Lockout

[Sleepy51]

The concept that owners are valuable and important to the game because of the financial "risks" they take went out the window a long time ago. This league has been engineered to insulate unsuccessful owners from real financial risk to protect the image and marketability of the investment. It is a lot easier to sell NBA franchises for a record prices if you can show any nitwit with access to someone else's half a billion dollars that even they can't possible f this up.

The last CBA was already damn near idiot proof. The only team that lost actual money on a total return basis under the expired CBA was Charlotte. In a watered down, overexpanded league with a serious parity problem and half a dozen half full arenas, only ONE team lost real money when all was said and done.

A number of people seem to have very strong feelings about guaranteed player contracts and the impact of guaranteed money on player performance. A revenue sharing system under a lopsided CBA is a GUARANTEED CONTRACT for owners. What do you imagine that does to an OWNER'S performance? How can the significance of guaranteeing profits to ownership be lost on Cohan-era Warrior fans of all people? If owners are supposedly of significance to fans because of a connection between ownership, risk and the quality of the product, then leaving Chris Cohan and Tawn's grandkids out of the equation, how do fans benefit from guaranteeing owners profits and insulating them from risk of loss?

Capitalism works (when it works) because of risk. The pressures of risk and competition and the strengthening and purifying power of loss are what create efficiency in markets. You get better businesses when bad businesses are allowed to fail. When is the last time an NBA team was actually allowed to fail? The numbers being floated as new CBA proposals will all but eliminate financial risk altogether from the owners side of this equation. An owner that isn't taking risk is not a capitalist. Owners who are insulated from risk and competition by collusion are called cartels.

[Mylie10]

The concept that owners are valuable and important to the game because of the financial "risks" they take went out the window a long time ago. This league has been engineered to insulate unsuccessful owners from real financial risk to protect the image and marketability of the investment. It is a lot easier to sell NBA franchises for a record prices if you can show any nitwit with access to someone else's half a billion dollars that even they can't possible f this up.

The last CBA was already damn near idiot proof. The only team that lost actual money on a total return basis under the expired CBA was Charlotte. In a watered down, overexpanded league with a serious parity problem and half a dozen half full arenas, only ONE team lost real money when all was said and done.

A number of people seem to have very strong feelings about guaranteed player contracts and the impact of guaranteed money on player performance. A revenue sharing system under a lopsided CBA is a GUARANTEED CONTRACT for owners. What do you imagine that does to an OWNER'S performance? How can the significance of guaranteeing profits to ownership be lost on Cohan-era Warrior fans of all people? If owners are supposedly of significance to fans because of a connection between ownership, risk and the quality of the product, then leaving Chris Cohan and Tawn's grandkids out of the equation, how do fans benefit from guaranteeing owners profits and insulating them from risk of loss?

Capitalism works (when it works) because of risk. The pressures of risk and competition and the strengthening and purifying power of loss are what create efficiency in markets. You get better businesses when bad businesses are allowed to fail. When is the last time an NBA team was actually allowed to fail? The numbers being floated as new CBA proposals will all but eliminate financial risk altogether from the owners side of this equation. An owner that isn't taking risk is not a capitalist. Owners who are insulated from risk and competition by collusion are called cartels.

Actually it's more like a government agency

[Sleepy51]

Capitalism works (when it works) because of risk. The pressures of risk and competition and the strengthening and purifying power of loss are what create efficiency in markets. You get better businesses when bad businesses are allowed to fail. When is the last time an NBA team was actually allowed to fail? The numbers being floated as new CBA proposals will all but eliminate financial risk altogether from the owners side of this equation. An owner that isn't taking risk is not a capitalist. Owners who are insulated from risk and competition by collusion are called cartels.

Actually it's more like a government agency

You can't really say that because we don't really have government agencies anymore Mylie. All we have are legislative and regulatory (and now even judicial) subsidiaries of various cartels. Government got privatized 30 years ago. Lobbyists spent the last 2 generations seizing control of the regulatory and oversight apparatus of our government. The primary purpose of so-called government agencies today is to create barriers to competition and protect vested corporate interests access to taxpayer dollars. The supply-siders never really wanted to "make government small enough to drown it in the bathtub." They just wanted to make sure they were the only ones who could afford to buy it.

Our government agencies often act like an unaccountable, unscrupulous, anti-competitive, parasitic corporation because that is often exactly who owns and operates them.

[Souvlaki]

We already have leagues where average joes play basketball. They are called rec leagues, and they make a few billion less dollars than the nba.

Actually you also have euroball and you have college which makes hundreds of millions if not billions as well. You don't have to be Le Brick James to draw a crowd.

If all the best basketball talent left the league and started their own, that would spell real trouble for the nba.

Sure, it would be competition for the NBA, but I doubt it would be anywhere near as successful for a very long time.

