If NBA owners approve a Hornets move to New Orleans sometime this spring, Charlotte would join dozens of other cities abandoned by pro sports teams over the last half-century.

And the next question would be what to do with the vacuum created by the Hornets' absence. Move on and shift the civic focus to other issues? Or begin the search for a team to replace the Hornets?

Even though the NBA says it's unlikely another team would soon replace the Hornets, many watching the situation think Charlotte will eventually pursue a replacement. The cities of Vancouver and Minneapolis-St. Paul offer contrasting case studies of how cities react to losing a team.

Vancouver, which lost the NBA Grizzlies to Memphis, Tenn., last year, is showing little sense of loss and little apparent desire for the NBA's return. In Minnesota, which lost its National Hockey League team to Dallas in 1993, securing the return of pro hockey became a years-long, roller coaster effort, culminating in the 2000 debut of the expansion Minnesota Wild.

In a telephone interview, Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen said of his city: "It's a busy place, with a lot of varied activities going on, whereas in a lot of cities, including Winnipeg, they are defined by their pro sports team. There are a lot of towns and cities that have only one kind of activity. We have a lot -- it's a very varied and culturally diverse community here."

With the Grizzlies gone after six seasons, Vancouver has plenty of sports distractions, including major- and minor-league hockey, minor-league baseball, a Canadian football franchise, and a major-league lacrosse team. And there's a long-term focus on the city's bid, in conjunction with the nearby Whistler ski area, for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

"It (the NBA) kind of faded away and people have said it came, it left and we'll carry on with our lives," Owen said. "There wasn't massive dependency on it. ... It was just one of a variety of activities."

Even though Minnesotans had stronger feelings about regaining pro hockey, former St. Paul Deputy Mayor Pam Wheelock warns Charlotte should be prepared for an uphill climb if it ends up trying to replace the Hornets.

"The good news is we had talent, local leadership, supportive government," said Wheelock, now the state's finance commissioner. "All those things came together, and it was still something that almost didn't get done."

Norm Coleman, the former St. Paul mayor who is running for U.S. Senate, puts it even more bluntly. "Before we got this franchise back, it died a thousand deaths," he said.

Size doesn't matter

If the Hornets move, Charlotte will join a club of cities left by sports teams that includes not just Fort Wayne, Ind., Rochester, N.Y., and Quebec City, Quebec, but also the nation's four largest cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.Since 1950, 46 teams in the NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball and the NFL and pre-merger American Football League have relocated. That does not include the American Basketball Association and the World Hockey Association, major leagues that were relatively unstable.

In 24 cases, no major-league team in the same sport has replaced the team that left.

In 20 cases, teams have been replaced. Twelve have been replaced by new teams created through expansion, eight by the relocation of existing teams. If it lands the Hornets, New Orleans -- abandoned by the NBA Jazz for Utah in 1979 -- would become the 21st case in which a city has regained a team in the same sport.

If Charlotte does end up in the market for a new NBA team, expansion seems unlikely, as Commissioner David Stern has made it clear the league has no plans for further domestic growth. And Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik said last week he viewed Charlotte's chances of attracting an existing team as "highly unlikely, but not impossible."

Vancouver full of choices

The Grizzlies left with the NBA's blessing after the 2000-01 season, done in by the Canadian dollar's relative weakness, a lack of revenue from the team's arena, GM Place, and persistent losing that sapped fan interest.

"I think, post-Grizzlies, certainly there is a hard core of basketball fans who certainly are missing the Grizzlies. And I believe the community is less well-off because the Grizzlies are no longer here," said Tom Mayenknecht, who worked as the Grizzlies' vice president of communications during the franchise's first two seasons and now owns the Vancouver Ravens of the National Lacrosse League.

"But the difference is that Vancouver has so many other choices, there's no demonstrations in the street about getting the NBA back," Mayenknecht added. "I would not close the door on that, but a lot of time would have to go by before that made sense for the community."

