In 1970, hoping to give the team the size of the state, the new owners eliminated the geographical prefix, shortening the name to Floridians. Traditionally, Miami had already been the base for a professional basketball club: in 1968, the Minnesota Muskies moved here, later renamed the Miami Floridians. In 1987, David Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, approved the creation of two NBA clubs in Miami and Orlando. Essentially, the local sandy beaches were a kind of shadow of the real Florida, the unofficial world capital of drug trafficking.
The reason for such cautious behavior is the state’s ambiguous reputation. For a long time, Florida remained one of the few populous and promising (financially) states that the NBA carefully avoided.
