The Official NBA Collective Bargaining Thread vol Phased in Hard Cap

[duba169]

Co-owner Wyc Grousbeck, who has been representing the team in labor negotiations and is part of the league’s Board of Governors, has not been as active recently as he was a few years ago. There was a perception that Grousbeck was a hard-line owner willing to cancel the season, but he has backed off that stance.

 

[gambit215]

Originally Posted by PMatic

"System changes"

There's another thing that could be happening, too.

Remember The Decision? That night in July something happened that angered basketball fans like nothing else. It can be framed as LeBron James being egotistical, or cowardly, or whatever else. But it can also be framed as a young black man  MEN just being sick of doing what old, white guys tell him to do.

There was a playbook for free agency, a procedure, some decorum. And James tossed it. No, after earning Dan Gilbert the sun, the moon and the stars he does not also owe him a phone call. No he doesn't have to let some other, whiter, older entity control the production of his announcement. No he doesn't have to stick to the story line of local hero, or even player. He really does have the power to play GM, to assemble a super team, and that's what he would do.

The message to a lot of fans was that James just got it all wrong. But the message to a lot of players was that James did what 1,000 players have been dreaming of doing for years -- he acted fully empowered -- and it's hard to say he failed at it. He made his millions, and the Finals. His team is intact. His business life is sound. He'll be contending for championships for years.

It's a business revolution with young black men, basketball players, in the corner offices. A new way of doing things, long overdue, and happening now.

And maybe that's what Stern encountered in that hotel room in New York: A new generation of fully empowered players who no longer believe they have to conform to much of anything.

Just three days earlier, with James in attendance, James' teammate Dwyane Wade had yelled at David Stern. "You're not pointing your finger at me," Wade said, sources told ESPN The Magazine's Ric Bucher. "I'm not your child."

Link

This aint about dollars and cents...........................

 

[gambit215]

Originally Posted by PMatic

"System changes"

There's another thing that could be happening, too.

Remember The Decision? That night in July something happened that angered basketball fans like nothing else. It can be framed as LeBron James being egotistical, or cowardly, or whatever else. But it can also be framed as a young black man  MEN just being sick of doing what old, white guys tell him to do.

There was a playbook for free agency, a procedure, some decorum. And James tossed it. No, after earning Dan Gilbert the sun, the moon and the stars he does not also owe him a phone call. No he doesn't have to let some other, whiter, older entity control the production of his announcement. No he doesn't have to stick to the story line of local hero, or even player. He really does have the power to play GM, to assemble a super team, and that's what he would do.

The message to a lot of fans was that James just got it all wrong. But the message to a lot of players was that James did what 1,000 players have been dreaming of doing for years -- he acted fully empowered -- and it's hard to say he failed at it. He made his millions, and the Finals. His team is intact. His business life is sound. He'll be contending for championships for years.

It's a business revolution with young black men, basketball players, in the corner offices. A new way of doing things, long overdue, and happening now.

And maybe that's what Stern encountered in that hotel room in New York: A new generation of fully empowered players who no longer believe they have to conform to much of anything.

Just three days earlier, with James in attendance, James' teammate Dwyane Wade had yelled at David Stern. "You're not pointing your finger at me," Wade said, sources told ESPN The Magazine's Ric Bucher. "I'm not your child."

Link

This aint about dollars and cents...........................

 

[finallyfamous]

Just go to www.hoopshype.com

and read without trying to laugh..

 

[finallyfamous]

Just go to www.hoopshype.com

and read without trying to laugh..

 

[cosmiccanon]

Originally Posted by gambit215

Originally Posted by PMatic

"System changes"

There's another thing that could be happening, too.

Remember The Decision? That night in July something happened that angered basketball fans like nothing else. It can be framed as LeBron James being egotistical, or cowardly, or whatever else. But it can also be framed as a young black man  MEN just being sick of doing what old, white guys tell him to do.

There was a playbook for free agency, a procedure, some decorum. And James tossed it. No, after earning Dan Gilbert the sun, the moon and the stars he does not also owe him a phone call. No he doesn't have to let some other, whiter, older entity control the production of his announcement. No he doesn't have to stick to the story line of local hero, or even player. He really does have the power to play GM, to assemble a super team, and that's what he would do.

The message to a lot of fans was that James just got it all wrong. But the message to a lot of players was that James did what 1,000 players have been dreaming of doing for years -- he acted fully empowered -- and it's hard to say he failed at it. He made his millions, and the Finals. His team is intact. His business life is sound. He'll be contending for championships for years.

It's a business revolution with young black men, basketball players, in the corner offices. A new way of doing things, long overdue, and happening now.

And maybe that's what Stern encountered in that hotel room in New York: A new generation of fully empowered players who no longer believe they have to conform to much of anything.

Just three days earlier, with James in attendance, James' teammate Dwyane Wade had yelled at David Stern. "You're not pointing your finger at me," Wade said, sources told ESPN The Magazine's Ric Bucher. "I'm not your child."

Link

This aint about dollars and cents...........................



True
At the end of the day, the most scary thing in the world is a black man with power. That's a huge reason, why many want Obama out, and disliked what Melo and Bron did.

 

[cosmiccanon]

Originally Posted by gambit215

Originally Posted by PMatic

"System changes"

There's another thing that could be happening, too.

Remember The Decision? That night in July something happened that angered basketball fans like nothing else. It can be framed as LeBron James being egotistical, or cowardly, or whatever else. But it can also be framed as a young black man  MEN just being sick of doing what old, white guys tell him to do.

There was a playbook for free agency, a procedure, some decorum. And James tossed it. No, after earning Dan Gilbert the sun, the moon and the stars he does not also owe him a phone call. No he doesn't have to let some other, whiter, older entity control the production of his announcement. No he doesn't have to stick to the story line of local hero, or even player. He really does have the power to play GM, to assemble a super team, and that's what he would do.

The message to a lot of fans was that James just got it all wrong. But the message to a lot of players was that James did what 1,000 players have been dreaming of doing for years -- he acted fully empowered -- and it's hard to say he failed at it. He made his millions, and the Finals. His team is intact. His business life is sound. He'll be contending for championships for years.

It's a business revolution with young black men, basketball players, in the corner offices. A new way of doing things, long overdue, and happening now.

And maybe that's what Stern encountered in that hotel room in New York: A new generation of fully empowered players who no longer believe they have to conform to much of anything.

Just three days earlier, with James in attendance, James' teammate Dwyane Wade had yelled at David Stern. "You're not pointing your finger at me," Wade said, sources told ESPN The Magazine's Ric Bucher. "I'm not your child."

Link

This aint about dollars and cents...........................



True
At the end of the day, the most scary thing in the world is a black man with power. That's a huge reason, why many want Obama out, and disliked what Melo and Bron did.

 

[grittyman20]

Originally Posted by amel223

^Wilson Chandler and JR Smith signing with China even though they don't do opt out clauses.  You don't pull that kind of stuff unless you're living check to check and hard up for money.

McGee's tweet. 

The 99 lockout ended because players were running out of money.  I can't imagine why now would different. 

And NBA playerrs are just notorious for their spending habits in general.

Speculation. You don't have to be living check to check just because you decide to maintain a steady income, especially since it sounds like some players are prepared to risk the entire season instead of signing a bad deal...now they could be in a suspect financial situation, but that signing overseas doesn't necessarily prove that.

 

[grittyman20]

Originally Posted by amel223

^Wilson Chandler and JR Smith signing with China even though they don't do opt out clauses.  You don't pull that kind of stuff unless you're living check to check and hard up for money.

McGee's tweet. 

