The Utah Flash Are Gone From The D-League

The Utah Flash will not play in the NBA Development League next season. The Flash had been affiliated with the Atlanta Hawks and the nearby Utah Jazz, but since the Jazz were unwilling to partner with the team, there weren't many other options to keep the team afloat.

The news first got to Ridiculous Upside via several D-League sources, and while I had decided to wait until the Flash could announce the news on their own terms -- or the team was bought by an NBA team -- local media learned of the news late Friday night.

The Orem based team had quite a bit of fan interest and was led by two competent people in Joe Brown and Drew Sellers, but was a losing investment owner Brandt Andersen (he's a legend 'round these parts) finally decided he wasn't interested in pursuing any longer.

This isn't good news by any means as the Flash seemed to be able to get a decent amount of fans to the arena every night (they were second in the D-League in reported attendance last season with 4,237.2 fans on average), but it does alleviate the uneven number of teams the D-League was looking at when the D-Fenders decided to come back after a one-year hiatus.

On a lighter note, it did allow me to have a Twitter conversation last week that began with "This is the video I'm using for the Flash story: http://t.co/WFREYBA" followed by the reply of "Maybe you could use this video:  http://t.co/QUpcgzX."

I'm sticking with my Scotty McCreery's cover of Gone.

Fun fact: I was front row for a Montgomery Gentry concert once and they sang this song before it was released. I also got a guitar pick from the girl in Trick Pony (the opening act).