Fairview4Life wrote:The players offered to give up over $160 million in payroll in year one alone.
When the league is losing $300 million +, that's a joke of an offer. They probably need to tack on another $300 million on top of that if they're at all concerned about the long-term viability of the league.
As we all know, 6.5-7 foot humans that require their knees to work in order to do their jobs, and fly several times a week, should probably not be flying coach. The total per diem for every player in the league last year, going with 450 players and 250 days, was somewhere around Phil Jackson's salary.
European players are just as big, and they fly coach. They also don't stay in 5-star hotels and don't get $100 per diems. You can say, "oh, well, the per diem isn't that much" - it's the mere fact that all these things add on and keep adding on and that's a problem.
I never said the Nets losses weren't real or more than likely extensive. Just that the numbers were overblown. I also did not say that Nets losses were solely the responsibility of poor management salary structure, depreciation, amortization, and everything else I listed previously. I said the 22-24 teams losing over 350 million number the league uses is overblown due to those factors. Not the Nets specifically.
But you can't prove that. The league is saying that that $350 million is cash losses. And the NBPA has
never refuted it, despite having had full access to the NBA's books. Telling, no?
Bruce Ratner bought the Nets and ran them into the ground. He purchased them with the express intent of moving them to Brooklyn, and only worked towards that move. He needed the team to get his billion dollar real estate deal off the ground. Once his eminent domain case was won, he quickly sold to Prokharov to improve the financing of his real estate development. The Nets losing a bunch of money during his run as owner does not indicate a systemic problem with the NBA's CBA. It indicates a systemic problem with letting someone like him own an NBA team.
None of this is at all relevant to the fact that the Nets lost a ton of money, not because their operational management was poor (quite the contrary: they were going deep into the playoffs without egregious contracts) or due to their costs of interest or nepotistic salaries or anything else you've alleged. They lost money because their payroll costs were staggering. Whether Ratner wanted to use the team as leverage to move them to Brooklyn to help develop property nearby at the same time is absolutely immaterial: when you have to hit home runs in real estate deals just to make the team viable at all, that franchise is in deep, dark trouble. And one thing I'll guarantee you: nobody who owns any kind of business, regardless of their long-term plans with it, can survive putting up cash losses of $20 million for very long.
The Nets would have lost that much regardless of who was owning it. I don't see at all where you can drop the blame for those losses on him.
And yes, there is a systematic problem with the NBA when it's hemorrhaging money. The league absolutely needs to be profitable.
Unless you don't care about keeping franchises in their current markets. Personally, I think the move is a good thing. I think the Hornets should also move, and the Thunder are probably going to have to move somewhere with more people and money as well, along with a few other teams. But I don't think the players should have to pay for the Nets losing money while tanking their franchise in a poor market as they waited out a court case. Their losses are also indicative of the fact that yearly operational losses were not a big deal for Bruce Ratner. He will now be bringing in about $30 million a year, and Prokharov will be doing extremely well thanks to his 20% option in the real estate side of things, and 45% stake in the new arena. This is the team with the largest losses in NBA history, and both the old and new owner have been crowing about how much money they will be making. There is an obvious disconnect here between how hard the NBA says it is to be an NBA owner, and the reality of how much money these men are going to be making.
And where would you have those teams move? What business factors exist in other markets where those teams will suddenly realize tens of millions of dollars of profit, and why is it nobody else has discovered these markets before? I didn't realize $200 million+ arenas were just dotting the North American landscape, waiting for teams to use them free-of-charge while tens of thousands of people immediately would lock into multi-year season ticket deals.