The 99 lockout ended because players were running out of money.  I can't imagine why now would different. 

And NBA playerrs are just notorious for their spending habits in general.

Speculation. You don't have to be living check to check just because you decide to maintain a steady income, especially since it sounds like some players are prepared to risk the entire season instead of signing a bad deal...now they could be in a suspect financial situation, but that signing overseas doesn't necessarily prove that.

 

[pmatic]

Competitive balance? NBA has always been about dynasties

I sincerely apologize.
With all the tweets you have to read these days, I don't recall the author of this particular one, written last week, and it would take way too long to find it. So, my apologies.

But this guy -- pretty sure it was a guy -- had it nailed.

Now is the time, he wrote, when everybody who hates the NBA becomes an expert on the NBA.

They are coming out of the woodwork now, people who troll pro basketball websites to say, over and over, how much they prefer college basketball, and this is why. Everything David Stern said he wanted to avoid at all costs -- the millions in salaries and revenues lost, the cutting of part-time employees on teams around the league and the thinning of the league office itself, the ease with which people have, again, cast his players in the worst possible light, greedy and thuggish, stereotypes on speed dial -- has now come to pass, in brutal, nasty and short fashion.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, damage-wise, if the lockout continues, and at some point, the graph line of whatever the league's owners ultimately get in these negotiations is going to cross the line of the disgust that diehard fans feel, and the disinterest that potential fans will express by spending their money and time on other pursuits, and the lousy play that will accompany whatever shank of a season ultimately is played in 2011-12.

The commissioner and the executive director of the players' union have been at this for two years now, two years of talking about how pleasant and different these negotiations were compared to 1998, and they pick last week to break out the language of conflict and no surrender, and the season bleeds away, and they both point accusatory fingers at the other.

Here's what's driving me crazy hearing about the "gulf" that exists between the two sides. Take amnesty -- the ability of a team to nuke a "toxic" contract such as Eddy Curry's and get it off of its books. The league and players agreed to this in 2005, and several teams took advantage. Now the sides are talking about allowing it again -- maybe with the twist that the contract would not only be removed from luxury tax consideration, but come off the cap altogether, giving teams that are jammed up more room to operate.

This is what Billy Hunter said on WFAN about the union's amnesty proposal: "One of the things we've come up with in the negotiations is what we call a 'stretch' provision. And a stretch would allow a team to now stretch the money, the payment, over a long period of time. So if they decide to cut a guy, they can pay him over 10 or 12 years as opposed to paying him all in one lump sum."

And this is what Stern said on WFAN the next day about the league's amnesty proposal: "We've said if you have a player who's not performing, rather than get stuck with him and thereby not allow yourself to improve, you can waive him and you can spread his payments over twice the length of his remaining contract, plus one. And it will count against your cap in that way."

That is not a gulf! Or a lake. Or a creek, even. That's an eddy you can hop over in your sneakers.

So now it is up to a mediator named George Cohen, seemingly respected by anyone in sports who's ever had a conflict in the last two decades, to try and draw a royal flush, make the 7-10 spare. It's late in the game now, very late, because the whispers are that the owners are ready to administer the coup de grace to this season if the players don't take 50 percent, and the players are adamant that 50 percent is out of the question.

The commissioner was vociferous in his defense of his owners during our conversation in New York last Thursday.

"People say, 'Well, they bought a sports team; they should expect to lose money,'" he said. "No, they shouldn't. Because when you spend the amounts of money that these teams now cost, and the losses pile up because the players' salaries have gone up from a billion that we were arguing about in 1999 to $2 billion plus, I'm not going to say. 'Oh, we shouldn't make a profit; the goal here is to break even.' Wrong."

No one disagrees with that. Even Hunter doesn't disagree with that. His argument is that the players alone shouldn't provide the margin by which teams can be profitable.

There is another leg to the league argument, of course, and that is that it must alter the CBA to ensure that more teams can have a chance to win titles. Some folks agree with that contention, saying the league has become a collection of haves in Miami and L.A. and Chicago whose advantages will only grow with time because of their ability to go into the luxury tax year after year to acquire and to keep players.

This argument, though, ignores six decades of history.

The Lakers and Knicks and Celtics have always had a leg up on their competitors. The NBA has always been a league of dynasties, with few teams able to break through and challenge the hegemony of the dominant franchises.

A recap:

1950-1960: Minneapolis Lakers, four of 10 titles

1960-1970: Boston Celtics, nine of 10 titles

1980-1990: L.A. Lakers, five of 10 titles; Celtics three titles; Detroit Pistons, two titles

1990-2000: Chicago Bulls, six of 10 titles; Houston Rockets, two titles

2000-2010: Lakers, five of 10 titles; San Antonio Spurs, three titles

You'll notice the 1970-1980 decade is missing. That was the only period in league history that can truly be considered democratic. Eight different teams won championships: the Celtics, Knicks, Bucks, Lakers, Warriors, Blazers, Bullets and Sonics. That would seem to be the kind of parity the league is now seeking. And the league was so popular that its Finals games had to be shown on tape delay. To be fair, there were other factors at play then -- the league was overwhelmed by the perception of white fans that its black players were all on drugs, for one. But the bottom line is the bottom line -- in the most egalitarian 10-year stretch in league history, no one watched on television, and people hated the on-court product.

<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>

In the NBA's 60-plus years of existence, seven franchises: Boston, the Lakers, the Bulls, the Spurs, the Philadelphia/Golden State Warriors, the Syracuse/76ers franchise and the Pistons -- have won a combined 53 titles. Read that again: seven of the league's franchises have won more than 80 percent of the league's championships. If you're judging competitiveness by championships won, the NBA has never been competitive.

Personally, I'm fine with that. The NBA is no different from baseball (the Yankees have almost one-fifth of all of baseball's world championships in their storied history), or hockey (the Canadiens have one-fourth of the National Hockey League's titles in the Stanley Cup era) or the NFL, where the Steelers, Cowboys, 49ers and Packers have almost half of the league's Super Bowl titles since 1966.

But maybe the league doesn't literally mean compete for championships. Maybe it is referring to having the opportunity to make the playoffs on a regular basis.

Since the last lockout (199, though:

• The lower-budget Spurs have made more postseasons (13) than the Lakers (12);

• The Jazz have been in more playoffs (9) than the Knicks (5);

• The Pacers have been in more playoffs (9) than the Bulls (6);

• The Hornets have been in just as many playoffs (

as the Celtics.

But that's not the point, the league argues. The point is that smaller-revenue teams can't spend the kind of money necessary to build championship-caliber teams. They have two choices, each bad: go more and more into hock to keep the players they have, or give those players away for pennies on the dollar to the big boys, like Memphis had to do with Pau Gasol, and fall further behind.

Of course, it was the Gasol trade that allowed the Grizzlies to rebuild in three short seasons, to the point where they made the playoffs this season, beat San Antonio in the first round and almost beat Oklahoma City in the second. And OKC has managed to put a pretty good team around Kevin Durant without breaking any banks; to the contrary, the Thunder have structured contracts with Nick Collison and Kendrick Perkins that go down in the years to come, not up, freeing up funds that can be used to extend Durant and Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka.

How did Sam Presti do this? Ouija board? Short-selling on the stock market?

He did it the same way R.C. Buford did it in San Antonio, and the way Joe Dumars did it in Detroit when he built a champion in 2004 out of parts other teams didn't care for, and the way Donnie Walsh did it in Indiana for, oh, 20 years, and the way Kevin O'Connor does it in Utah this morning. Draft the right guys. Sign the right guys. Trade for the right guys. And pay the right guys the right amount of money.

