Lockout

[FNQ]

GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS

Abrams: David Lee. Toss-up between him and Andris Biedrins ($27 million through 2014), but Lee makes more money for more years ($68.7 million through 2016).

Simmons: Are you crazy??? If the Warriors use their amnesty on Lee over that cap-hogging stiff Biedrins, I will walk from Los Angeles to San Francisco while wearing a Lakers no. 32 jersey that says "ABRAMS" on the back.

Hahaha

Ha! I thought I was the only one. That Abrams dude owes me royalties.

You're both in bed with Kamikaze as well..

[floppymoose]

^ I wouldn't know.

[turk3d]

Just when it looked like they may be about to settle, now this?

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/70316 ... ources-say

[Sleepy51]

I had posted this earlier in the thread and it seems ripe for a bump now that the faux economic hardship portion of the lockout has run it's disingenuous little course.

Another interesting wrinkle here is that the highest rated NBA season ever (= more profits) coincided with the Heat's highly "unpopular" superteam formation and having teams from the top 5 population markets being in the playoffs. The lesson: a top heavy league (think MLB: Yankees vs. Red Sox) is absolutely financially viable and even lucrative. When they all see the numbers on the next TV deal, parity for the small market teams will become irrelevant. The small market teams will realize that they will make MORE money as also-rans in a revenue sharing based league than they can possibly make standing on their own as small market once in a blue moon contenders just like in MLB.

This lockout is a cash grab before the big market owners finally have to chop up the pie with their small market counterparts which is at this point all but inevitable.

http://probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com/ ... ion-deals/
http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... -roll-on/1
http://blogs.forbes.com/mikeozanian/201 ... ting-fees/

[marthafokker]

Just when it looked like they may be about to settle, now this?

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/70316 ... ources-say

Might be the best news for Dubbs. Outside of no bad GSW basketball, everything is good. Why?

In 2012/2013 season...
1. Bell contract gone.
2. Beanbag is only a 2 year buy out instead of 3.
3. Lee is owed one year less on his contract.
4. The West is even older and ready for GSW to play ball.
5. GSW gets to keep their draft pick if using NHL drafting positioning.
6. Lin is gone for LIN HATERS!!!!!
7. D. Howard a FREE AGENT!!!!!!!! GSW should front load Howard's contract with $25mil first year. $5Mil remaining for rookies and minimum paid players.

[floppymoose]

I read that three times before realizing that #4 was about the Western Conference instead of Jerry West.

[floppymoose]

The latest from Woj. Sobering stuff:

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slug=a ... ern_092911

He doesn't think the players have the stomach to sit out a year, and that they are going to get screwed. I think he's right. I hope he's wrong.

The owners have already won this fight, and it’s just a matter of how greedy they want to get. It’s Stern’s job, his moral duty, to sit the hard-line owners and empty the bench so late in a blowout. This lockout was always ending when the owners were done running up the score, and now it’s on David Stern to be the closer.

“There are two victory speeches being written up now,” one Western Conference executive said. “Stern just needs to give Hunter his.”

The message is unmistakable from the commissioner: Blink now, Billy Hunter. Keep coming with the givebacks, and I’ll still get you out of this with your arms raised in the air, with something to sell. Blink now, Stern is saying. Blink again and again. Once more, Stern’s come to bury the bodies.

[Sleepy51]

A no-hard cap resolution is a worst case scenario for fans if the players do fold on the overall revenue split.

The people who have run franchises into an iceberg are now going to be able to list "brand new and improved idiot proof CBA" as an asset in the financials that Sal Galioto shows to prospective buyers. That means the next crop of NBA franchise buyers can rest comfortably in the knowledge that they really don't have to be any good at building a basketball organization to make a big honking pile of money at this. That is going to once again broaden and diversify the pool of prospective new owners, but it's going to broaden that pool downwards. Less well capitalized, more in need of positive annual cash flows and less apt to continue to reinvest in the franchise.

We need a good drug epidemic or something to shrink this league in a hurry.

[turk3d]

The latest from Woj. Sobering stuff:

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slug=a ... ern_092911

He doesn't think the players have the stomach to sit out a year, and that they are going to get screwed. I think he's right. I hope he's wrong.

