that resulted in head coach Rolland Todd stepping down; after a dismal start the team finished 35-26 and made it to the second round of the playoffs, where, according to the team's play-by-play announcer, poor officiating led to Las Vegas' ouster; and any ex-Rebel over the age of 30 who can still hit a 10-foot jump shot will be offered a contract next season, as if seeing George Ackles struggle to get up and down the floor this past season wasn't disparaging enough.

Also to be considered while looking ahead is the fact the new American Basketball Association plans on having a Las Vegas franchise in action this fall, former UNLV athletic director Brad Rothermel confirmed Thursday.

"We're going forward," he said of a franchise currently owned by a group called Inflight Sports Management, although Rothermel, through his all-encompassing role with the team, is pursuing local ownership for it and hopes to have that resolved within a month.

Rothermel added that while not having seen the Silver Bandits, "it's my sense they will be back." But he also restated the obvious by saying "a team's always in trouble when its fans can be tallied by a head count."

With the ABA team planning to join the IBL team in the Thomas & Mack Center, it's going to get a little congested. Factor in the Rebels and the arena's miscellaneous events and the building's occupancy rate will go up, even if the competitive setting is apt to speed the demise of at least one of its tenants.

Which one survives? Who knows.

But the new team comes in knowing the "established" one had a difficult time of it, finding complacency and, yes, occasional animosity, blocking its path.

It planted a seed, albeit one that could easily be uprooted.