"Dance with me here," the commissioner said Thursday. "You're smarter than I am, as a general manager, and you have $45 million of salary. And I'm not so smart, I have $110 (million), but I hire a decent general manager. Over time, do you think you could compete with me?"

Do the big market teams have a financial advantage? Yes. They always have. But states with no income tax have an advantage over states that do. And states near water have an advantage over states that are landlocked. And states with mountains have an advantage over states that are flat, not that there's anything wrong with flat.

It is not easy to build a contending team in a small market. But it is not unknowable. It does not require magic or spending seven years in medical school.

For its part, the union sticks to 53 percent, insisting that the owners wouldn't really torch a season for three lousy percent (the same three percent it cannot possibly give up, by the way), and it continues to hold out that it can preserve some form of the mid-level exception, and argues that the supertax will destroy free agency movement among the big spenders.

The star players have reiterated 53 percent to their rank-and-file brethren, including at last Saturday's exhibition game in Miami featuring LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

"That's what we was basically trying to tell them," Wizards guard John Wall said Saturday night, after the D.C.-Philly exhibition in Washington. "If you're going to start losing money and losing games and worrying about that, then you might as well just take the 50-50 deal now. But if you can wait out and take it, then go with that 53 percent. But if you're going to start complaining after these two weeks, then you might as well just take the 50-50 and don't lose no money or no games. That's the main thing. When we was talking, we said we've got to stick with this, and if they come asking us, that's the number."

If there was some give from owners on the system, you hear, if the "supertax" could be eased or modified, there are more than a few players who'd be willing to talk about 50-50, or at least something well below 53. Which begs the question: Are the owners looking to make a deal, or bust this union?

"It ain't really about the number 53," Wall said. "That's a great number; that's where we want to stay. But it's about the system, how they try to do the system -- hard cap, extra two years on your rookie contracts. For the young guys, that's really hurting. Like I said, we want to play basketball. But it comes to the money at some point. And the veteran guys have played years. They say, 'We'll take 50-50,' because they've already made what they needed. They're not thinking about us. So we're just really thinking about the young guys."

But 50-50 is a hard lift for Hunter, maybe impossible at the moment. His problem is that he doesn't have a couple of months to hold out and, maybe, work that revenue sharing fissure among the owners out into the open.

If the players were to swallow 50-50, though, no matter what they got on the system side, it would be criminal for the owners not to accept, and would provide overwhelming evidence that this is less a negotiation than a shakedown. That would be a $280 million per year giveback by the players compared to the previous collective bargaining agreement, $1.96 billion over the life of a seven-year deal -- and that doesn't even count the escrow system that has returned another billion from the players to the owners in the last six years. The league says it lost $300 million last year. It would get 93 percent of that back from the players in a 50-50 split.

The frustration among players is growing.

"We've just gotta get something done, man," Kevin Durant said Saturday. "It's starting to get out of hand."

"Hopefully, we get something done, man, and hopefully the owners help us out a little bit," Durant said. "We kind of went off of what we wanted to do and we gave up some things, sacrificed some things. And I feel like they ain't helping us out. They ain't meeting us halfway with it. I mean, I think we're not willing to do anything just to get a deal but we want to get a deal. I think we want to stick at 53, but they gotta do something. It's like they're not leaving off of, I think, 47. They're not leaving off of that. And in a negotiation, you've got to give a little and take a little, I think. They've gotta help us out. I've heard a lot of people say we're fighting to get more money, and it's not like that."

<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>

No, they are fighting for principle, and that may be worse if you want to see basketball. The players have a pair of threes and the river is about to show. They could fold the hand, take their big losses and live to fight another day, wait until the time when they have the leverage and the owners do not. Or they could stay in and fight and go Mutually Assured Destruction with the owners. They would survive that. So would the owners. So would the game. But it would take a long time for fans to forgive. Or forget.

Two years, and they're still trying to spin everyone like they're Tai Babalonia.

There are a lot of smart people in the room. That's the problem. There have been dozens of proposals, counter-proposals, good ideas, not so good ideas, but there has always -- there had always -- been the notion that there was a solution out there.

And now ... I just don't know. I don't know if there's a willingness to solve the problem, rather than win the fighthttp://.


http://

Link

 

[pmatic]

Competitive balance? NBA has always been about dynasties

I sincerely apologize.
With all the tweets you have to read these days, I don't recall the author of this particular one, written last week, and it would take way too long to find it. So, my apologies.

But this guy -- pretty sure it was a guy -- had it nailed.

Now is the time, he wrote, when everybody who hates the NBA becomes an expert on the NBA.

They are coming out of the woodwork now, people who troll pro basketball websites to say, over and over, how much they prefer college basketball, and this is why. Everything David Stern said he wanted to avoid at all costs -- the millions in salaries and revenues lost, the cutting of part-time employees on teams around the league and the thinning of the league office itself, the ease with which people have, again, cast his players in the worst possible light, greedy and thuggish, stereotypes on speed dial -- has now come to pass, in brutal, nasty and short fashion.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, damage-wise, if the lockout continues, and at some point, the graph line of whatever the league's owners ultimately get in these negotiations is going to cross the line of the disgust that diehard fans feel, and the disinterest that potential fans will express by spending their money and time on other pursuits, and the lousy play that will accompany whatever shank of a season ultimately is played in 2011-12.

The commissioner and the executive director of the players' union have been at this for two years now, two years of talking about how pleasant and different these negotiations were compared to 1998, and they pick last week to break out the language of conflict and no surrender, and the season bleeds away, and they both point accusatory fingers at the other.

Here's what's driving me crazy hearing about the "gulf" that exists between the two sides. Take amnesty -- the ability of a team to nuke a "toxic" contract such as Eddy Curry's and get it off of its books. The league and players agreed to this in 2005, and several teams took advantage. Now the sides are talking about allowing it again -- maybe with the twist that the contract would not only be removed from luxury tax consideration, but come off the cap altogether, giving teams that are jammed up more room to operate.

This is what Billy Hunter said on WFAN about the union's amnesty proposal: "One of the things we've come up with in the negotiations is what we call a 'stretch' provision. And a stretch would allow a team to now stretch the money, the payment, over a long period of time. So if they decide to cut a guy, they can pay him over 10 or 12 years as opposed to paying him all in one lump sum."

And this is what Stern said on WFAN the next day about the league's amnesty proposal: "We've said if you have a player who's not performing, rather than get stuck with him and thereby not allow yourself to improve, you can waive him and you can spread his payments over twice the length of his remaining contract, plus one. And it will count against your cap in that way."

That is not a gulf! Or a lake. Or a creek, even. That's an eddy you can hop over in your sneakers.

So now it is up to a mediator named George Cohen, seemingly respected by anyone in sports who's ever had a conflict in the last two decades, to try and draw a royal flush, make the 7-10 spare. It's late in the game now, very late, because the whispers are that the owners are ready to administer the coup de grace to this season if the players don't take 50 percent, and the players are adamant that 50 percent is out of the question.

The commissioner was vociferous in his defense of his owners during our conversation in New York last Thursday.

"People say, 'Well, they bought a sports team; they should expect to lose money,'" he said. "No, they shouldn't. Because when you spend the amounts of money that these teams now cost, and the losses pile up because the players' salaries have gone up from a billion that we were arguing about in 1999 to $2 billion plus, I'm not going to say. 'Oh, we shouldn't make a profit; the goal here is to break even.' Wrong."

No one disagrees with that. Even Hunter doesn't disagree with that. His argument is that the players alone shouldn't provide the margin by which teams can be profitable.

