Columnist Dean Juipe: Bandits fit for popular quiz show

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2001 | 11:27 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.

With the popular and long-running TV game show Jeopardy having been in town for some taping in recent days, let's get into the spirit and see how you would fare as a contestant.

You know how the game goes: They give you the answer and you supply the question.

OK? Here goes.

The answer is: Two-thirds.

And here's the question you would need to recite in order to get credit for the proper response: "What percentage of the fans who attended the Bishop Gorman vs. Durango high school basketball game Monday night at the Thomas & Mack Center left before the professional game between the Las Vegas Bandits and Trenton Shooting Stars?"

You almost had to see it to believe it, but two-thirds of the roughly 3,000 spectators that watched Gorman's fantastic team defeat Durango by a score of 85-65 were long gone by the time the International Basketball League's Bandits and Stars tipped off some 30 minutes later.

Even though a single admission fee entitled customers to see two games for the price of one, the vast majority -- maybe even three-quarters, to be honest -- hit the road rather than stay and see the Bandits eventually defeat the Stars by a 94-92 count.

The lack of interest in the Bandits comes as no surprise, of course. The announced attendance for the team's previous home game -- against league-leading St. Louis -- was a slightly padded 787 and the average for the season is a mere, and routinely embellished, 1,694.

The shame of it is, the team isn't half bad and the Bandits' staff is professional and courteous.

But the reality of it is, it just doesn't look like they're going to make it.

This is consecutive seasons of poor attendance and this time the Las Vegas franchise is spending a fortune on advertising. It is also doing everything it can to attract fans and has a promotion of some sort every night; Monday it was the high school game and Wednesday, for instance, it will be Elvis Night.

But people just don't care.

How long this team and this league can survive is speculative, yet sooner has a sizable lead over later in a contest that could be entitled "When will they simply give up?"

Two IBL franchises capitulated before the season and two of the six current teams are drawing smaller crowds than the Bandits. Add in the announced and then rescinded merger with a rival league, the ABA, that came and went just before the season opened and you could almost say nothing has gone right for the IBL and its dependents.

Richmond, with an average attendance of 572, and Trenton, averaging 1,315, are lagging behind Las Vegas in attendance and none of these teams is apt to have the financial wherewithal to keep pressing into a 2001-02 season. Only Cincinnati, with an average of 3,745, gets a passable grade in the public acceptance department.

Lest we forget, the Thomas & Mack is an expensive place to play and the Bandits can't possibly be anywhere but deep in the red. They curtain off the upper deck so the near-vacant arena doesn't look so empty, but it is empty and the bottom line shows no sign of improvement despite an admirable and concerted effort.

The franchise, it's plain to see, is in Jeopardy.