The owners have already won this fight, and it’s just a matter of how greedy they want to get. It’s Stern’s job, his moral duty, to sit the hard-line owners and empty the bench so late in a blowout. This lockout was always ending when the owners were done running up the score, and now it’s on David Stern to be the closer.

“There are two victory speeches being written up now,” one Western Conference executive said. “Stern just needs to give Hunter his.”

The message is unmistakable from the commissioner: Blink now, Billy Hunter. Keep coming with the givebacks, and I’ll still get you out of this with your arms raised in the air, with something to sell. Blink now, Stern is saying. Blink again and again. Once more, Stern’s come to bury the bodies.

Can someone explain to me how the owners are winning? Seems to me that a lot of the players are still being paid (by existing contracts, and new ones overseas and more to follow). It's the owner that are the ones losing money from what I can tell and especially once they start losing games which they already have not to mention the massive lawsuit for unfair labor practices they'll be hit with if this thing gets shut down for the entire season.. I really think Stern is bluffing, the little prick.

[Twinkie defense]

Revenue is not the important factor, profits are.

Indeed. And the players took the same percentage of revenue they took in prior years. So what's the explanation for the lower profits? Could it be mistakes by the owners on other expenses? Or could it be *gasp* simply a lie???

A lie is one explanation, but I don't think it is a compelling explanation, otherwise the union, which has access to all the financial reporting, would be shouting that from the rooftops instead of offering to give back money and asking for teams to revenue share.

From what I've seen there hasn't been a single year under the old CBA where the League as a whole was profitable, so the most compelling explanation for lower profits to me would be the terms of the deal.

I would never argue that teams haven't made mistakes - in fact I think every team has made numerous "mistakes." I just think those mistakes are guaranteed by the system - you can't have a viable franchise or have any chance of being competitive without a combination of incredible luck and rolling the dice and making mistakes. The system compels it.

[floppymoose]

A no-hard cap resolution is a worst case scenario for fans if the players do fold on the overall revenue split.

From what I've seen, the current "soft cap" proposal is a hard cap in disguise.

[Sleepy51]

A no-hard cap resolution is a worst case scenario for fans if the players do fold on the overall revenue split.

From what I've seen, the current "soft cap" proposal is a hard cap in disguise.

That's the argument in the article that claimed there has been a hard cap since the last CBA. 57% of BRI was a "league" hard cap under the escrow system. That is not a "team by team" hard cap such as exists in NFL or NHL. The team by team hard cap is the measure that adds to competitive parity. The "league" hard cap does not.

[floppymoose]

Sleepy, the cap proposal I was hearing about was basically the lux tax, but with a much stiffer penalty for going over: supposedly a lot more than $1 for every $1. It's hard to evaluate this without the full details, but it's sounding like something teams would treat as a hard cap for all practical purposes. It would be soft only in the sense that you could afford to go just barely over it if that's what it took to make the contracts fit, but no one would want to go over it in a big way like they do now.

[Sleepy51]

Sleepy, the cap proposal I was hearing about was basically the lux tax, but with a much stiffer penalty for going over: supposedly a lot more than $1 for every $1. It's hard to evaluate this without the full details, but it's sounding like something teams would treat as a hard cap for all practical purposes. It would be soft only in the sense that you could afford to go just barely over it if that's what it took to make the contracts fit, but no one would want to go over it in a big way like they do now.

The current luxury tax was supposed to do the same thing. When a plan doesn't work, let's do the same plan BIGGER!!!

A financial penalty for exceeding the cap that does not PREVENT exceeding the cap actually has a disproportionately greater influence on the smaller market team. The Bucks are more likely to be deterred by increased penalties than the Lakers. The team with less resources will be injured more by an increase in penalties than the team with greater resources. You can't simultaneously be a lux tax recipient AND a payer, so smaller maker teams are being financially incentivised to LET bigger market teams outcompete them in retaining players above the cap. It's yet another structure that pits economic interest at odds with competitive interest.

Penalties for exceeding the cap are not the answer. They make the native disparity between markets even worse.

