As a parent, my job is to take care of my kids, provide them shelter and food, keep them safe and teach them right from wrong. The owner of a sports franchise has a much simpler job: he pays for stuff. That's it. Remember Jerry Seinfeld's joke about the only qualifications for a New York City cab driver being a name and a face? Being an NBA owner isn't much different: You need a face and a checkbook. The best owners take it much further by becoming the face of their franchise, engaging their fans, getting involved in the community, unearthing inventive ways to generate revenue, then putting that extra revenue back into their team. But you don't necessarily have to do that. You can just sit back, hire mediocre employees and pay for just enough stuff to stay afloat.
Guess what? The Maloofs couldn't even do that. Consider …
• The 2010-11 Kings had such a low payroll, they dipped more than a million below the league's minimum team salary threshold after February's Carl Landry/Marcus Thornton trade. When the season ended, they had to pay the difference between the minimum threshold and their payroll number to Kings players, who split that money between them. That's right, the Kings are so cheap, you get EXTRA to play for them.
• A few years ago, when the NBA offered struggling franchises a line of credit up to an estimated $75 million to weather a floundering economy, the Maloofs gobbled up every available dime. They haven't paid it back yet. They're like the annoying guy in your fantasy football league who hasn't paid the commissioner in three years. I'm out of checks right now. Can I pay you on PayPal? Are you on PayPal? What if I just get you at the draft?
• When the city of Sacramento loaned them $77 million to help them build a new stadium years ago, the Maloofs eagerly cashed the check. They haven't paid the money back yet, which seems relevant, you know, because they're trying to move the team to Anaheim.
• When Anaheim approached them about relocating the Kings there, the Maloofs asked the city to pay for the relocation fee -- determined by the other 29 owners based on the perceived value of the new market compared to the old one, which means that fee could climb as high as $75-100 million -- and loan them money to cover their debts on top of that. What a deal! So Anaheim gets a terrible basketball team and a ton of debt, plus, it doesn't get to own the team. How can the city turn that Godfather offer down?
• The Maloofs made the fatal mistake of building a billion-dollar tower at the Palms right before the economy turned; between that and Vegas' abrupt decline as a tourist attraction, their economic fortune swung as fast as an unlucky blackjack player at one of their tables. Maybe that's why, in the past 18 months, they sold their family's liquor distributor, folded their WNBA team, shopped the Palms and accumulated so much casino debt that Harrah's started buying it up for a possible takeover.
Getting the picture yet? If Mark Cuban owned the Kings and announced, "I've looked at this from every conceivable angle, and there's just no way a professional basketball team can work in Sacramento anymore," we would assume that opinion came from an educated, thoughtful place. Here's what we know about the Maloofs.
1. They inherited a ton of money.
2. At some point, one of them said, "We like basketball, we should buy an NBA team."
3. At a later point, one of them said, "We like gambling, we should buy a casino."
4. They no longer have a ton of money.
Young Flanagan always warns us on TBS and Cinemax 3, "All good things come to an end, otherwise they wouldn't end." Once upon a time, the Maloofs owned the hottest casino in Las Vegas and one of the hottest teams in basketball. Now they would apparently rather destroy basketball in Sacramento over admitting their own financial plight. The words of Young Flanagan are bouncing right off them.
In baseball, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt ran out of money to pay for stuff. There were two big reasons for this: he was going through a nasty divorce, and he never had any money in the first place. How can you buy one of the most famous baseball franchises without any money? It's a great question. But when McCourt went behind Bud Selig's back and tried to secure a $30 million personal loan from Fox (his television partner), an enraged Selig seized the team from him last week under the rarely seen edict, "You Can't Pay For Stuff Anymore."
Only Southern Californians fully understand what happened to the Dodgers during the McCourt Error. Six decades, Dodger Stadium, Vin Scully, Koufax and Drysdale, Garvey-Cey-Lopes-Russell, Fernandomania, Orel's streak, Gibson's homer, Gagne coming out of the bullpen breathing fire, Dodger Blue … the McCourts were crapping on all of it. Desecrating the brand. Maybe it took a sneaky loan and a poor Giants fan getting senselessly beaten into a coma for Selig to finally intervene, but he did. To his credit. When a commissioner keeps siding with owners over fans, he becomes nothing but a puppet with strings trickling out of his back. Selig stuck up for Dodgers fans. He did the right thing.
Sacramento fans must have felt jealous: for months and months, they had been waiting for David Stern to stick up for them. Last week, he finally did. And only because the arrogance of "the boys" left him no choice. One of the biggest economic swoons in American history just happened because overleveraged multimillionaires and billionaires took too many dumb chances, borrowed too much money and cheated the system too many times … you know, exactly how the Maloofs tried to keep a franchise they could no longer afford to run. Stern finally had enough. But only when the Lakers and Clippers refused to yield their lucrative Orange County territory unless they were paid accordingly.
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