Good Seats Still Available

We point our GPS coordinates this week to the endearingly enigmatic city of New Orleans, for an overdue look into the Big Easy’s chaotic pro sports franchise history – with Historic New Orleans Collection writer (and recovering sports scribe) Nick Weldon (“A Streetcar Named Basketball”). Although a mainstay of baseball’s minor and Negro leagues since the dawn of the sport’s professional era in the late 1800s (including Louis Armstrong’s well-outfitted, attention-grabbing, but largely lamentable 1931 barnstorming “Secret Nine” club), Louisiana’s largest city has been considered more of a football town over the last half-century – especially after the arrival of the NFL Saints in 1967. But it’s the pursuit (and occasional success) of pro basketball that has captured the fancy of local sports entrepreneurs most in the intervening decades – providing the Crescent City with some of its most fascinating, yet oft-forgotten sporting exploits: The American Basketball Association’s Buccaneers (1967-70) – a charter mem