Columnist Dean Juipe: Depleted IBL looks to be dying

Dean Juipe

Friday, Nov. 17, 2000 | 10:31 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.

It's not something the league wanted to advertise.

Yet with its season due to open in three weeks, the International Basketball League finally realized it ought to get its schedule out. And when it did this week, those who took a close look discovered something was missing.

What was once a struggling eight-team league is now a struggling six-team league.

One season under its belt and the IBL has lost a quarter of its teams. Add in the failure of a previously announced new franchise (in Flint, Mich.) to actually materialize and the league has a most unenviable attrition rate.

Remember that column earlier this year that insinuated that maybe, just maybe, the league and its Las Vegas franchise, the Bandits, might just survive? Well, forget it.

A six-team league is hopelessly anemic.

That sound in the distance? It's the tolling of funeral bells.

The IBL is not going to make it.

The irony in Las Vegas is that the Bandits took some steps to get their house in order. A team owner was found; a respected executive was brought in; a recognizable coach was hired. But those advancements are meaningless when seen in the context of the bigger picture, which reveals the IBL is already one step away from requiring life support and maybe only a couple months away from calling it quits.

With the exception of the original National Hockey League, six-team leagues are habitually doomed. And the financially strapped IBL is no NHL.

Six-team leagues bore people to death because even a team's staunchest fan gets tired of seeing only five opponents.

Look at how this affects the Bandits' schedule. Games 3, 4, 5 and 6 this season will all be against New Mexico; the teams will play here, there, here, there, and anyone not comatose by the fourth game will be subject to further medical review.

There are also numerous other instances -- 12 to be precise -- of the Bandits playing at least consecutive games against the same opponent, which is OK in baseball but frowned upon otherwise.

In the IBL's case, familiarity is apt to breed contempt. Its six teams are going to play each other so often the participants will put it on automatic pilot and the number of spectators will decrease proportionately.

It's also a very unbalanced schedule, with the frequency of games against specific opponents determined by geography (which is another way of saying the league is trying to contain its travel costs). Las Vegas, for instance, will play New Mexico a tedium-inducing 15 times, while East Coast-based Trenton shows up on the schedule only seven times.

But here's the good news: The IBL has reduced its schedule from last season's 64 games per team to 52.

How long will it be before it reduces it again, say, to something like however many have been played by the time everyone runs out of money or the willpower to keep the league going? February 1? March 1? Get those office pools going.

The IBL may as well give its notice. The six-team setup is a harbinger of things to come.

It's going to be out of business sometime soon.