Indianapolis In Mls

Will We Ever See Another Merger?

Friday marked the 35th anniversary of the NBA-ABA Merger*. (You can celebrate by watching the 1976 ABA Slam Dunk Contest here .) The American Basketball Association was one of three major professional sports leagues to merge with its more established rival between 1970 and 1979.

The NFL-AFL merger became official in 1970, and the AFL’s ten teams joined the NFL’s American Football Conference. Then, an agreement between the National Hockey League and the World Hockey Association in 1979 sent the WHA’s Edmonton Oilers, Quebec Nordiques (now the Colorado Avalanche), Winnipeg Jets (now the Phoenix Coyotes), and New England Whalers (later the Hartford Whalers and now the Carolina Hurricanes) to the NHL. (Alas, the Indianapolis Racers, who folded one year before the merger, were lost to history.)

These plucky start-up leagues had a lasting, and generally positive, impact on their sports. Without the AFL, ABA, and WHA, we might not have the Super Bowl, the three-point line, or sudden-death overtime in hockey. But could one of these leagues exist today? Could a new league emerge in one of the major professional sports that could compete for top-level talent with the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, or even MLS? Will we ever see another merger?

Probably not. For two reasons.

When the AFL began play in 1960, five of its original 8 franchises were located in cities without NFL teams. In 1962 the Dallas Texans moved to Kansas City to become the Chiefs, and in 1967 the Los Angeles Chargers moved to San Diego. The league added teams in Miami (1966) and Cincinnati (1968). By the time the AFL merged with the NFL, only the New York Jets were in a city that already had a team. The merger gave the NFL nine new markets, including major metro areas such as Boston, Houston, and Denver.

The same is true of the ABA. With the exceptions of mega markets such as New York-New Jersey, southern California, D.C.–Baltimore, and the Bay Area, the ABA’s teams were in cities without an NBA presence. Indianapolis, Denver, and San Antonio were new markets for the NBA in 1976. Other prominent ABA markets (such as Dallas, Salt Lake City, and Miami) would get NBA teams in subsequent expansions and relocations.

The WHA placed teams in major Canadian cities without NHL squads, such as Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Calgary. The league also had a Sun Belt strategy two decades before Gary Bettman got the idea, with teams in Houston, Phoenix, and Birmingham. In the years following the merger with WHA, the NHL would add teams in Canada (Calgary, by relocation, and Ottawa) and the American South.

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