The NBA owners are greedy and they are liars.
Am I really supposed to believe they really lost over $400 million last season?
A company that loses that much money in a year tends to make cuts and sacrifices.
What did the NBA do instead?
They expanded their spending and they did it more recklessly than they had done since 1998.
Oh, wait, do you remember the summer of 1998? Do you remember the owners saying they need to reign in big contracts and they needed to get the financial business of the NBA back in order?
I sure as hell do.
Oh, we’ll never do another Shaq or Kevin Garnett-style big-money contract—they’re worth it, but you won’t see us doling out that money ever again.
How does the NBA react now?
By doling out even more $100 million contracts—some to players who deserve it, some to players who don’t.
It was a progressive issue, too.
Sure, the contracts were nice and small in the years following the post-1998 lockout, but progressively the contracts again began to rise.
Was Jermaine O’Neal ever worth the $127 million that he signed with Indiana back in 2003? Was Rashard Lewis, in 2007, worth his $126 million contract? Was Gilbert Arenas, coming off multiple knee surgeries in 2008, worth his $111 million contract?
Were any of those guys worth the amount of money they signed for?
Not even close.
Not even remotely close.
You want to know why the NBA claims it is losing over $400 million a year?
Look at those three contracts. Three NBA teams are paying almost $400 million on contracts for three guys that barely average 20-10 combined!
Okay, maybe they aren’t putting up those numbers. Still, you get my point.
Do I even need to bring up the absurd Amir Johnson and Travis Outlaw contracts from this past offseason? Didn’t we get a whole few weeks of rhetoric from the owners and management about how they were going to keep the spending in check, how they weren’t going to overspend? That’s all I heard.
Then you had the situation in Miami and the Heat signing three guys to over $100 million each.
So then New Jersey freaks out because they didn’t get LeBron James.
Then there's Memphis and Atlanta overspending for their stars. From here on, both teams are now in a position where they are going to have a very tough time signing the role players they need to be competitive.
I’m sorry, but I think Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph are more important than Rudy Gay. The same applies to Josh Smith over Joe Johnson.
Memphis is proving that it doesn’t need Gay to win—they are doing just fine without him. Sure, they would be better, but shouldn’t they have saved some money for the two guys who are carrying their team right now?
Oklahoma City is on the verge of being in the same position. They can only make about nine million dollars a year in profit because of their market. Of course, Durant’s new extension eats up most of that. When it came to extending Kendrick Perkins, they had to put away the black pen and switch to a red one instead to do the books.
What’s Clay Bennett going to do with Westbrook, Harden and Ibaka needing extensions over the next two years? None of those guys are going to sign for less than $10 million a year. They are team players, but no one in the NBA today is that much of a team player.
Speaking of Oklahoma City, is it really smart for the NBA to consistently move teams to smaller markets?
Charlotte was a hotbed for basketball when the Hornets played there, but the NBA, by backing George Shinn, effectively killed professional basketball in North Carolina, seemingly forever.
The Bobcats haven’t been received nearly as well as the Hornets ever would. Not even Michael Jordan can save that sinking franchise.
Leaving Seattle and Vancouver, BC due to bad management and nothing to do with the fans also hurts the league.
Seattle and Vancouver are cities that boast huge metropolitan areas—populations of nearly eight million people combined.
Seattle and Vancouver also are gateways to Asia, a place where "The Angel of Stern" has been trying to get a foothold on because of the billions of people that he sees as billions of potential dollars.
Yet he’s now taken away the two cities that work the most with Japan, Thailand, China and Singapore.
Where did they take those two teams?
To the gateway of Mississippi and fat people. To places that are so much poorer than the cities they left, where they can’t get the sponsorship dollars and where they can’t get the higher ticket prices that they so desperately seek to pad their bottom lines.
Memphis, Oklahoma City and New Orleans should have never, ever seen professional basketball outside of the CBA or the D-League.
Hey, when it doesn’t work out in those cities, and it eventually won’t, let’s give it a go in Des Moines, Boise and Albuquerque—or let’s give the Los Angeles area a third team and Chicago a second.
