Abbreviate This!

I was watching the lakers *cough* kobe- Utah game the other night and noticed on the score the lakers were represented as LAL, what happened to the old LAK which got me to thinking. The team abbreviation is it necessary, if you ask me it seems like an over the top OCD-like symptom. If you try and tell me it's because spelling the teams name would take to much space all i would do is point to the 2-inch think sports ticker at the bottom of the screen that seemingly gets bigger with more bells and whistles then the hd plasma that it's being shown on. Even in my fantasy baseball league i see them except the yankees are NYA and the mets are NYN for some reason. I say we try spelling it out, just to see, maby we will be able to see four players in gold uni's pretend like they have an impact on the outcome. Let me know what you think.