Sports WI: What if Pittsburgh got an NBA team in the 60's?

I was looking up Pittsburgh NBA Expansion today on Google, and it said something about how Pittsburgh was almost admitted to the NBA in 1966 in lieu of Seattle. The reason that they weren't was because Art Rooney, Sr, the Steeler owner, didn't approve of the team. He was a major power broker in Pittsburgh sports, and didn't want an NBA team in Pittsburgh.

What if Rooney would have said yes? Would they still be in Pittsburgh? How successful would the team have been?
 
It's hard to judge how successful a non-existent franchise would have been. You can assume they have much of the same success as Seattle or you can assume it would have been run incompetently and relocated to another city.
 
I'd think it would be long gone by now. Considering the Rockets move, the Buffalo move, the Kansas City move, and full circle the Seattle move. As far as success, I think they'd struggle initially, presuming they're in the same division/conference as the Celtics, which could be one of the reasons they move.
 
Thye had two ABA teams but I think that it just didn't have the fanbase to support one. Plus they had two more later on. The Pythons and Pisces ;)
 
They would move. You've got the:
  • 4-team-city syndrome: cities fight harder to keep pro teams when they have fewer of them. That's why the NBA is willing to give franchises to relatively small cities like Oklahoma City, where they're the only act in town.​
  • the less-popular sport syndrome: Even in the 1970s, when the Pirates had one of the best decades in baseball history, they were usually in the bottom half of the league in attendance. The college basketball teams were, until the last couple years, even less popular. Pittsburgh is a through-and-through Football Town. You can make up some kind of ethnic/racial theory if you like, but it's closer to the truth to just say that WPIAL (the local high school league) did a phenomenal job of building up the high school football program, churning out generation after generation of fans.​
  • the Rust Belt syndrome: the Pirates were on the chopping block from ~1985-~2000, and the Penguins from ~1960-~2008, because they were in a mid-sized, economically declining city, and therefore making little revenue compared to their peers, and not being considered a "sexy" place to have a franchise. Sure, by ~2000 Pittsburgh's economy had perked up again, and now it's very well-off compared to the average US city, but it's also smaller than ever.​
  • the crappy multi-use arena syndrome: they would have to share the Civic Arena with the Pens, because there's no money for another facility, which starts a downward spiral of lower revenues.​
Any one of those syndromes is bad. All four almost has to be fatal.​
 
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