There is another leg to the league argument, of course, and that is that it must alter the CBA to ensure that more teams can have a chance to win titles. Some folks agree with that contention, saying the league has become a collection of haves in Miami and L.A. and Chicago whose advantages will only grow with time because of their ability to go into the luxury tax year after year to acquire and to keep players.

This argument, though, ignores six decades of history.

The Lakers and Knicks and Celtics have always had a leg up on their competitors. The NBA has always been a league of dynasties, with few teams able to break through and challenge the hegemony of the dominant franchises.

A recap:

1950-1960: Minneapolis Lakers, four of 10 titles

1960-1970: Boston Celtics, nine of 10 titles

1980-1990: L.A. Lakers, five of 10 titles; Celtics three titles; Detroit Pistons, two titles

1990-2000: Chicago Bulls, six of 10 titles; Houston Rockets, two titles

2000-2010: Lakers, five of 10 titles; San Antonio Spurs, three titles

You'll notice the 1970-1980 decade is missing. That was the only period in league history that can truly be considered democratic. Eight different teams won championships: the Celtics, Knicks, Bucks, Lakers, Warriors, Blazers, Bullets and Sonics. That would seem to be the kind of parity the league is now seeking. And the league was so popular that its Finals games had to be shown on tape delay. To be fair, there were other factors at play then -- the league was overwhelmed by the perception of white fans that its black players were all on drugs, for one. But the bottom line is the bottom line -- in the most egalitarian 10-year stretch in league history, no one watched on television, and people hated the on-court product.

<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>

In the NBA's 60-plus years of existence, seven franchises: Boston, the Lakers, the Bulls, the Spurs, the Philadelphia/Golden State Warriors, the Syracuse/76ers franchise and the Pistons -- have won a combined 53 titles. Read that again: seven of the league's franchises have won more than 80 percent of the league's championships. If you're judging competitiveness by championships won, the NBA has never been competitive.

Personally, I'm fine with that. The NBA is no different from baseball (the Yankees have almost one-fifth of all of baseball's world championships in their storied history), or hockey (the Canadiens have one-fourth of the National Hockey League's titles in the Stanley Cup era) or the NFL, where the Steelers, Cowboys, 49ers and Packers have almost half of the league's Super Bowl titles since 1966.

But maybe the league doesn't literally mean compete for championships. Maybe it is referring to having the opportunity to make the playoffs on a regular basis.

Since the last lockout (199, though:

• The lower-budget Spurs have made more postseasons (13) than the Lakers (12);

• The Jazz have been in more playoffs (9) than the Knicks (5);

• The Pacers have been in more playoffs (9) than the Bulls (6);

• The Hornets have been in just as many playoffs (

as the Celtics.

But that's not the point, the league argues. The point is that smaller-revenue teams can't spend the kind of money necessary to build championship-caliber teams. They have two choices, each bad: go more and more into hock to keep the players they have, or give those players away for pennies on the dollar to the big boys, like Memphis had to do with Pau Gasol, and fall further behind.

Of course, it was the Gasol trade that allowed the Grizzlies to rebuild in three short seasons, to the point where they made the playoffs this season, beat San Antonio in the first round and almost beat Oklahoma City in the second. And OKC has managed to put a pretty good team around Kevin Durant without breaking any banks; to the contrary, the Thunder have structured contracts with Nick Collison and Kendrick Perkins that go down in the years to come, not up, freeing up funds that can be used to extend Durant and Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka.

How did Sam Presti do this? Ouija board? Short-selling on the stock market?

He did it the same way R.C. Buford did it in San Antonio, and the way Joe Dumars did it in Detroit when he built a champion in 2004 out of parts other teams didn't care for, and the way Donnie Walsh did it in Indiana for, oh, 20 years, and the way Kevin O'Connor does it in Utah this morning. Draft the right guys. Sign the right guys. Trade for the right guys. And pay the right guys the right amount of money.

"Dance with me here," the commissioner said Thursday. "You're smarter than I am, as a general manager, and you have $45 million of salary. And I'm not so smart, I have $110 (million), but I hire a decent general manager. Over time, do you think you could compete with me?"

Do the big market teams have a financial advantage? Yes. They always have. But states with no income tax have an advantage over states that do. And states near water have an advantage over states that are landlocked. And states with mountains have an advantage over states that are flat, not that there's anything wrong with flat.

It is not easy to build a contending team in a small market. But it is not unknowable. It does not require magic or spending seven years in medical school.

For its part, the union sticks to 53 percent, insisting that the owners wouldn't really torch a season for three lousy percent (the same three percent it cannot possibly give up, by the way), and it continues to hold out that it can preserve some form of the mid-level exception, and argues that the supertax will destroy free agency movement among the big spenders.

The star players have reiterated 53 percent to their rank-and-file brethren, including at last Saturday's exhibition game in Miami featuring LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

"That's what we was basically trying to tell them," Wizards guard John Wall said Saturday night, after the D.C.-Philly exhibition in Washington. "If you're going to start losing money and losing games and worrying about that, then you might as well just take the 50-50 deal now. But if you can wait out and take it, then go with that 53 percent. But if you're going to start complaining after these two weeks, then you might as well just take the 50-50 and don't lose no money or no games. That's the main thing. When we was talking, we said we've got to stick with this, and if they come asking us, that's the number."

If there was some give from owners on the system, you hear, if the "supertax" could be eased or modified, there are more than a few players who'd be willing to talk about 50-50, or at least something well below 53. Which begs the question: Are the owners looking to make a deal, or bust this union?

"It ain't really about the number 53," Wall said. "That's a great number; that's where we want to stay. But it's about the system, how they try to do the system -- hard cap, extra two years on your rookie contracts. For the young guys, that's really hurting. Like I said, we want to play basketball. But it comes to the money at some point. And the veteran guys have played years. They say, 'We'll take 50-50,' because they've already made what they needed. They're not thinking about us. So we're just really thinking about the young guys."

But 50-50 is a hard lift for Hunter, maybe impossible at the moment. His problem is that he doesn't have a couple of months to hold out and, maybe, work that revenue sharing fissure among the owners out into the open.

If the players were to swallow 50-50, though, no matter what they got on the system side, it would be criminal for the owners not to accept, and would provide overwhelming evidence that this is less a negotiation than a shakedown. That would be a $280 million per year giveback by the players compared to the previous collective bargaining agreement, $1.96 billion over the life of a seven-year deal -- and that doesn't even count the escrow system that has returned another billion from the players to the owners in the last six years. The league says it lost $300 million last year. It would get 93 percent of that back from the players in a 50-50 split.

The frustration among players is growing.

"We've just gotta get something done, man," Kevin Durant said Saturday. "It's starting to get out of hand."

"Hopefully, we get something done, man, and hopefully the owners help us out a little bit," Durant said. "We kind of went off of what we wanted to do and we gave up some things, sacrificed some things. And I feel like they ain't helping us out. They ain't meeting us halfway with it. I mean, I think we're not willing to do anything just to get a deal but we want to get a deal. I think we want to stick at 53, but they gotta do something. It's like they're not leaving off of, I think, 47. They're not leaving off of that. And in a negotiation, you've got to give a little and take a little, I think. They've gotta help us out. I've heard a lot of people say we're fighting to get more money, and it's not like that."

<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>

No, they are fighting for principle, and that may be worse if you want to see basketball. The players have a pair of threes and the river is about to show. They could fold the hand, take their big losses and live to fight another day, wait until the time when they have the leverage and the owners do not. Or they could stay in and fight and go Mutually Assured Destruction with the owners. They would survive that. So would the owners. So would the game. But it would take a long time for fans to forgive. Or forget.

