The lockout makes me mad

by Evans Almighty on Oct 21, 2011 7:43 AM MDT

This is a list of comments and ideas that make me mad.

1. The small market owners stole the show, there wasn't fair representation of the large market teams

First I guarantee that all of the players are not represented either, Dwayne Wade and Lebron James do not represent of all the players. I just feel that if Jeremy Evans or another "Rank and File" player was the president of the union this whole thing might have been done by now.

Also half of this league is comprised of what I would call small market teams. Especially if you consider the actually popularity of the sport in certain markets.

2. The system is broken, don't the players get this?

I believe Peter Holt when he says that Spurs have lost money the last couple of years. This is one of the smartest organizations in the league and so if they are losing money that doesn't bode well for other small market teams.

You know the system is broken when the NHL is a more profitable league than the NBA. Yes the NHL pays a lot lot less to their players the NBA but they are profitable because they are living within their means. The NBA might be exaggerating their losses a bit, but the point is there are still losses.

I've heard anywhere from 12-22 teams lost money last year and were predicted to lose money this year. The system is broken but if it were up to the players things would stay the same which obviously wasn't working. (forbes said 17 teams lost money last year http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-01-27/sports/29978700_1_valuable-team-valuations-report-claims).

The players have to know by now that the league isn't profitable because, they would have had their accountants look over the money and we would have heard by now if this wasn't true.

3. Twitter was making me mad. How come everyone sides with the players now that doesn't make sense to me, I am mad at both.

One retweeted tweet i kept seeing last night was, "if the system is so broken why are teams still selling like hot cakes" (it was something to that affect). Excuse me? If i am not mistaken New Orleans is still looking for an owner. Also Sacramento has been looking for new owners off and on. Yes Goldenstate was just sold, but remember that is a team in the bay area where money overfloweth. Also a reason so many teams have been sold and are for sell is because the system is broken, owners want out. Look at the pistons and philly. If it was a good business people would want to stay in it. So why do people still want to buy? Well they could be NBA fans, also they have all been successful running some sort of business so i bet that the owners believe that they can always turn things around, but then 4 years into it they realize that the system is so broke there might be nothing they can do, so they try to sell the team again.

4. It's not like the 50 percent f the BRI goes straight into the owners pockets, they use it to pay the coaches, the stadium workers, the marketing team, and everyone else that goes into running a company.

5. Its millionaires vs billionaires and its hard to side with either when they show up to these meetings with Louis Vuitton bags, oxford suits and Rolex watches. Especially when we struggle to make thousands, news flash this is the worst economy the US has seen since the great depression.

6. The NBA is going to lose fans and a lot of them.

I am a hardcore fan and who ever reads this is a hardcore fan we will come back. A majority of people that I know stopped being fans after the retirements of Jordon, Stockton, and Malone. Why did they stop enjoying the NBA? Well maybe its because i'm from utah and we have different views, but they all think the sport has lost its class, that today the players are overpaid spoiled brats, comments like the one Latrell Sprewell made a while ago that he didn't have enough money to feed his family even though he made 14 million that year. My grandpa was a season ticket holder for years he stopped liking the NBA because of all the whining that players did. It does make me a little sick to think how much players make now versus what they made in the 90s even. Even adjusted for inflation your average player today makes more than malone and stockton did.

7. The miami heat and balanced competition

I don't like where this league might be headed, if Lebron had his way (he has stated this before) there would be 3 or 4 super teams and 26 teams of cannon fodder for them. It's scary how good they were so quickly last year, and with the way the system is now every year they will be able to spend more and more to get better and better. I as a Jazz fan don't like this.

I don't understand how people think that a hard cap doesn't help competition. I've read this article by Henry Abbott 3 times http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/32703/the-nba-clings-to-a-fragile-position it still doesn't make that much sense to me. Yes i get it that not every team every year will be on the same level of competition. Every year there will be bad teams and good teams that is obvious. What a hardcap does in my opinion is give everyone a fair shot to be good, obviously management is still the most important part to a good team. Look at the NFL, the Lions and 49ners are great this year and they have been terrible for the last decade. No one predicted them to be this good this year.

8. The owners have enough money,

In my perfect basketball world, the owners should be happy with the money they already have. Obviously it is a problem if they are losing money on their team every year, but they should be happy with breaking even.

9. Sorry clark pojo I feel like this got turned into politics last night. The mud flinging has begun, and the players and owners now care more about getting their way then doing whats right. Its called pride, and both sides have it and they aren't thinking right they are being blinded. This is the prisoners dilemma all sides in the end will lose and the fans will lose the most.

What do you all think?

All comments are the opinion of the commenter and not necessarily that of SLC Dunk or SB Nation.

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Comments

I agree with almost everything you said.

The thing that kept ticking me off last night was all the players saying the owners said 50-50 take it or leave it. My thought everytime I read that was then why not TAKE IT.

I know if isn’t the deal they want, I know the owners may not have been willing to budge, but I do know that 50% of something is more than 53% of nothing. I know that the hockey players should have taken the owners deal over missing the entire season and they know it now too, and have stated as much. Everyday that passes is money the NBA players will never get back. Most of these guys will be out of the league within the next 5 years so every thing they miss out on now is money that they don’t have a lot of time to recoup. If the players are smart they take the 50-50 and start making money.

