sidney lanier wrote:It's been almost a century since F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the very rich are different from you and me, but the message doesn't seem to have reached many on this forum yet. LED are not Average Joes, and applying Average Joe standards to them, or criticizing them for not living up to those standards, or complaining they do things differently from the way you would do them if you were an NBA owner, is a mistake.
Compared to other owners, LED aren't particularly meddling, incompetent, or high-handed. True, they probably see the Bucks as an asset, but that doesn't preclude them from feeling about this team the way, say, the Queen of England feels about the race horses she owns. There's emotional investment there, however tainted (at least in the eyes of the non-capitalists among us) by venal considerations.
And if we're turning professional sports into an ethics symposium, where is the outrage over a Michael Milken protege owning our baseball team? (Or for that matter MLB now embracing that crook?)
This is a great point, just because the owners want to make money, doesn't mean they don't want the team to win. There's other ways to make money besides owning sports franchises (that usually require less headaches).