RealGM

I heard one of the minority owners of the Heat also has a stake in an Euro team (Maccabi?) Is there anything that would prevent an sole or majority owner of an NBA team to, say, buy an European team?

I do not know the answer but it is sure an interesting question.
I would guess there might be problems that would arise with the concept?
On the other hand the NBA wants to have a Euro 5 team division in the not too distant future and
active NBA Players can have ownership in Euro teams, Sabonis and Kobe did, while they can not have any ownership in an NBA team.

Ownership in Euroleague is a different cat than the NBA anyway:

This is from an espn article:

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?page=whittelloneuroleague

As for the owners themselves, that is one of the most interesting features of Euroleague, as Gherardini explained.

"There's no homogeneous picture. You can have one person owning a team, you can have a company owning a team, you can have members owning the club," he said.

"Clubs like Barcelona and Real Madrid historically have been 'owned' by the 100,000 people who are members of the sporting club, which means the football club for the most part.

"Some clubs, like Benetton Treviso, are owned by the Benetton company. CSKA Moscow? You can't really even say who owns them. It was the Red Army team in the past, and technically, that is still what it is, but there are also owners who put money into it.

"The top European team right now, in terms of budget -- Panathinaikos -- are owned by two brothers, Yannakopoulos, who own a major pharmaceutical business. In France, it is not easy to describe, because clubs are part of the municipality and part-owned by institutions.

"Contrary to the logic of a commercial league such as the NBA, most of the people putting money into European basketball know they will never see that money back. Of course, Euroleague is meant to be a money-making business but very rarely is it a business that brings money back to the owners. They do it as a marketing resource to promote their product; they do it for political reasons, to have better ties with a political scenario; they do it for personal reasons or for a relationship with the local community. Or people do it just because they are crazy fans."

I was thinking that an NBA owner can kind of "cheat the system" if he also owns an Euro team, or at least form an "alliance" with one. There are many things you can do with it, such as:

1. the most obvious use, use it as an upgraded version of a D-League team, probably with better competition.

2. store not yet-drafted young talent on the team, and make sure you have sky-high buyout clauses to discourage anyone but yourself from drafting him (or else you make a penny off the buyouts)

3. use it to alleviate your luxury tax concerns... if a useless guy is making $4 million on your NBA team, get him to agree to a $0 buyout with a simultaneous $4 million Euro signing.

All these would probalby be frawned upon as blatan cheating.

GTO wrote:All these would probalby be frawned upon as blatan cheating.

Is English your first language?

this is a really interesting question. this is certainly a HUGE "loophole" if there isn't anything to prevent the NBA owners to also own teams in Europe, or as said to acquire an "alliance". the scenarios GTO mentioned are obvious cheating, so i got to think there is some sort of rules already in place, so i can't wait to hear from the experts.