In a press release, the Magic say they have a “major announcement” scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. League sources tell Khobi Price of The Orlando Sentinel (subscriber link) that the Magic will announce they are relocating and rebranding their G League affiliate.
The club’s G League affiliate currently plays at the RP Funding Center in Lakeland, Florida, which is roughly 55 miles from the Amway Center in downtown Orlando.
The problem is I-4 — the interstate highway between Lakeland and Orlando (it technically runs from Tampa to outside of Daytona Beach) — is frequently heavily congested with traffic and/or construction, making the travel tedious and about an hour-and-a-half.
According to Price, Orlando will be relocating its NBAGL affiliate to Kissimmee, specifically Osceola Heritage Park, where the team will play at the Silver Spurs Arena starting in November. That’s much closer to the Amway Center — about 24 miles or 31 minutes, per Google maps.
Orlando’s G League team will now be known as the Osceola Magic.
You really had me going there at “Magic to Relocate”
Yea I thought they were moving I was about ot go crazy
An 1.5 hours to go 55 miles…And your complaining? That’s pretty whimpy.
Maybe it sounds insignificant, and I’m not from Florida so I wouldn’t know as well as others. But there’s a lot more to it.
If you’re shorthanded and you need to bump up one of your two-way players, you’d want to make sure they get to you in time. And I’d imagine attendance at the new arena might be better if more people are able to make it and don’t have to sit through traffic to get there. Especially if they’re coming from work.
@Michael Umm…Teams are usually run a bit better than that. They know more than 2 hours in advance of a game if they needed to bring up a player. That would be pretty incompetent management…It shouldn’t that hard for fans to get to a game. The Warriors sucked and still sold out games in Oakland. The freeway access to the Coliseum is a major trucking route; it feeds the Port of Oakland.
This is an overly defensive response to just trying to explain the team’s point of view lol
A team isn’t making the decision to call up a player two hours before game time, especially if it takes two hours to get there. More likely, they’d make the call earlier in the day and want the player to be there for shootaround, etc. And you can’t really compare an NBA team’s attendance to a G League team’s attendance because people are usually willing to go to much greater lengths for an NBA game. For a G League game, accessibility to the arena can absolutely be the difference between fans going and not going.
Umm…I didn’t say anything about a G League Team’s attendance. If you are fans of a team, an 1.5 hours is not that long to go see a team. In most sports, people make whole days of it.
@lil Look at NBA teams and the locations of their G League affiliates. Most are more than 50 miles away. Some are even in different states.
Agree to disagree
I don’t follow the G league but I do follow the Cavs. Their G league team plays about 5 minutes away and it’s not just about traffic for fans and players being called up. An NBA operation is a multi million dollar operation with dozens of employees of every kind imaginable. Like all big businesses, they look for economies of scale and synergy. The closer they are, the more often they can share training facilities, coaching personnel,technology. Just having the guys closer together means that when they do call up a G league guy, he’s not entering another world, he’s just walking next door, where he’s been dozens of times before.
Distance shouldn’t be an issue for a well run organization. Just look at MLB. The NBA puts bare minimum effort into developing players. MLB teams have Minor League facilities all over the country, and the Dominican Republic. It works out quite well for them.
Yeah baseball is doing great these days lol