NBA Players' Union: Adam Silver Is Full Of Crap
Deadspin
On Tuesday, in response to a question at a press conference after a Board of Governors meeting, NBA commissioner Adam Silver asserted that
a “significant” number of NBA teams were losing money.
lol) This mirrored what Silver said at the beginning of the season, which the league repeated two months ago.
Today the National Basketball Players Association has issued a response to Silver’s claim. While prefacing her statement by saying “we agreed not to debate the finer points of negotiation in public”—Silver said something very similar after his comments—NBPA president Michele Roberts said “business is thriving,” and added these “facts of this business”:
Under the CBA, we do not have a gross compensation system. The players 50% share is calculated net of a substantial amount of expenses and deductions.
New and renovated arenas around the league have proven to be revenue drivers, profit centers, and franchise valuation boosters. That has been the case over the past few years in Orlando, Brooklyn, and New York, to name a few. In some instances, owners receive arena revenues that are not included in BRI. Many teams also receive generous arena subsides, loans and other incentives from state and local governments as part of their arena deals.
Virtually every business metric demonstrates that our business is healthy. Gate receipts, merchandise sales and TV ratings are all at an all-time high. Franchise values have risen exponentially in recent years, and the NBA has enjoyed high single digit revenue growth since 2010-11.”
Make no mistake: both Silver and Roberts are negotiating in public, and setting the table for an ever-more-likely lockout/strike in 2017.
Roberts’s “facts” about the business are similar to points made in a Deadspin article about how owners can manipulate revenue to bypass the Collective Bargaining Agreement. She is arguing that there are numerous ways NBA owners can accumulate off-book profit from their teams, such as bamboozling municipalities into build them arenas and profiting from “arena revenues that are not included in BRI.” Even if teams are technically losing money, the argument goes, if you look at the whole enterprise, owners are not.
Four years ago, the owners locked the players out, and eventually won the lion’s share of concessions in the ensuing CBA. The biggest of these was a reduction of Basketball Related Income paid to the players from 57 to 50 percent; this came after the league claimed that 22 of 30 teams were losing money, and that the league as a whole was losing $300 million annually.
With the league performing so well—curiously, Silver’s statement came almost directly after he proclaimed that the long-term outlook of the league was very positive, and that “the league is very healthy”—it would seem natural that the players would seek a new, more favorable CBA at the first possible opportunity. That opportunity is after the 2016-17 season; either side can announce their intention to opt out by December 15, 2016.