NBA basketball could never hope to compete with NHL hockey, also a wintertime sport, for the devotion of Vancouver fans. Testimony to that is a recent Vancouver Province newspaper story celebrating the fact that in the Grizzlies' absence, the quality of the Vancouver Canucks' ice surface at GM Place has soared (the Grizzlies' floor went on top of the ice, making it hard to regulate the temperature and humidity of the ice surface).

In the Grizzlies' absence, the Canucks have enjoyed a strong season at the turnstiles, while Mayenknecht's Ravens and the minor-league Vancouver Giants hockey team both enjoyed successful debut seasons this winter.

From a broader civic perspective, life has hardly come to a halt with the Grizzlies gone.

"No. 1 on the radar screen is the Winter Olympics bid for 2010," Mayenknecht said. "That has occupied a strong place in the civic and corporate psyche, simply because there is the feeling that that is a strong bid."

Vancouver's bid committee spent $700,000, about $442,000 in U.S. dollars, to send 60 bid officials to February's Salt Lake City games, and British Columbia is considered a leading contender for the games when they are awarded next year.

And provincial and city officials hope to break ground by early next year on a $495 million ($312 million U.S.), expansion of the Vancouver Convention and Exposition Centre that is being touted as a boost to tourism and an important asset to the 2010 Olympic bid.

With GM Place privately owned, and Vancouver's downtown filled nightly -- 76,000 people live on the 3.5-square-mile peninsula at the city's center -- the Grizzlies' absence has barely been felt, Owen said.

"It wasn't like suddenly we've got an emptiness," he said. "You can't go out downtown any night of the week ... and find an available parking meter."

Similarities with Minnesota

There are parallels between Minnesota's loss of pro hockey and Charlotte's possible loss of the Hornets.

Hockey is a part of Minnesota in much the same way that basketball is embedded in North Carolina life, though in both cases interest historically has been more intense in the high school and college levels of the sport.

Rising ticket prices and resentment of owner Norm Green -- whose purchase of the North Stars had helped save the team from a relocation in the late 1980s -- helped turn the Minnesota North Stars into the Dallas Stars in 1993. Green claimed to have lost a total of $24 million and said the team's season-ticket base was too small -- 6,400 in the North Stars' final season. Fans kept coming, though, with attendance averaging 13,000 in the team's final season in suburban Bloomington -- and much of the crowd joining in lusty chants of "Norm sucks!"

It was 2 1/2 years before serious talk began about bringing hockey back, with a 1995 overture by St. Paul Mayor Coleman to the Winnipeg Jets. The Jets ended up in Phoenix, but a conversation had begun, Coleman recalled.

"We went through the mourning period," Coleman said. "This wasn't, `They left and we're starting a search for a new team right away.' "

While wooing teams for relocation, St. Paul also sought a team through the expansion process, scrapping a plan to put a team in St. Paul's aging, leaky-roofed Civic Center after the league said the facility was inadequate.

To build a new arena, the city assembled a mix of city and state funding, with the team to pay annual rent that will eventually equal a quarter of the building's cost. Some state funding came through a no-interest loan, the rest in the form of a grant.

At a time when the Minnesota Twins were unable to win state approval for a $300 million-plus baseball stadium, Wheelock said, the plan for a $170 million arena flew to completion "under the radar." The NHL awarded St. Paul an expansion franchise in 1997; financing for the arena was completed afterward and the Wild began play in 2000.

It was only once the Xcel Energy Center opened and the Wild began playing games before sellout crowds, Coleman said, that the arena went from a political liability to an asset.

"Once the puck dropped, the dynamic changed," he said. "But these things are not political pluses from the time the deal is done until the first ball is tipped or the puck is dropped."

Dean Bonham, a Denver-based sports marketer, notes the irony implicit in any city's attempt to regain a lost team.

"It's almost inevitable," Bonham said. "In every community that loses a sports team, that community wakes up one day and realizes it has all of the assets and energy to attract a team. The question is, where was all of that when you were trying to keep the team?"