Of course players come and go. That has nothing to do with whether or not the strength of the league is on their shoulders. Owners come and go too. In fact, your whole paragraph above makes more sense to me if you replace players/employees with owners. Few fans remember "star owners", but they remember their favorite players. And they don't come to see the owners, they come for the players and the game.

That's a pretty bizarre comparision you're trying to make. Of course no consumer cares a whit who runs their favorite company as long as the product is good. I'm talking about running a business, not a popularity contest.

The product of the NBA has been declining for years. The stars today are more marketing fabrications than the absolute best atheletes in the world (the 2004 Olympics proved that). Every year we see players basically get snatched up off the street to play major minutes on NBA teams (the Warriors are famous for this). So honestly, how hard would it be to completely replace a roster? Yeah, it would be tough, but not impossible and the quality of the games wouldn't degrade much in my opinion. If anything you'd probably have a more competitive league.

[Souvlaki]

How many people do you think you will fill up your arena with if you put 5 Joe Blows out there?

Every NBA player was a Joe Blow until the hype machine convinced you that they were the greatest thing ever. Who the **** ever heard of Monta Ellis 6 years ago?

[Twinkie defense]

It's an interesting question, why don't the players start their own League?

I don't think it would be successful - too many players and not enough venues. And they would play at second-rate venues. They would be starting with zero fan base.

The NBA brand is powerful. I think they could get a good group of players together, from the US and the world, if there really was a permanent break with the current players, as a whole (of course some players would defect - and it would be good for competition right?). But the basketball would be a little ragged to start.

The glory days - the ABA and the NBA. Why not have two Leagues?

[Twinkie defense]

What does it say that some small market teams want a soft cap while some big market teams want a hard cap?

[turk3d]

How many people do you think you will fill up your arena with if you put 5 Joe Blows out there?

Every NBA player was a Joe Blow until the hype machine convinced you that they were the greatest thing ever. Who the **** ever heard of Monta Ellis 6 years ago?

That's ridiculous souvs. There's a tremendous amount of work and development which goes into making a star player (Mont theoretically isn't even a star yet). Not everyone can be a Jordan or jump through the roof. Very few are as physically gifted as your top NBA players and that's who the fans come out to see and pay the big bucks for, not the scrubs (or even the guys who are high paid but aren't earning it (it's those guys if there are enough of them which will cause fans to start coming to games and maybe not even watching any more).

[floppymoose]

Actually you also have euroball and you have college which makes hundreds of millions if not billions as well. You don't have to be Le Brick James to draw a crowd.

Right. But the crowd you draw, and the money they will spend, is connected in part to the quality of players. Surely that is obvious? It's not the *only* factor. But it is a HUGE factor.

This is repeated everywhere over and over in pro sports. Boxing. Baseball. Hockey. Football. Racing. Tennis. Golf. The big money is reserved for seeing the best. Competitions that don't have the best, don't draw as well. You can see this directly in sports like Tennis and Golf where there can be a pretty good sized gap in how many world class players attend a given event, and looking at how much money that event raises, and how full the stands are for various matches in a tennis tourney, for instance.

[turk3d]

Another good example of this ^^^ is the Mayweather fight which just took play. Apparently they took in enough money from Pay-per-view for Mayweather to be be grossing somewhere in the neighborhood of 50M.

Now you might feel that no one is worth that much money and that may be true but you have to ask yourself if Mayweather is really making that much money (and this is what I heard so it needs to be verified) how much do you the promoters and everyone else involved in the fight made? You can be sure it's a lot more. You won't see the promoters making the kind of money they made on fights like this if the participants were two unknowns or ordinary everyday fighters.

This is all about pie, and everyone wants a bigger piece (or perhaps put another way) the biggest piece they can get. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to what's known as Free Enterprise which is the way of Capitalism.

In that regard, you can't really fault anyone for trying to get as much as they can of the pie, you just have to debate on who you feel is most deserving and how big of a piece they should be entitled to. That's all this is, the owners wanting a bigger piece (I haven't seen anywhere that the players are asking for a larger piece)..

[floppymoose]

It shows up even in college sports. You can look at the same schools in different years and see a correlation between the player quality and ticket sales.

In the 90's Santa Clara was a decent basketball team for the WCC conference, and they drew about the same as Gonzaga. Fast forward to the mid 2000's, when Gonzaga was a powerhouse and Santa Clara was not a threat, and you see a *huge* gap in the attendance figures.

[Twinkie defense]

I don't think you can compare the top fighter in an individual sport, in an "event" with a history of pay per view, with Leagues like the NBA. Totally apples and oranges.