Two years, and they're still trying to spin everyone like they're Tai Babalonia.

There are a lot of smart people in the room. That's the problem. There have been dozens of proposals, counter-proposals, good ideas, not so good ideas, but there has always -- there had always -- been the notion that there was a solution out there.

And now ... I just don't know. I don't know if there's a willingness to solve the problem, rather than win the fighthttp://.


http://

Link

 

[pmatic]

Basketball as business for Dan Gilbert

On Election Night in 2009, Dan Gilbert threw a late-night party on the practice court inside Quicken Loans Arena. The extravagance in the room called to mind a mob-movie wedding reception, complete with live music, roaming waiters and five-star cuisine served on fine linens.
Gilbert was floating, and not because, after a disconcerting 0-2 start, his Cavaliers had just secured their first win of the season.

The game was hardly the day's main event.

Before he arrived at the party, Gilbert was watching election returns on a TV in his luxury bunker down the hall from the Cavs locker room. He enlisted some of the team's ball boys to help him prepare a water cooler. He used the back elevator, with the cooler hidden under a towel. Then he doused his campaign manager as soon as the victory became official.

That night, Ohio voters passed Issue 3, which was a measure to amend the state constitution to allow four casinos to be built. Gilbert, set to own two of them, and a casino company poured $35 million into the project and ran an intense and wide-ranging campaign. With victory secured, they were on the road to a windfall that some estimate could be in the billions.

With his tie ditched and his beautifully-cut blue blazer picking up champagne stains, Gilbert worked the room and hugged business associates. Cleveland mayor Frank G. Jackson, who had won re-election that night himself, took a detour from his personal celebration to stop in and make sure he got in on the photo op. Several Cavs players and members of the team's management, some of whom had personally worked the campaign trail for Gilbert, milled about.

LeBron James was invited but wasn't there, though his presence hung in the room. After casino measures had failed four times over the previous 18 years in Ohio, Gilbert had pulled the sword from the stone with an all-encompassing deal that essentially gave him and his partners a monopoly on gambling in the state. He got there with an attractive plan and timing, plus his personal sterling reputation in Ohio.

But mostly he got there on the back of the massive popularity of the Cavs at the time, which of course was powered by James.

Gilbert was a success story and a business leader before he bought the team. He's generally known as being a good boss and a forward thinker. He's certainly had his detractors, and there have been a few personal and business relationships that ended both badly and publicly. But then what self-made billionaire doesn't have a few scars? They were just lines on Gilbert's face as he'd steamed ahead, the continuing conqueror.

At the time, James and Gilbert weren't enemies. They were still on the same team and occasionally James even sought Gilbert's advice on investments or other business matters. Now, of course, they publically exchange zingers without actually using each other's name. They're even more ruthless in private matters, neither passing up a chance to grate the other if possible.

As the 2009-10 season opened, James was well aware that July 1, 2010, was going to be a huge moment in his career. For Gilbert, the big event was that referendum, which passed thanks in part to the popularity James brought the Cavs and Gilbert.

No matter what James and the Miami Heat accomplish in the future -- even if they end up making Gilbert eat his infamous words guaranteeing a Cavs title before there's a single parade held for the Heat -- Gilbert's business victory has already been assured.

James has left the Cavaliers, but his seven seasons with the team played a valuable role in likely making sure Gilbert will become a permanent fixture on the Forbes 400 list -- where he currently ranks 293rd at $1.5 billion, higher than at any time when James was an employee.

To be clear, Gilbert had always been confident he would convince James to re-sign. All the way up until the two had their last conversation on July 3, 2010, when the Cavs made what they certainly believed was a great pitch to secure a contract extension.

Gilbert is both an unrelenting optimist and someone who has reason to expect things to go well. He sold his online mortgage company in 1999 for $532 million, then bought it back three years later after the tech bubble burst for $64 million and turned it into a cash cow. And that's just one story.

So despite conviction that James wasn't leaving home, Gilbert and his partners found a hedge. The need for such thinking hit Gilbert hard after James requested just a three-year contract from the team starting in 2007 instead of the five-year deal that was offered (they settled on a three-year deal with a player option for a fourth). Gilbert raised a glass to celebrate that deal at the time. But it also caused an organizational stutter-step that called for some long-term planning in both basketball and business operations.

On the court, the Cavs ended up spending tens of millions more than was planned, quickly ditching the organization's mantra that it could win big without becoming a luxury tax payer. This was perhaps what James wanted, for the team to feel urgency. The Cavs sold every seat season after season and landed a rich local cable deal, but they operated in the red as Gilbert kept green-lighting moves that added costs.No team in the league traveled, ate or was pampered better than the Cavs. By James' last season, seven players on the team were earning $8 million or more.

When the 2009 election arrived, which came on the heels of the mortgage crisis that hit Gilbert's core hard, he was committed to spending more than $100 million in salary and luxury taxes for the upcoming season -- more than the New York Knicks, more than the Los Angeles Lakers.

James, meanwhile, had turned down a nine-figure contract extension offer. His relationship with Gilbert, once rather close, had deteriorated. Was that natural? Was that just proper? Was it part of a plan that James' personal team implemented in preparation to leave? To this day, Gilbert must wonder. Regardless, in early 2009 he was already swinging for the fences business-wise just to make sure the whole thing didn't turn sour.Gilbert didn't get his championship. His $100 million ended up buying a bitter second-round loss. James was gone. Gilbert and his fans were devastated. But not before he'd hit a business grand slam.

In 2005, Gilbert bought the Cavs for $375 million -- a premium price for the team former owner Gordon Gund had bought 20 years earlier for $20 million. Looking at that transaction now, it doesn't seem like it was a great investment on the surface for Gilbert.

Teams in larger markets like Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta have recently sold for less money. James' departure in free agency directly led to a last-place finish for the Cavs in 2010-11. Attendance, sponsorships and merchandise sales are all expected to follow suit. Forbes estimated the Cavs' 2011 value at $355 million, though Gilbert would honestly have a hard time finding a buyer at that number if he wanted to at the moment.

Gilbert is fond of saying that owning an NBA team alone doesn't make a lot of fiscal sense. In interviews over the years he's compared buying a team to owning a rare piece of art. He is fond of talking about what he calls "threads" that come with such ownership. These threads are offshoots from the centerpiece, the team, that create value and make the investment worth making.

In his first few years of owning the Cavs, Gilbert started unspooling these threads. His mortgage company bought the naming rights to the arena and put the logo on the floor for all the national television games the Cavs played when James was on the team.

He bought Fathead, a company that sells sports-themed wall graphics. He promptly plastered hundreds of them around the arena in addition to ramping up the national advertising campaign.He bought a company that enabled the Cavs to get in on the secondary ticket market, a first in the NBA, and then sold the service to other NBA teams. Now he owns a ticket services company that operates electronic ticketing, as well.

No thread, though, is greater than the downtown Cleveland casino Gilbert is building. When it is completely finished it will literally be attached to the Cavs. A walkway will connect the arena and the casino, where fans will be able to park and walk to the game past the gaming tables and slots. The more fans that attend Cavs games, the more people there will be in the casino on game nights.

Park in the casino, have dinner there, walk into the arena past the slots and blackjack tables, stop at a bar in the casino for a nightcap on the way out after you walk past the slots and tables again. Or stop by before or after watching the Cleveland Indians, who play next door. You don't need an MBA to understand the business plan.

Threads everywhere, most of them leading to profit.

