With the D-League Almost "Full Strength", should a "real" AA league try to develop?

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Sam Hill
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Post by Sam Hill » Wed Mar 29, 2017 11:47 pm

[quote=""Minor League Mania""]Yeah, my comment was supposed to read teams are often operated and owned by the parent club. While your statement is still true for a lot of clubs, more and more parent clubs are now owning and managing their own teams.

Take the Braves for instance. They own the AAA, AA, and low-A teams.
[/quote]

And have for years, I believe.
This is not the case for every club but is becoming the trend.
Is it? I don't know. I thought Player Development Contracts were still the preponderance of these things.

It appears as though exactly three AAA clubs are owned or partially owned by their major league affiliate. (Gwinnett, Scranton-Wilkes Barre and Oklahoma City.)

Don't know about below AA, would have to check. But if it's becoming the trend, there would be more of those arrangements now than, say, 10 years ago. And I don't know if that's the case or not.
Sam, what is your thoughts on the D-League ever having a sub league like a AA? I seem to recall you were not too optimistic on them even getting to a 1 to 1 affiliation this quickly.
Don't recall that, which is not to say I didn't think that.

I don't know why a AA would be necessary.
Old enough to remember when bashing the ABA was fun.

Minor League Mania
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Post by Minor League Mania » Thu Mar 30, 2017 1:49 pm

@Sam you are correct that the majority are still not owned by the parent club but there is much more than 3 or 4 and more on the way.

The last couple of realignments of teams have put the pressure on teams to either sign a long term deal or just simply own a team. Some teams were really scrambling to find a home. That combined with many teams wanting either their AAA or AA close by.

Here is a list of the teams and deals
http://minorleaguesource.com/pdc.html

33 owned by the parent club
120 not owned by the team
A couple up in the air whats going on.

This also does not include the Arizona Fall League where most of the stadiums are owned by the parent club.

At the bottom of the page look at all the movement coming from 2018-2020!



Back to basketball here are my predictions for the next few season of the NBA & D/G-League:

All teams will have a one to one affiliate by 2020

Draft will move from two rounds to three than eventually to four

G-League will pick up a few more sponsors and maybe player minimum contracts go up a bit more

NBA Teams will have up to 4 players players in the G-League at any given time

NBA teams will start using G-League for rehab a bit more as teams are relocating much closer to the parent clubs

Summer League will be expanded and more organized maybe more of a mini season than a couple tournaments

An extended Summer League could also be added for players not signed to any NBA Contracts. Like undrafted free agents

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