Almost stripped of any hope

If ever the stars were perfectly aligned for Las Vegas to land a team in one of the four major professional sports, it would seem that time starts Monday.

Major League Baseball pulls into town for its winter meetings, the most significant event the league has held in many years in the city, which was an also-ran in the bidding to land the Montreal Expos in 2004.

Mayor Oscar Goodman is expected to bounce around the meetings extolling Sin City’s virtues, and why wouldn’t he? The city hosted the NBA All-Star Game last year, rumors continue to persist that Vegas could be a permanent home for the Sacramento Kings, and the public’s level of comfort with sports betting appears to increase all the time.

And on top of all of it, talk of a neutral-site World Series is more prevalent than ever after the rain-soaked conclusion to this year’s Fall Classic.

But in Las Vegas, optimism about landing a major professional team isn’t running so high.

The economic collapse has hit Vegas, too, where the little cash floating around is being invested in near-completed projects on the Strip, not a new sports facility. Plans for an arena to be completed by 2010 have fizzled, and some of the town’s central figures are wondering if Las Vegas has missed its window for a while.

“You look back 10 years ago, when growth was really starting to fly and land was at a record low , we needed the foresight then to be able to say, ‘Let’s go now, so we’re ready in 2015,’” said Daren Libonati, the events director at the Thomas and Mack Center, which hosted last year’s NBA All-Star Game. “We should have been doing it in ‘01, ‘02, ‘03. We’re going to miss this curve, and it’s going to be a while before we have a chance at the next one.”

NBA commissioner David Stern had little to say about the possibility of bringing a team to Las Vegas.

“We have no plans for expansion,” he said.

Even the normally loquacious Goodman is mum on the subject. He said, through spokesperson Diana Paul, that he continues to work on plans for an arena. In addition to a lack of cash, Las Vegas must deal with questions about its ability to support a team - questions that have nothing to do with gambling.

There’s still plenty of faith in the market long-term, but as the booming city tries to build its infrastructure in the midst of a financial crisis, it’s unlikely any momentum generated from the winter meetings will translate into results anytime soon.

“Short-term, it’s going to go through some pain,” said Phoenix Suns CEO Jerry Colangelo, whose leadership of USA Basketball has frequently landed him in Las Vegas for pre-Olympic training. “Long-term, the market will come back like I believe the real-estate market will.”

More than gambling

But even when the market does rebound, uncertainty about Las Vegas as a major sports town will remain.

For the metro area’s rapid growth (its population has jumped by an estimated 25 percent since the 2000 U.S. Census to roughly 2 million), it’s still not among the 25 largest markets in the country.

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