The Cavs aren't the only team to use such leverage. Just last month the Orlando Magic won approval to purchase land around their new downtown arena to develop a retail complex that promises to earn millions in upcoming years. The Orlando Sentinel called it a "sweetheart" real estate deal that upset competitors. The Magic might as well call it a thread.

It's not all just public projects. Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander's venture capital company got the chance at some Chinese IPOs after he drafted Yao Ming. Mark Cuban was a billionaire before he owned the Dallas Mavericks but that purchase made him a famous billionaire and opened the door to numerous other projects including a television career and a movie production company. There are numerous other examples and none of that scratches the surface on the taxpayer dollars that have built the arenas that teams play in.

All a great use of threads, Gilbert would say.


Link

 

[pmatic]

Basketball as business for Dan Gilbert

On Election Night in 2009, Dan Gilbert threw a late-night party on the practice court inside Quicken Loans Arena. The extravagance in the room called to mind a mob-movie wedding reception, complete with live music, roaming waiters and five-star cuisine served on fine linens.
Gilbert was floating, and not because, after a disconcerting 0-2 start, his Cavaliers had just secured their first win of the season.

The game was hardly the day's main event.

Before he arrived at the party, Gilbert was watching election returns on a TV in his luxury bunker down the hall from the Cavs locker room. He enlisted some of the team's ball boys to help him prepare a water cooler. He used the back elevator, with the cooler hidden under a towel. Then he doused his campaign manager as soon as the victory became official.

That night, Ohio voters passed Issue 3, which was a measure to amend the state constitution to allow four casinos to be built. Gilbert, set to own two of them, and a casino company poured $35 million into the project and ran an intense and wide-ranging campaign. With victory secured, they were on the road to a windfall that some estimate could be in the billions.

With his tie ditched and his beautifully-cut blue blazer picking up champagne stains, Gilbert worked the room and hugged business associates. Cleveland mayor Frank G. Jackson, who had won re-election that night himself, took a detour from his personal celebration to stop in and make sure he got in on the photo op. Several Cavs players and members of the team's management, some of whom had personally worked the campaign trail for Gilbert, milled about.

LeBron James was invited but wasn't there, though his presence hung in the room. After casino measures had failed four times over the previous 18 years in Ohio, Gilbert had pulled the sword from the stone with an all-encompassing deal that essentially gave him and his partners a monopoly on gambling in the state. He got there with an attractive plan and timing, plus his personal sterling reputation in Ohio.

But mostly he got there on the back of the massive popularity of the Cavs at the time, which of course was powered by James.

Gilbert was a success story and a business leader before he bought the team. He's generally known as being a good boss and a forward thinker. He's certainly had his detractors, and there have been a few personal and business relationships that ended both badly and publicly. But then what self-made billionaire doesn't have a few scars? They were just lines on Gilbert's face as he'd steamed ahead, the continuing conqueror.

At the time, James and Gilbert weren't enemies. They were still on the same team and occasionally James even sought Gilbert's advice on investments or other business matters. Now, of course, they publically exchange zingers without actually using each other's name. They're even more ruthless in private matters, neither passing up a chance to grate the other if possible.

As the 2009-10 season opened, James was well aware that July 1, 2010, was going to be a huge moment in his career. For Gilbert, the big event was that referendum, which passed thanks in part to the popularity James brought the Cavs and Gilbert.

No matter what James and the Miami Heat accomplish in the future -- even if they end up making Gilbert eat his infamous words guaranteeing a Cavs title before there's a single parade held for the Heat -- Gilbert's business victory has already been assured.

James has left the Cavaliers, but his seven seasons with the team played a valuable role in likely making sure Gilbert will become a permanent fixture on the Forbes 400 list -- where he currently ranks 293rd at $1.5 billion, higher than at any time when James was an employee.

To be clear, Gilbert had always been confident he would convince James to re-sign. All the way up until the two had their last conversation on July 3, 2010, when the Cavs made what they certainly believed was a great pitch to secure a contract extension.

Gilbert is both an unrelenting optimist and someone who has reason to expect things to go well. He sold his online mortgage company in 1999 for $532 million, then bought it back three years later after the tech bubble burst for $64 million and turned it into a cash cow. And that's just one story.

So despite conviction that James wasn't leaving home, Gilbert and his partners found a hedge. The need for such thinking hit Gilbert hard after James requested just a three-year contract from the team starting in 2007 instead of the five-year deal that was offered (they settled on a three-year deal with a player option for a fourth). Gilbert raised a glass to celebrate that deal at the time. But it also caused an organizational stutter-step that called for some long-term planning in both basketball and business operations.

On the court, the Cavs ended up spending tens of millions more than was planned, quickly ditching the organization's mantra that it could win big without becoming a luxury tax payer. This was perhaps what James wanted, for the team to feel urgency. The Cavs sold every seat season after season and landed a rich local cable deal, but they operated in the red as Gilbert kept green-lighting moves that added costs.No team in the league traveled, ate or was pampered better than the Cavs. By James' last season, seven players on the team were earning $8 million or more.

When the 2009 election arrived, which came on the heels of the mortgage crisis that hit Gilbert's core hard, he was committed to spending more than $100 million in salary and luxury taxes for the upcoming season -- more than the New York Knicks, more than the Los Angeles Lakers.

James, meanwhile, had turned down a nine-figure contract extension offer. His relationship with Gilbert, once rather close, had deteriorated. Was that natural? Was that just proper? Was it part of a plan that James' personal team implemented in preparation to leave? To this day, Gilbert must wonder. Regardless, in early 2009 he was already swinging for the fences business-wise just to make sure the whole thing didn't turn sour.Gilbert didn't get his championship. His $100 million ended up buying a bitter second-round loss. James was gone. Gilbert and his fans were devastated. But not before he'd hit a business grand slam.

In 2005, Gilbert bought the Cavs for $375 million -- a premium price for the team former owner Gordon Gund had bought 20 years earlier for $20 million. Looking at that transaction now, it doesn't seem like it was a great investment on the surface for Gilbert.

Teams in larger markets like Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta have recently sold for less money. James' departure in free agency directly led to a last-place finish for the Cavs in 2010-11. Attendance, sponsorships and merchandise sales are all expected to follow suit. Forbes estimated the Cavs' 2011 value at $355 million, though Gilbert would honestly have a hard time finding a buyer at that number if he wanted to at the moment.

Gilbert is fond of saying that owning an NBA team alone doesn't make a lot of fiscal sense. In interviews over the years he's compared buying a team to owning a rare piece of art. He is fond of talking about what he calls "threads" that come with such ownership. These threads are offshoots from the centerpiece, the team, that create value and make the investment worth making.

In his first few years of owning the Cavs, Gilbert started unspooling these threads. His mortgage company bought the naming rights to the arena and put the logo on the floor for all the national television games the Cavs played when James was on the team.

He bought Fathead, a company that sells sports-themed wall graphics. He promptly plastered hundreds of them around the arena in addition to ramping up the national advertising campaign.He bought a company that enabled the Cavs to get in on the secondary ticket market, a first in the NBA, and then sold the service to other NBA teams. Now he owns a ticket services company that operates electronic ticketing, as well.

No thread, though, is greater than the downtown Cleveland casino Gilbert is building. When it is completely finished it will literally be attached to the Cavs. A walkway will connect the arena and the casino, where fans will be able to park and walk to the game past the gaming tables and slots. The more fans that attend Cavs games, the more people there will be in the casino on game nights.

Park in the casino, have dinner there, walk into the arena past the slots and blackjack tables, stop at a bar in the casino for a nightcap on the way out after you walk past the slots and tables again. Or stop by before or after watching the Cleveland Indians, who play next door. You don't need an MBA to understand the business plan.

