Columnist Dean Juipe: No surprise as Bandits go under

Dean Juipe

Friday, March 16, 2001 | 10:27 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.

We really didn't take any satisfaction in seeing the Las Vegas Bandits fold, as they did this week, despite predicting just that virtually since the team's inception.

As forecasts go, it wasn't all that difficult.

The Bandits, as part of the International Basketball League, were trapped in an expensive rental agreement with the Thomas & Mack Center and -- more to the point -- were of little interest to the vast majority of Las Vegans.

To prosper, the Bandits needed to fill a void. But there was no void; no one in the city had been clamoring for a minor-league basketball team to occupy their time.

As a result, a figurative bull's- eye was painted over the team's logo and it was only a matter of time before the inevitable became reality.

The end came Tuesday, less than two years after someone named Thaxter Trafton passed through town and said the league -- his league -- and the Bandits would be unequivocal successes.

But no one with money involved in the project took into account the basic facts of the matter, which are these: Some 600,000 people may have moved into Southern Nevada in the past decade, yet almost none of them have any rooting allegiance to sports teams based in Las Vegas; and, even if they enjoy sports and might take in an occasional game, they're far more apt to spend their entertainment dollars playing video poker.

As easy as that is to understand, it has escaped the attention of one group after another that has been intent on forcing a minor-league franchise on the community.

(Someday, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, the XFL's Outlaws will call it quits, too, the league having failed in its quest to provide NBC with quality Saturday night programming. But that's another story.)

The Bandits may have had good intentions and some very likable people on their administrative staff, yet there was no way they were ever going to attract the 5,000 or so fans they would need every night to survive. The quality of play in the IBL isn't bad -- but it isn't bad down at Sunset Park, either.

Worse for the league as a whole, it never was able to meet the minimum requirement of getting its standings on the major wire services on a daily basis, and the result is the inescapable belief that no one should take its product seriously. No standings; no roundups; no interest.

The league as a whole should have succumbed last summer before incurring this season's additional losses. But instead of recognizing the obvious, it plugged on -- minus two teams that withdrew in the offseason -- as if it were banking on gaining some stature at the expense of two other struggling leagues. And while the CBA did capitulate (last month) and the ABA is devastatingly obscure, their troubles were of no benefit to the IBL.

Neither was the comical idea of adding CBA teams to the IBL in midstream, as was done this season and which led to some teams in the league being 18-15 and some teams being 3-3.

It's as if everyone involved with the Bandits (and the league) had no better game plan than to cross their fingers and hope for the best.

Now that the end is here, it's more clear than ever that the mistake they made was in even getting started.