You, sir, are a genius. Version 9.2.3 reduces the hang time at "Loading Teams" from three and a half hours to 15 seconds. I'd call that one heck of an improvement! It's too bad we can't purge those unused teams floating around in our database, but maybe that's something that can be looked into for OOTP 10.
In the meantime, this is more than a satisfactory solution: it's positively brilliant. You've got my thanks and the thanks of our entire league, Markus.
Big time.