Threads everywhere, most of them leading to profit.

The Cavs aren't the only team to use such leverage. Just last month the Orlando Magic won approval to purchase land around their new downtown arena to develop a retail complex that promises to earn millions in upcoming years. The Orlando Sentinel called it a "sweetheart" real estate deal that upset competitors. The Magic might as well call it a thread.

It's not all just public projects. Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander's venture capital company got the chance at some Chinese IPOs after he drafted Yao Ming. Mark Cuban was a billionaire before he owned the Dallas Mavericks but that purchase made him a famous billionaire and opened the door to numerous other projects including a television career and a movie production company. There are numerous other examples and none of that scratches the surface on the taxpayer dollars that have built the arenas that teams play in.

All a great use of threads, Gilbert would say.


Link

 

[fantastic4our]

Originally Posted by amel223

Originally Posted by DubA169

Gilbert is the man known as "Subprime Dan," the who made his millions as CEO of Quicken Loans, offering 0%, no money down mortgages to potential home buyers over the Internet. This kind of legalized loan sharking of course wrecked the US economy. But it didn't wreck Gilbert. As foreclosures reached record highs in Cleveland, Quicken Loans reported that 2009-2010 has been their most profitable period in the company's history. Now while people throughout the state of Ohio have lost their homes and livelihoods at the altar of Quicken Loans, Gilbert has announced that he will be opening four casinos throughout the state. He also funded the referendums that secured his right to legalize gambling in the state. Anyone who has been to a casino in Detroit can predict what their Ohio variant will look like: working class families -- black, brown, and white -- dragging their kids to the bingo parlor and the penny slots hoping against hope they can raise enough to keep the bank from taking their home -- perhaps even thanks to a subprime mortgage courtesy of Quicken Loans


This is one of the faces of the lockout. Oh woe is me. These are the people that the economy "hurt". We must save them from these damn greedy players. It isn't even worth posting a sterling article

I'm not naive.  I mean, I can recognize that some of these owners are known for their shady histories, and I'm open to the possibility that some of these owners with spotless records are not so squeaky clean either. 

But that's also why I want the players to take their deal now.  Given everything the owners are capable of, I feel like they are actually playing nice to start (10 percent off millions of dollars is nothing) ... but the more this drags the more hard ball the owners will play. 

And I don't think the players are smart enough to recognize that. 


--

It's like this.  I'm an RN.  I can recognize when I'm out treating patients that the administrators who run the damn hospital don't give a damn about the patients.  They just care about the bottom line.  The money from insurance, contracts with technology people, whatever. 

As long as I'm earning my paycheck I'm just keeping it moving you know.  And I get to make people better in the process.

But then when **%# hits the fan for these hospital administrators they don't go to their RNs and say, "All right to save my bottom line, I'll make a new collective bargaining agreement with y'all...to fatten my pockets all I ask is for 10 percent of your salary."

You know what these hospital administrators do?  They FIRE ppl.  Or they close down hospitals.  Cut their losses.  And hundreds of healthcare/medical professionals are out of jobs. 

I cannot feel sorry for these players one bit.

Your RN analogy is horrible.
Are you the best RN in your hospital? Do people come to your hospital just to have you help them? Very unlikely.

The NBA is MUCH more player driven than the NFL or MLB. They put people in the stands. No owner is going to "fire" a good player due to  their bottom line. You cannot compare the two at all.

 

[fantastic4our]

Originally Posted by amel223

Originally Posted by DubA169

Gilbert is the man known as "Subprime Dan," the who made his millions as CEO of Quicken Loans, offering 0%, no money down mortgages to potential home buyers over the Internet. This kind of legalized loan sharking of course wrecked the US economy. But it didn't wreck Gilbert. As foreclosures reached record highs in Cleveland, Quicken Loans reported that 2009-2010 has been their most profitable period in the company's history. Now while people throughout the state of Ohio have lost their homes and livelihoods at the altar of Quicken Loans, Gilbert has announced that he will be opening four casinos throughout the state. He also funded the referendums that secured his right to legalize gambling in the state. Anyone who has been to a casino in Detroit can predict what their Ohio variant will look like: working class families -- black, brown, and white -- dragging their kids to the bingo parlor and the penny slots hoping against hope they can raise enough to keep the bank from taking their home -- perhaps even thanks to a subprime mortgage courtesy of Quicken Loans


This is one of the faces of the lockout. Oh woe is me. These are the people that the economy "hurt". We must save them from these damn greedy players. It isn't even worth posting a sterling article

I'm not naive.  I mean, I can recognize that some of these owners are known for their shady histories, and I'm open to the possibility that some of these owners with spotless records are not so squeaky clean either. 

But that's also why I want the players to take their deal now.  Given everything the owners are capable of, I feel like they are actually playing nice to start (10 percent off millions of dollars is nothing) ... but the more this drags the more hard ball the owners will play. 

And I don't think the players are smart enough to recognize that. 


--

It's like this.  I'm an RN.  I can recognize when I'm out treating patients that the administrators who run the damn hospital don't give a damn about the patients.  They just care about the bottom line.  The money from insurance, contracts with technology people, whatever. 

As long as I'm earning my paycheck I'm just keeping it moving you know.  And I get to make people better in the process.

But then when **%# hits the fan for these hospital administrators they don't go to their RNs and say, "All right to save my bottom line, I'll make a new collective bargaining agreement with y'all...to fatten my pockets all I ask is for 10 percent of your salary."

You know what these hospital administrators do?  They FIRE ppl.  Or they close down hospitals.  Cut their losses.  And hundreds of healthcare/medical professionals are out of jobs. 

I cannot feel sorry for these players one bit.

Your RN analogy is horrible.
Are you the best RN in your hospital? Do people come to your hospital just to have you help them? Very unlikely.

The NBA is MUCH more player driven than the NFL or MLB. They put people in the stands. No owner is going to "fire" a good player due to  their bottom line. You cannot compare the two at all.

 

[everysingletime]

Originally Posted by Fantastic4our

Your RN analogy is horrible.
Are you the best RN in your hospital? Do people come to your hospital just to have you help them? Very unlikely.

The NBA is MUCH more player driven than the NFL or MLB. They put people in the stands. No owner is going to "fire" a good player due to  their bottom line. You cannot compare the two at all.

There are hundreds of analogies that I could use that would fit my argument.  I just chose to use the RN analogy because that was the first that came to mind.

The point being, is that NBA owners are not the only shady owners out there.  There are dozens of owners/managers/whatever out there that do worse things to their employees to satisfy their bottom line.  A 10 percent cut is nothing.

As for your second argument.  Somebody else already explained it.  There are 300 something players in the nba.  About only 25 seriously "drive" the sport (and I'm probably being generous with that number).  Owners would be happy to pay their franchise people but the rest are overpaid, and extremely lucky to be earning the kind of money they earn. 

 

[everysingletime]

Originally Posted by Fantastic4our

Your RN analogy is horrible.
Are you the best RN in your hospital? Do people come to your hospital just to have you help them? Very unlikely.

The NBA is MUCH more player driven than the NFL or MLB. They put people in the stands. No owner is going to "fire" a good player due to  their bottom line. You cannot compare the two at all.

There are hundreds of analogies that I could use that would fit my argument.  I just chose to use the RN analogy because that was the first that came to mind.

The point being, is that NBA owners are not the only shady owners out there.  There are dozens of owners/managers/whatever out there that do worse things to their employees to satisfy their bottom line.  A 10 percent cut is nothing.