Oh, yeah, that could actually happen. It’s only a matter of time before the Kings are the Royals of Anaheim Subservient to Greater Los Angeles and the Hornets end up in Chicago, Seattle or Vancouver. They definitely aren’t staying in New Orleans. The NBA already knows this and it’s funny that buyers from Chicago, San Jose, Seattle, Vancouver and even Tampa have come forward, but not a single buyer from New Orleans.
Chicago will probably win out with Vancouver in a close second.
You think I’m joking—I’m not.
The NBA is so messed up right now because of bad management, bad contracts, owners who can’t help themselves and who, to prove how powerful they are, can just up and move a team at will.
It’s only a matter of time before we end up with an upstart West Covina Thunder taking on the Pasadena Timberwolves in the Western Conference Finals with the winner getting the winner of the Chicago Hornets and the Queens Bucks Eastern Conference Finals.
You have to go with the markets that have the money and that’s all this is about. It’s all about money. The owners want it, the players want it and yet it’s you and I who are the ones that are having to suffer in this whole situation.
Last season, it cost me over $600 to take three of my friends to a Sonics game. That included tickets, parking, food and beverage. We didn’t drink that much beer—we maybe had three each, but that’s still almost $100 spent on just crappy beer for a night.
You think a family of four can afford that on a regular basis?
And why are ticket prices so high?
It's because idiot owners are paying guys like Amir Johnson almost $10 million a year.
The owners do want a hard cap (it’s needed almost as badly as it is in the MLB) and they also want non-guaranteed contracts like in the NFL and it’s something they need extremely badly.
We, the fans, get screwed because just about every team has an Eddy Curry-type of situation sitting on their bench.
The NBAPA is going to fight the owners every step of the way on these issues, too. The NBAPA is going to want guaranteed contracts and an unlimited cap akin to what major league baseball has right now.
Unfortunately the NBA isn’t as popular as baseball and the game doesn’t generate anything remotely close to the revenues that baseball does.
It also has half as many games and stadiums half the size. Just semantics, though.
Where will the compromise lie? How do we get the NBA back to a functional league that isn’t going to have a lockout every 10 years or so?
If the league cannot come to terms with a hard salary cap, then they need to institute an aggressive revenue sharing model.
If the Lakers make over a billion in profit and there are teams like the Pacers, Bucks, Hornets and Grizzlies that combine for a $120 million loss, then the Lakers and whoever else turned a profit need to spread the wealth so every team has the same profit line.
What about the owners who will just sit on that cash and pocket it?
Easy—each team should be required to spend a minimum amount of salary every year and with every team sharing the profit, it should in theory set a precedent of an implied salary cap. If our minimum is $30 million every season, then teams should be expected to spend more than, say, $42 million.
Kind of like a gentlemen’s agreement.
It’s nowhere near perfect, but if the owners can’t help themselves in spending, then they need to have the money taken away from them for the most part and spread out equally. Each team can offer the same dollar amount and we no longer have bidding wars, just where the player would rather play basketball.
Like I said, it’s not perfect.
How do we deal with the contract situation?
It’s actually really simple. No player is allowed to sign for more than four years and teams have options in the third and fourth years. Two years would be the guaranteed length and if the player wanted to remain on the team then he’d have to live up to his contract in years three and four.
See?
Simple, right?
Unfortunately, it’s not going to work out like that and we’re not going to see any basketball next year because it’s going to be ugly. Very, very ugly—and the owners have brought it all on themselves with all the lies, the overspending and moving to lesser markets just to prove a point to cities that wouldn’t give them free stadiums.
Last time I checked, the company I worked for spent $50 million on the building I work in. I also pay for the house I live in. Why should these greedy NBA owners get to squat for free like a freegan?
Why should they take my money that I put into my favorite team?
Why am I not partial owner?
Why aren’t you?
If the NBA goes to a lockout, you might as well put a nail in it's coffin. It's going to be incredibly hard to recover from a lost season.
Also, if you think the players are getting off easy, just wait.
They have theirs coming on Thursday.
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