Promotion/relegation in North American Sports?

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Should one or more major sports in North America be reorganized into a promotion/relegation system?

This was brought up in a radio discussion that I heard a few weeks ago regarding the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats, who finished the recent regular season with a league-worst EVER record of 7-59.

Instead of being rewarded for their beyond pathetic play giving them the most slips in the hat for the college player draft lottery, the moderator argued, they should be treated like crappy teams in most of the rest of the World and be relegated to the next lower level professional league with that league's best team then being promoted to the NBA to replace them.

Any thoughts?

Could this work in other major sports in North America (ie, baseball, hockey, MLS, NCAA, high schools, etc)?

Mike

It might work, though not sure about high school sports. It would have to be agreed upon by the majority of owners, and who knows if it would pass.

I like the way it works in the Premier league is soccer, and I think that you could do it in baseball, but in American football there is not a lower league to move down to or move up from. Part of the reason teams in the USA might be opposed is that so much money is put in to the stadiums of the professional teams, and you would not want to do that if there was the chance you might not be the top tier the next year.

I don't think this would work for professional sports. Most major professional sports teams are located in the biggest cities where they can sell the most tickets whereas minor league or developmental teams tend to be located in smaller cities and have smaller stadiums. Obviously there are exceptions but in general it would defeat the purpose, at least financially. However, I could see this working for college sports, where for example the best Division II teams move up to Division I or the worst FBS football teams move down to FCS. With all the conference realignment these days, conferences don't seem to mean much anymore so the teams could just get put into new conferences based on geographical location. However, I believe the way the NCAA currently operates is that if a school wants to be Division I, it must either have just one Division I sport, or all of its sports must be Division I. That seems like a strange rule that could easily be changed to me.

Although it's not the same as relegation, high schools sometimes will try to move down a division in a particular sport if they just aren't competitive---I think it happens more when they are in a classification with schools that are much larger. Some states have weird methods of determining who is in which division and it can vary depending on the sport. I believe my high school recently managed to do this---several years back the state expanded the levels of division in football and moved everyone up a level as a result. I think my school also had previous years where they had more students than they do now, so it's taken them a long time to finally get back to their old classification.
They had several years there where they only won maybe one or two games a season because they were having to compete with much larger schools, but they were considered at the same level when it came to football.

It would be interesting to see in college football, but would never work...the main thing people hope for there is some kind of viable playoff system.

Thinking about it more, I think it could never work on the professional level in the US, just because there is a huge talent gap between minor league teams and major league teams. Even the worst pro team is exponentially better than the best minor league [or college] team, for various reasons the main one probably being that only a select few of the minor league players are good enough to play at the highest level.