Hi. Right now, Vancouver and Montréal are home to NHL and USL-1 franchises, and the latter are pushing for MLS membership in the future (and hopefully they will get it, too!) but I was wondering about the other 'major league' sports in Northern America, such as the NBA - who currently have the Raptors as their sole Canadian representative. Would either Montréal or Vancouver be good places for expansion franchises to be set up? (As with the Raptors, who play in the ACC, perhaps a Montréal team could play in the Canadiens' Bell Centre - and the Grizzlies used to play in GM Place before they were shipped off to Memphis.) Is there enough interest in the NBA in those cities to make teams viable - or did the fate of the Grizzlies rule out any possible future for Vancouver at least as an NBA city? And even if the cities did join, would they be a new benefit to the league in Canada (one could imagine a quick-to-form rivalry between a Montréal team and the Raptors, akin to that between the Habs and Leafs, and which will hopefully spark this year between TFC and the Impact, to give an example) and to the rest of the NBA?
Vancouver is a non-starter. If the Grizzlies had've been averaging 17,000 and Heisley moved the team, then the NBA may have considered it again (sort of like Charlotte), but the Grizzlies had the worst attendance in the League for something like 5 straight years. The low Canadian dollar probably had a heavy affect on operation there at the time, but I still don't see Vancouver every being viable unless a local Billionaire steps up to the plate. Greg Kerfoot seems more interested in Soccer than Basketball, so I don't see him being the party, but there is a Hong Kong ex-pat living in Vancouver that is a billionaire in his own right and is also the son of the Richest man in Hong Kong, so he's a potential owner if he likes basketball. I haven't heard anything about him since he and his dad made a $10B all-cash offer for Husky Energy a few years ago before the Chinese state oil company offered $14B. Montreal is a different story, but also has it's own problems. The fact that Montreal is a large, wealthy city that generally supports it's sports teams pretty well. (Even the Expos drew pretty well when they still had good ownership (the Bronfman's)) The problem with Montreal is the Bell Centre. It is already one of the most booked venues in North America, so there would be a terrific problem trying to free up 41 regular season dates and theoretically 15 playoff dates. The growth of Basketball in Montreal and Quebec (as can be witnessed by the number of Quebec and Montreal born and raised players in Division I basketball this past year) in my opinion makes Montreal a very real possibility in the future if the arena issue wouldn't be too problematic.
Generally, in Canada, if it's not played on ice, it's not going to work. The Grizzlies failed. The Expos failed. Minor-league baseball has failed all over Canada. You watch Canadian sports TV, and there's almost no coverage of college basketball and little coverage of the NBA beyond the Raptors. Canada is obsessed with hockey to the exclusion of other sports. The possible exception is soccer -- because Canada, and Toronto partiularly, has so many immigrants, yuppies and Europhiles, making a perfect demographic for MLS.
One thing to bear in mind is that the Raptors have their own TV channel, run by MLSE - the same guys who run LeafsTV (and, technically, the TFC TV they have up at Toronto FC's website...) so it's easy for them to get themselves on Canadian TV sets. If a Montréal team was in the NBA (and, in theory, shared owership with the Habs - or at least made use of the Bell Centre) they could well end up with their own TV channel, at least in French - or maybe even pushing for the likes of SRC or RDS to sign a broadcast agreement for them. I suppose it is something of an irony if an NBA team did do well in Montréal, as opposed to another city in Canada - since there are plenty of people in that city, and the province it sits in, who like to show how they are distinct enough to avoid generalisations which affect the rest of the country!