[floppymoose]

It really depends on how punitive it is. If it is enough so that even the rich teams will not go over it by much, then it serves to level the playing field much better than the old system.

[Sleepy51]

It really depends on how punitive it is. If it is enough so that even the rich teams will not go over it by much, then it serves to level the playing field much better than the old system.

Unfortunately, it doesn't . .

You have a rule that allows teams an option to overspend under special, presumptively, competitively justifiable circumstances. But, by increasing the cost, you have diminish the rational incentives for smaller market teams to utilize such an option relative to their better capitalized competition.

No matter how much you increase such a tax to "get to" the wealthy teams, you are leaving an option on the table that along with your tax increased, becomes a decreasingly viable option for small market teams to a higher degree. Where the Bucks might be willing to broach the cap under the lower penalty, they are less likely to do so under a higher penalty than the wealthier lakers. A higher cap may decrease a wealthy team's desire to overspend (highly speculative assumption based on the Yankees/Red Sox precedent) but it decreases a poorer teams desire to overspend by a greater delta. Ultimately, you have widened the gap in terms of how the calculus of available rational self-interested choices functions for wealthy vs. less wealthy teams.

If the goal is parity then the half measures do not work. If you want to level the playing field then you level it. Get rid of the option to overspend altogether.

[turk3d]

Maybe what they should do to help mitigate the problems you're alluding to is to only allow teams to use the exceptions (giving an extra year and paying an additional 10%) if the player in question was an original draft pick.

If they wanted to inhibit this further, then they could disallow S & Ts (i.e., limit them to the remainder of their current contracts when a player is traded) or require the player to wait at least a year before his new team could sign a player they acquired in trade to a multi-year deal. This protects a team to a much greater degree with players they have drafted (the real tool for parity which is the draft) and would not make your star players so likely to leave (getting a max deal from a have wouldn't be quite as easy as it is now).

If they really wanted to get clever, they could disallow max deals in FA as well (limit FAs to two to 3 year deals max). To me, the whole idea regarding FA in the first place is that it would allow players to not be locked into teams which just happened to be lucky enough to draft them force them to play there for their entire careers, particularly if they wanted to go play where they grew up or with a certain team and/or player(s).

That's fine, but I think there should be some kind of penalty for that, and I think it should be money. You want to play elsewhere, it's going to cost you (you'll lose in salary). That's sort of what happened in Miami with the super 3 (all I believe took less money than they were capable of getting).

[Sleepy51]

The solution doesn't need to be clever. It needs to be simple. A hard cap is really simple.

You don't overextend yourself to players with murky futures. You keep dry powder BELOW the cap so that when the unforseen happens, you have options and flexibility. And most important, whatever talent you are forced to jettison due to cap considerations, you are not the only one. Other teams are doing the same thing every year. The "cap casualty" free agent market will be flush with bodies every year. That means ample supply and depressed demand. The end result of a hard cap is lower contracts and fewer guaranteed years, which is what everyone wants.

The problem with a hard cap environment is that some teams are inevitably going to get it wrong and they are going to fail. when they do fail fans will punish them. That's what the NBA doesn't want to see happen. They don't want any teams to suffer actual financial consequences for failing to win.

That's why the NBA is increasingly (Please Use More Appropriate Word).

[floppymoose]

No matter how much you increase such a tax to "get to" the wealthy teams, you are leaving an option on the table that along with your tax increased, becomes a decreasingly viable option for small market teams to a higher degree.

Not really relevant to evaluating it's effectiveness. If it reduces the payrolls of the rich teams when compared to the poor, then it is more effective. And I think it's is pretty clear that it will do that.

[floppymoose]

http://basketball.realgm.com/wiretap/21 ... th_Players

The owners have been unable to agree on revenue sharing and, as much as anything, it is keeping them from bridging the gap with the players, according to sources.

Large-market owners have refused to share their local television revenues, which are substantial in comparison to smaller-market teams.

If the big-market owners don't agree to share more revenue, the small-market owners will keep pushing for a harsher deal from the players

This is making my original post in this thread look like solid gold. The nba can't handle it.