There was precious little outrage, relatively speaking, over the decision to enrich Uncasville, Conn., with a WNBA franchise.

I mean, some folks noticed that Uncasville's lone claim to existence is Mohegan Sun, the mega-casino, and thought there would be some gambling issues, but most folks had the wit to consider the problem and respond, "Uhh, who's betting on WNBA games? Who cares whether they shave points or not? And who's buying LeBron James' socks?"

	There isn't much more to Uncasville, Conn., than the towering Mohegan Sun Casino, and the WNBA's Connecticut Sun.

But the matter of Uncasville as the test case for Las Vegas is still very much open, and the results of this experiment are fraught with significance.

And not just because of the cheerful sentiments of Mohegan tribe's "Chief Vinny", who said on the Don Imus radio program just last Friday, "Everything we do is financial ... there's only so many ways you can launder money."

You see, Las Vegas is the obvious untapped site for wayward professional sports teams, and the obstacle people have always found for keeping teams out of Vegas is the proximity to open, rampant, hyperactive gambling and its effect on the purity of our play-for-pay diversions.

Stop that laughing.

The theory here, at least the one WNBA commissioner Val Ackerman would admit to if you gave her a snootful of sodium pentothal, is that the Connecticut Double-downs, or whatever the franchise is calling itself, is in Uncasville to see if pro sports can thrive financially in a casino environment.

And maybe in this case, it can, because the only casino in town -- indeed, the only anything in town -- has the only sports team in town. Thus, the WNBA team can be part of the casino experience, an opportunity to merge baccarat with the breakaway layup for the financial benefit of all.

The problem, though, is that (and please hold your incredulity until the end) Uncasville is not Las Vegas.

	The bright lights of the Las Vegas strip would never become confused with downtown Uncasville.

In fact, to choke an analogy into unconsciousness, Uncasville is Disneyland. Las Vegas is Disneyland on every corner. And that's why the test case for Las Vegas is no test case at all.

The problem with putting a pro franchise in Las Vegas isn't the gambling, after all, but the competition.

There are too many places in Las Vegas to spend one's money, and pro sports franchises do best in a relative entertainment vacuum. Even a team tying itself in with one casino is going to have to face fierce competition from all the other casinos.

Put another way, Bally's isn't going to spend much time promoting the MGM Grand's ball team.

Not to mention the fact that no single casino is going to see the wisdom in bringing in its own competition.

Put another way, three hours at the ballpark are roughly 35 hands of Texas Hold-'Em that don't get played, 60 hands of blackjack, or more than 1,000 pulls of a slot machine. That's money lost, not gained, and the one thing we know most of all about Las Vegas is that no quarter ever gets cold.

See, we haven't even gotten into the crypto-moral issues about having sports in a house of chance. Gambling and pro sports may go together, but they stand little chance of survival sharing bunk beds. Not because they are so dissimilar, but because they are so alike.

Which brings us back to Uncasville, a community that makes Green Bay look the size of Rio de Janeiro. The basketball team may very well thrive in a small-town, one-casino environment, and the WNBA can use all the thriving it can get.

But as the test case for Vegas, well, let's put it nicely. Uncasville isn't up to it, and isn't trying to be.

Then again, no town in America is up to it. Las Vegas isn't a town, it's a world of its own, and the rules that could apply to Portland, Northern Virginia, Indianapolis or any other American city do not apply to Las Vegas.

Besides, no team is up to it. It's like running a Methodist church in the Vatican. It isn't the belief, it's the size of the crowd.

The obstacle is not time, or propriety, or even morality. It's something more basic.

Cash. In Las Vegas, there's a lot of it about, and it all flows one way.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com