Anaheim Team’s Owner Is Close to Deal With Pond

Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets are not coming to the Arrowhead Pond, but Schea Cotton and the Anaheim Roadrunners might be.

The owner of the Roadrunners, Al Howell, said Wednesday he is close to signing a lease agreement for his team to play at the Pond. The minor league basketball team plans to play in ABA 2000, a proposed revival of the American Basketball Assn. that hopes to tip off in November.

The Roadrunners have leased office space in Orange and entered a team in the Summer Pro League at Long Beach State, although the players on that team will not necessarily play for the ABA team. They also have distributed shirts and caps with the team logo, a bird screeching to a halt atop the ABA’s trademark red, white and blue ball.

Howell has hired Richard “Sonny” Lee as coach and director of basketball operations. Lee said he hopes to sign Cotton, the guard who led Mater Dei to the 1995 state championship. Cotton led the University of Alabama in scoring last season, at 15.5 points per game, then filed for the NBA draft. He was not selected.

Howell, a sports broker from Ontario, Canada, said he is so convinced the ABA--and the Roadrunners--will fly that he has moved his family to Orange County.

In May, ABA President Gerald Williams said the league had dropped Anaheim from its franchise list because Howell had yet to present an ownership group or arena deal. Williams did not return a call Wednesday, but the league has restored Anaheim among the teams listed on its web site.

Mike O’Donnell, assistant general manager of the Pond, said he had sent Howell a proposed lease agreement and list of available playing dates. Howell said he has attracted several investors from Newport Beach, but he declined to name them pending a news conference upon completion of the lease deal.

The Roadrunners would become the first pro basketball team to call the Pond home, although the Clippers played a part-time schedule there from 1994-99. The Pond, desperately in search of a full-time NBA tenant, lost out when the Clippers moved from the Los Angeles Sports Arena to Staples Center. The Rockets vowed to leave Houston without an agreement on a new arena but spurned an invitation to visit Anaheim. The NBA plans no further expansion.

Howell said he hopes to draw 6,000 to 8,000 fans per game. Ticket prices would range from $8 to $40, with an average of $25, he said.

Lee is the only Roadrunner employee so far, Howell said. That gives Howell less than four months to assemble a business and marketing staff and spread the word about his team.

Even the Summer Pro League players aren’t entirely sure what the Roadrunners are. Duane Cooper, the former USC guard who played briefly with the Lakers and Phoenix Suns, played for the Roadrunners in the Summer Pro League Wednesday. He plans to play in Europe this fall and said he had never heard of the ABA revival, or the Anaheim franchise, until his second summer league game Wednesday.

“I need to get in shape, and there’s no better place to do that than here,” Cooper said. “But I didn’t even know this was a team.”