RealGM

Let's start with looking at a listed $25 million "Loss on player's contracts," in the Nets paperwork, which is actually nothing of the sort. Here's Craggs:
The first thing to do is toss out that $25 million loss, says Rodney Fort, a sports economist at the University of Michigan. That's not a real loss. That's house money. The Nets didn't have to write any checks for $25 million. What that $25 million represents is the amount by which Nets owners reduced their tax obligation under something called a roster depreciation allowance, or RDA.
Bear with me now. The RDA dates back to 1959, and was maybe Bill Veeck's biggest hustle in a long lifetime of hustles. Veeck argued to the IRS that professional athletes, once they've been paid for, "waste away" like livestock. Therefore a sports team's roster, like a farmer's cattle or an office copy machine or a new Volvo, is a depreciable asset.
The underlying logic is specious at best. As Fort points out, a team's roster at any given moment isn't actually depreciating. While some players are fading with age, others are developing and improving. But the Nets don't have to pay more taxes when a player becomes more valuable. And in any case, the cost of depreciation is borne by the athletes themselves, when they pass their primes and lose their personal earning power.

Mr. E wrote:And people say that there is no creativity in Accounting!

Thanks for the link, moofs!

“In both cases the owners are basically saying: ‘We would like you to give us more money.’ And the players in both situations are going ‘why.’ And the owners’ argument amounts to: ‘We would like to have more money.’

They keep claiming they’re losing money, but if you go through the history of labor negotiations in sports, you can find owners in sports saying they’re losing money all the way back to 1879. They’ve been saying this for 130 years.