(The Montreal Expos in 2002. The Expos were one of several MLB teams in financial trouble; rather than ceasing operations, they moved to Washington and became the Nationals. Photo by Paul Chiasson, AP)

Every once in a while, you'll hear grumblings about how sports leagues should consider contracting their number of teams. Usually these complaints come only from the fans and are rarely uttered by anyone within the sport. There are exceptions though. When Major League Baseball was on the verge of a work stoppage in 2002, the Florida Marlins and the Minnesota Twins appeared destined to get erased, and the same was true of several NHL teams after the league canceled the entire 2004-2005 season. Recently, Jerry West voiced his opinion that the NBA would be better off if several teams were to be wiped from the books.

As much as we hear about contraction -- so much so that the word is in the lexicon of any sports fan -- it's worth noting that none of the big sports leagues have ever done it. The Twins and Marlins escaped disaster, as did all of the NHL franchises. And if you've heard David Stern's plans to build an entire European division of the NBA in the future, you know that reduction is the last thing on his mind.

We're in an age of sports where more is better, and the notion of over-saturating the product is often ignored. The NFL plans to expand its regular season to 18 games while both Major League Baseball and the NCAA basketball tournament are considering adding even more opening-round playoff games. The same is true of the number of sports teams in each league. The big four see addition as their best way to globalize their sport; more teams mean more fans, and more fans mean more money.

As such, none of the leagues will ever take the initiative to reduce their workload. There have been cases when sports teams have gotten in such financial ruin that they could no longer be a part of the league, but even that's an exception. Nowadays when teams go bankrupt, they're either sold to a new owner or just moved to a different city and state (ala the Seattle SuperSonics). The last time a sports team ceased operations, essentially dropping out of the league, was the Cleveland Barons of the NHL, who waved the white flag in 1978. The last NBA team to cease operations was the first incarnation of the Baltimore Bullets (way back in 1954), and the last NFL team to cease operations was the first incarnation of the Dallas Texans (way back in 1952, before either the AFL-Dallas Texans or the Dallas Cowboys existed).

Even then, those teams were forced to fold because of their lack revenue, not because the leagues demanded it. As long as teams are willing and able to continue existing, neither the commissioners nor the owners are going to cut off the revenue stream. At this point, all four leagues have at least 30 teams, with the NFL (by far the strongest league) maintaining 32. To have 30 teams is essentially a right of passage, and dipping below that number would be a black eye to any of the leagues.

Still, a strong case can be made that contraction would be a good thing for the leagues, at least most of them. The NFL is the one league immune to contraction talks, since in past years it's seen every one of its regular season games sold out. And there are so many cities willing to inherit an NFL team that the owners would never simply allow one to disappear.

The same, however, cannot be said of the NHL, which virtually all experts admit has expanded too much. By putting teams in places like Florida, Arizona, Atlanta and Nashville, where their local following is virtually irrelevant, the league has taken a serious hit. Instead of seeing cold-weather teams in the Stanley Cup Finals like the Red Wings and Penguins, the NHL has often sported a championship with at least one warm-weather team with relatively no national following. A perfect example of this came in 2006, when the Carolina Hurricanes defeated the Edmonton Oilers in what was then the lowest-rating finals in league history.

Both the NBA and MLB mirror the NHL's blight to a lesser degree. Both leagues are dominated by big-market teams like the Lakers and Yankees that routinely show up in the championship games. However, the down side to having 30 teams is that when a team that isn't the Yankees or Lakers or Cubs or Celtics shows up, the ratings can be catastrophic. This was the case when the Tampa Bay Rays made it to the World Series in 2008, or when the San Antonio Spurs won the NBA Finals four times from 1999 to 2007. In both cases, viewers were nonexistent, and the leagues suffered because of it.

Others argue that contraction would improve the talent-level of the leagues, since it would filter out the very worst players by giving them one less team to play on. But no matter what we may think of contraction, the fact remains that only the most fledgling of sports leagues would ever eliminate one of its teams, and only because they absolutely had to. Contraction is only done when a league has overproduced its product, and as much as the NBA or NHL has suffered of late, it's never gotten that bad. Until one of the leagues goes on the verge of dying, it's hard to imagine we'll see it any time soon.