I feel like I am watching Deal or No Deal and even though they have hopes of making the big money they have one big case left and no safety net. The only smart play at that point is to take the deal. Maybe the banker is giving you a crappy offer, but it is better than going home with nothing. TAKE THE DEAL. If you don’t taket the deal and lose big don’t look to us and expect us to feel sorry. Sure the banker may have been a jerk and not given you a “fair” offer, but either take what you can get or don’t cry to us when you come up empty trying to press your luck. TAKE THE DEAL.

by BobbyD31 on Oct 21, 2011 8:58 AM MDT reply actions

Well Said! I would echo some of the same comments and add some of my own

1) The NBA is the least competitive league. Per wikipedia “In the past 30 years, 20 different teams have won World Series titles, compared to 14 different teams winning the NFL Super Bowl, 13 winning the NHL Stanley Cup and 9 winning the NBA championship.” While I believe the NBA will always have the least amount of Parity due to the fact that you can only play 5 guys at a time and you have to have a superstar to win a championship, there remains something that can be done to prevent the formation of super teams (Heat) and things like the Lakers spending over $100 Million while the Kings spend $42 million. By the way, the Lakers have appeared in the Finals as the West representative nearly 50% of the time. It was exactly 50% until Dallas beat them this year.

2) The NBA players are the highest paid players in all of professional sports. They average 4.79 Million, MLB averages 3.3 Million, NHL averages 2.4 Million and NFL averages 1.9 Million. With the deal that is on the table they will STILL be the highest paid athletes on the planet.

3) The players careers are finite. They average 4.7 years. If they lose a whole season they are losing roughly 22% of their career earnings.

4) If you don’t have a job and you know your career is probably going to last less than 5 years, do you turn down a job that pays you nearly 100K per week? The players are losing on average $92,199 per WEEK. They have no other job skills that could pay them anywhere near that. By ESPN’s Larry Coon’s calculations they will have lost the $300 Million that they are fighting over by Mid Dec. Making matters worse, the jobs they are turning down are guaranteed whether they perform or not.

5) The NFL shares all of its TV money with all teams. The NBA doesn’t. The Laker’s TV deal is a reported 30 Billion with a B over 20 years. It makes the Lakers say, “Salary cap? What Salary Cap”.

6) While neither the owners or the players are a very sympathetic group, the owners are going to win. They have other income streams, they have Billions, the players only have Millions. The owners are better with money, the players are generally speaking somewhat frivilous with their money. The owners are also pissed about the LeBron (see Gilbert, Dan). I think those franchises that have lost their superstars don’t want to go through that again.

Anyways, nice post. I want to “Play the basketball” like Fes but I also wan’t a system that promotes competitive balance more.

by socaljazzfan on Oct 21, 2011 9:44 AM MDT reply actions

I love all these points.

The thing that is especially surprising to me is how stupid the players are being. THEY ARE GOING TO LOSE THIS. There is no way that they are going to get the deal they want unless the owners just decide to give it to them. They have no leverage. The only thing they are doing is hurting themselves. The fact that they are not smart enough to see this makes me wonder about all their other arguments.

Beyond that, the issue of market value (e.g. what they can earn outside of the NBA) is the most damning for them. They will never make more money than their salaries in the NBA even with a 50-50 split. In fact it wouldn’t even be close.

Those are realities that some people just don’t seem to understand, or won’t accept.

by davidthecomposer on Oct 21, 2011 11:21 AM MDT reply actions 1 recs

On top of that, I think we should all give Kevin Martin a little more respect for his take on the issues.

"Mediation didn’t work, so I think us players and owners should go work a 9-to-5 job in this tough economy. Then we might realize what’s really fair, and respect the game, along with the opportunities we have, a little more."

The more you try to erase me, the more that I appear.

by clarkpojo on Oct 23, 2011 7:47 PM MDT up reply actions

There is an old movie from the '80's called War of the Roses.

In that movie, a couple is going through a divorce, and refuse to settle with each other, because they are too proud, too angry at each other, and both want to win. Instead of splitting up their considerable assets in a reasonable manner and going their separate ways to get on with their lives, they continue to fight until they eventually destroy each other at the end of the movie.

The NBA CBA negotiations remind me a bit of that movie. What I don’t think either the players or the owners are thinking about is that fans are either losing interest in the NBA or getting angry with the NBA, and a large portion of the NBA fans will take their time, attention and money somewhere else—just like fans did several years ago with professional hockey and professional baseball when they lost all or part of a season. After it happens, it will be hard to get the fans back. Therefore, it is inevitable that future TV viewership will go down unless the lockout ends within the next week or two at the latest. Also, ticket sales will go down and sales of NBA merchandise will go down. The players and owners are under the delusion that the next TV contract will be bigger than the current one or will at least stay the same, but with decreased viewership it should actually go down, perhaps markedly. Other revenue streams will also go down.

So, regardless of what the owners and players eventually agree upon, they will be dividing up a much smaller pie—not the current pie or a bigger pie, which they all seem to think will happen. What will that do to the player’s future salaries and the owner’s ability to run a profitable business—over and above what they lose from lost games during the lockout?

If the players and owners don’t factor that scenario into their negotiations, they are a bigger bunch of boneheads than we all thought.

by Fesenko for President on Oct 21, 2011 6:52 PM MDT reply actions

You can bet that the NBA will put on some cheesy "Win the fans back" campaign

Baseball has not really been the same fan wise since the big strike in the late 80s. The NBA has to realize that fans aren’t going to come crawling back with the same enthusiasm they had last season. I’m about as diehard of an NBA fan as there exists, but even I’m a little upset with the whole situation, and really am doing fine without it because of the NFL. Last season I only lukewarmly followed the NFL because of the NBA…this time around it’ll be the opposite- the NBA has really lost their hook for early interest already. Even if games started next week interest would be low till the NFL ends.What a bunch of morons.

by Jeffersap on Oct 22, 2011 9:25 AM MDT up reply actions