The handful of League superstars are definitely a big part of the League's success. The Warriors are a profitable and valuable franchise, who are its stars? A second rounder, the 30th overall pick, and a guy making rookie scale. And if Monta is our big name, who made him a big name, Monta or the NBA? In other words, absent the NBA, would Monta be a big name? He's basically an off-the street guy, and as we have seen there's always some off the street guys who can fill out rosters.

If every single NBA player were to commit to start their own League, I don't think it would work. However if the NBA decided they were going to start from scratch with players, I think they could make a go of it. Some current NBA players would jump ship to the new NBA. They could sign the best college players. Bring in the best players from overseas. Sure, a lot of value to the League accrues from the LeBrons, Kobes, Dwights, and Durants of the world - but there is always a new crop of superstars coming up. And most players in the League I would say are riding the coattails of these superstars for their financial success. You just can't tell me that we couldn't switch out over half of the League's current players with new players without the system crashing down.

So who is it really that is creating all this wealth? If you say Andris Biedrins, Charlie Bell, Epke Udoh, and Matt Barnes, I laugh in your face. You guys are really underestimating the power of the NBA brand, as well as their existing infrastructure network.

[Twinkie defense]

The owners are apparently in agreement that they would like to use another amnesty, and amnestied players' payouts would not count against the cap. Presumably the players would be fine with that. This is good news for the Warriors - they could erase Biedrins' salary from the cap and use it to sign a replacement. I wonder if bad salaries could even become trade chips, if their cap hits can be just wiped away?

In other news, agents are regretting passing up "good" overseas contracts while holding out for "great" contracts. Maybe this means the value of professional basketball players in the open market isn't as high as was thought. I do think there is some contradiction there when players are saying they need to make a certain amount of money from the League, and yet no one else is stepping up to pay them that money.

[floppymoose]

I can't imagine players being against an amnesty, unless the owners are changing the meaning of the word. If the owners still pay out the full value to the amnestied player, plus have all that money off the cap to free funds for another player, that is win-win from the players' point of view.

I don't see a real strong motivation for the owners to want to do that - UNLESS it's tied to a transition to a hard cap.

[floppymoose]

The first postponements have happened:

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slug=a ... lay_092211

[turk3d]

I can't imagine players being against an amnesty, unless the owners are changing the meaning of the word. If the owners still pay out the full value to the amnestied player, plus have all that money off the cap to free funds for another player, that is win-win from the players' point of view.

I don't see a real strong motivation for the owners to want to do that - UNLESS it's tied to a transition to a hard cap.

I think that might be the case. That would give everyone a "fresh start" including the owners. That might be more palatable to the players as well and make them more amenable to a new hard cap, especially if it came in at 70M as being reported.

[Twinkie defense]

Well isn't that exactly what happened before? That RealGM blurb claims that in 2005 or whatever it was, Allan Houston Rule amnesties counted against the cap. I don't remember that being the case.

And if they still count against the cap, isn't that just a buyout? Any team can negotiate a buyout with any player at any time.

Of course if you're worried about finances, that's still money out the door. But most of these teams still want to win, and there will always be someone to take a financial hit to try to get better. And probably even more so if they are one of the profitable teams.

[floppymoose]

Well isn't that exactly what happened before?

I think before that there was no offset in the original contract when the player signed a new deal.

[Twinkie defense]

Yeah there may have been offsets... Same as with a buyout. I think most of those new deals were not that big.

[floppymoose]

There was no offset in the last amnesty. It wasn't like the normal released player rules.

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2135039

DALLAS -- Michael Finley was waived late Monday night by the Dallas Mavericks, who took advantage of a one-time amnesty provision that will allow them to avoid luxury taxes on the $51.8 million owed their captain over the next three seasons.

The Mavs spent all day Monday exploring trade options, and waited until just before the late-night deadline to release Finley and take advantage of the provision in the NBA's new labor agreement.

Finley becomes an unrestricted free agent and is still guaranteed the money from his Mavericks contract, plus whatever he gets from a new team.

also here...

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/ ... /index.htm

Any player waived would be free to sign a new deal with a different team and still get to keep the money from their old one. Finley, for example, could pocket his $51 million from Dallas and then sign with a contending team for the mid-level exception (around $5 million per season). The only restriction is that a player can't re-sign with his former team.

That amnesty was different from the normal release rules as outlined in Coon's cba faq:

http://members.cox.net/lmcoon/salarycap.htm#Q57

If another team signs a released player who had a guaranteed contract (as long as the player has cleared waivers -- see question number 56), the player's original team is allowed to reduce the amount of money it still owes the player (and lower their team salary) by a commensurate amount (this is called the right of set-off). This is true if the player signs with any professional team -- it doesn't even have to be an NBA team. The amount the original team gets to set off is limited to one-half the difference between the player's new salary and the minimum salary for a one-year veteran (if the player is a rookie, then the rookie minimum is used instead).