NEW ORLEANS – Six years later, no one remembers who came up with the idea that saved the NBA in New Orleans.

All they recall is that the plan was brilliant. Imaginative. Out of the box. Who would have guessed the solution for keeping the Hornets (now Pelicans) in a place that wasn’t sure it wanted them would be to host what amounted to basketball Tupperware parties? One hundred of them in fact, held in living rooms where the product sold was not storage containers but season tickets.

“It was a very New Orleans thing to do,” Matt Biggers, a former team vice president told The Vertical.

And yet it worked.

This weekend the city that loves any party is hosting the NBA All-Star Game for the second time in four years. While this week’s event is a replacement for the original host, Charlotte, the fact there are any All-Star Games in New Orleans these days is something of a miracle, because in the summer of 2011 basketball was all but dead here. Were it not for a clever idea, hatched in desperation, basketball might long be gone by now.

Of all the NBA’s comeback stories in recent years, New Orleans might be the best.

To understand this you have to realize how bad things were in June 2011. The Hornets had lost so much money since their 2007 return from a two-season post-Hurricane Katrina exile that the NBA had bought the team from owner George Shinn six months before. Commissioner David Stern hated the idea of his league abandoning the broken city and desperately wanted the Hornets to stay, but the league’s owners were frustrated with New Orleans. They wondered if basketball could really work there.

Prospective owners from other cities were circling, looking to snatch away the Hornets. The NBA was on the verge of a lockout. The league didn’t want to run the team long. They needed a local buyer and yet none seemed willing. Interest in the Hornets was low. Local fans figured the NBA was as good as gone. Something had to change fast or even Stern wouldn’t be able to keep the Hornets there.

“I was operating under the assumption that if the plan didn’t work the team would move,” Jac Sperling, the sports executive recruited by the NBA to run the Hornets, told The Vertical. “Everyone on our staff thought that, too.”

New Orleans has never been the perfect professional sports city. It is not a sprawling metropolis with millions of people and huge companies eager to buy luxury suites – things successful sports markets have in abundance. There were reasons the Hornets lost money. And while Sperling and then-team president Hugh Weber could renegotiate an arena lease and cut a better cable television deal, they faced a bigger problem.

The Hornets had sold just 6,300 season tickets the season before, a number well below the 10,000 that is considered the industry standard for franchise stability. Sperling and Weber quickly realized that after negotiating a new lease and cutting a better television deal, they had to find a way to sell 3,700 more season tickets. If they could do that they were sure the league would see New Orleans was viable and perhaps it could find a local owner.

Because of one brilliant idea, New Orleans was in position to host the All-Star Game for the second time in four years. (Getty Images) More

“New Orleans is lacking Fortune 500 companies, but it does have pride,” Weber said. “If you can tap into that tapestry of what it means to be local then you have something.”

Weber, who had overseen the team’s move to Oklahoma City and back, always believed the team had a story to tell. New Orleans, he had come to realize, was a passionate place, a resilient place, a city like none he had experienced. He will never forget the elderly woman who approached him at one of the handful of games the Hornets came back to New Orleans to play during the Oklahoma seasons. She had lost her home in Katrina and spent the previous year sleeping in her car and yet she kept her Hornets tickets.

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