hands11 wrote:
Hands11 wrote:
Personally, I wouldn't pay a dime to go watch these guys play in a lock out. I side with the owners. I want to see things change for the good of the sport and the league.
Johnbragg wrote:
Maybe that's you, Hands, but I think that Wade, Magloire and Steve Blake vs Melo, Erick Dampier and Jordan Farmar 3 on 3 would sell out FedEx Field.
It's probably not an option now, because the biggest stars are under contract. But I think that the top stars--Kobe, Lebron, Wade, KG, Carmelo Anthony--should have looked into it. They haven't, and so now the top stars will have very little leverage in the CBA negotiations. The All-NBA level players have very little recourse if the hundreds of NBA scrubs decide to accept a deal that is much harsher on the top of the payscale than the bottom. Amare Stoudamire can't really say anything if suddenly he's making $8M instead of $18M a year. Lebron, Kobe, Wade, Howard could be in the position Jordan, Magin and Bird were in for much of their career, where they were contributing far more value to the league than they were getting in salary.
Hands11 wrote:
Did you mean to put that in green because that is kind of funny. If that is all it would take to sell out the Booth, they would be doing it.
Which part? Do you really not think that Iverson and 2 scrubs vs Lebron and 2 scrubs, one time in Washington, would not sell out Fedex Field? And I didn't stutter, I know the difference between Fedex and the Phone Booth. They would do it if they could, but they can't, legally. Kobe can't play basketball for money for anybody but the Lakers. Dan Snyder can't run a $100,000,000 one-on-one tournament with NBA players without going through the NBA, it would break all kinds of contract rules. (He could run a tournament like that, but only free agents could participate. Which is why Kobe, Lebron and Wade should have seriously considered being free agents during the lockout--so they could legally explore creating non-NBA big money hoops options.)
OR do you think that this is still an option? Because even I don't.
Or do you think that Lebron and Kobe will have leverage in the lockout?
Or do you think that Kobe, Lebron and Wade are creating less value for the league than their salaries?
By the way, I agree that the salary structure of the league needs to change. The league has been giving Kobe money to the Pau Gasols, and it's out of hand. That doesn't mean that the new system will be fair to the biggest stars.