As for your second argument.  Somebody else already explained it.  There are 300 something players in the nba.  About only 25 seriously "drive" the sport (and I'm probably being generous with that number).  Owners would be happy to pay their franchise people but the rest are overpaid, and extremely lucky to be earning the kind of money they earn. 

 

[gangsta207therevolution]

I wanted to touch on a few things.
Amare saying form our own league...

I think it could work, but thats only cause I know it could.
Basic structure
Guys invest an amount of money which is what they want to make back on the deal. Shoe companies, Owners who wanrt to cross the picket line etc invest in ownership / liability stakes in the league. But their investiment is not to exceed 40% of what the inital investiment is.
Amare Lebron Wade Howard, Kobe, put down 100 million total
Nike could put down 24 million in that situation for its guys Adidas could put down 8 for Howard, and Jordan Brand would put down 8 for Wade.

Deeper finanical structure.
Similar to the NBA, but the players take the pitfalls of any potiental losses. say the league ends up in a 2 million dollar hole,there are 100 shares in a team 2000 in the league the loss gets distributed evenly so that's a 1000 loss for every share.
on the flip side the league makes 100 million then each share gets 50k. 1 million dollars equals a share.
If the league was more of a trial thing, and the NBA were back next season, then the NBA and its owners would pay back each of the initial investments to buy out the leagues right to operate. Meaning if 200 million were invested in the league the NBA would pay the players, and the people who invested in the league every cent they invested before negotiations of the actual NBA CBA started.

Why this would benefit players? If the players are actually the product we will know within 6 weeks of the leagues operation.
NBC, Fox, CBS even ESPN and ABC would be fighting for the TV rights especially at the start insuring with the right mix of venues profit, and NBA owners either investing, or falling over their ++$ to get back into good faith negotiations.
With rules and regulations about ownership after retirement guys could have built in retirement plans.

Why it wouldn't work. While I think the players need to do this for themselves, and if the lockout extends a lot further, they would have no clue as to how to do it. More over agents and lawyers would run the league just like they do now. Guys will stick on longer than they should because of their stakes in the team. For this to work you need a core group of guys,  and the shoe companies and high net worth individuals to invest and hold the players accountable for things like when a guy retires, and coaching decisions, personal decorum etc.
Its a headache, and if people who are billionares, and have master degrees and Phd's cannot do it what makes me think Lebron James, Kobe Bryant can do it and not piss everyone else off?


that's the next step if Stern wants to act like he didnt prepetuate the sentement Wade displayed in that meeting.

Kobe and Kevin Garnett are looking at this situation with the only sane eyes in the whole thing.
The 1999 CBA cost Kobe at least 100 million, prob cost Garnett 40, and that's not to mention in great depth the Rookie contracts which Garnett might have been signed for even more money. At least half of the NBA's teams would have given Shaq 49 million in 92, only the bucks would have given Glenn Robinson 87 million in 94.
Im of the thought that if you take away guaranteed contracts then the rookie cap should be gone. You can point to the NFL and technically the NBA as examples where it didnt work, but why not make them all free agents? College can still have its hypocritical rules about eligibility and violation of it once you hire an agent, but let it be a free market. if that's not viable how about letting a team have a scale, but being able to abandon it, and putting in and arbitration. Why not after 2 years let John Wall have an arbitrator access his performance? You can still have a salary cap, and give the arbitrator the freedom to use Bird rights and Luxury tax money. If the arbitrator puts a team into Lux tax then instead of dollar for dollar, let it be dollar for 25 cents or something like that, which still penalises a team for making bad moves.
My idea for rookies would be whatever the team wants to pay a guy they draft him and pay him that, then after 2 years the arbitrator accesses the performance and determines the salary for the next year. If a team decides to reject arbitration then the guy is a FA. Years that can be accessed by an arbitrator are years 2-5, so that teams still get 5 years with a guy via qualifying offers. Once your vested, as in 5 years then max length of contracts is 4 years. Before your vested a team can sign you for all of your arbitration years so a max of 5 years. No max salary just a cap, and luxury tax.
How is it that a sport which isn't as popular world wide as the NBA or NFL will have the easiest negotiations, unless Bud and the owners try to stick it to Michael Weiner.

 

[gangsta207therevolution]

I wanted to touch on a few things.
Amare saying form our own league...

I think it could work, but thats only cause I know it could.
Basic structure
Guys invest an amount of money which is what they want to make back on the deal. Shoe companies, Owners who wanrt to cross the picket line etc invest in ownership / liability stakes in the league. But their investiment is not to exceed 40% of what the inital investiment is.
Amare Lebron Wade Howard, Kobe, put down 100 million total
Nike could put down 24 million in that situation for its guys Adidas could put down 8 for Howard, and Jordan Brand would put down 8 for Wade.

Deeper finanical structure.
Similar to the NBA, but the players take the pitfalls of any potiental losses. say the league ends up in a 2 million dollar hole,there are 100 shares in a team 2000 in the league the loss gets distributed evenly so that's a 1000 loss for every share.
on the flip side the league makes 100 million then each share gets 50k. 1 million dollars equals a share.
If the league was more of a trial thing, and the NBA were back next season, then the NBA and its owners would pay back each of the initial investments to buy out the leagues right to operate. Meaning if 200 million were invested in the league the NBA would pay the players, and the people who invested in the league every cent they invested before negotiations of the actual NBA CBA started.

Why this would benefit players? If the players are actually the product we will know within 6 weeks of the leagues operation.
NBC, Fox, CBS even ESPN and ABC would be fighting for the TV rights especially at the start insuring with the right mix of venues profit, and NBA owners either investing, or falling over their ++$ to get back into good faith negotiations.
With rules and regulations about ownership after retirement guys could have built in retirement plans.

Why it wouldn't work. While I think the players need to do this for themselves, and if the lockout extends a lot further, they would have no clue as to how to do it. More over agents and lawyers would run the league just like they do now. Guys will stick on longer than they should because of their stakes in the team. For this to work you need a core group of guys,  and the shoe companies and high net worth individuals to invest and hold the players accountable for things like when a guy retires, and coaching decisions, personal decorum etc.
Its a headache, and if people who are billionares, and have master degrees and Phd's cannot do it what makes me think Lebron James, Kobe Bryant can do it and not piss everyone else off?


that's the next step if Stern wants to act like he didnt prepetuate the sentement Wade displayed in that meeting.

Kobe and Kevin Garnett are looking at this situation with the only sane eyes in the whole thing.
The 1999 CBA cost Kobe at least 100 million, prob cost Garnett 40, and that's not to mention in great depth the Rookie contracts which Garnett might have been signed for even more money. At least half of the NBA's teams would have given Shaq 49 million in 92, only the bucks would have given Glenn Robinson 87 million in 94.
Im of the thought that if you take away guaranteed contracts then the rookie cap should be gone. You can point to the NFL and technically the NBA as examples where it didnt work, but why not make them all free agents? College can still have its hypocritical rules about eligibility and violation of it once you hire an agent, but let it be a free market. if that's not viable how about letting a team have a scale, but being able to abandon it, and putting in and arbitration. Why not after 2 years let John Wall have an arbitrator access his performance? You can still have a salary cap, and give the arbitrator the freedom to use Bird rights and Luxury tax money. If the arbitrator puts a team into Lux tax then instead of dollar for dollar, let it be dollar for 25 cents or something like that, which still penalises a team for making bad moves.
My idea for rookies would be whatever the team wants to pay a guy they draft him and pay him that, then after 2 years the arbitrator accesses the performance and determines the salary for the next year. If a team decides to reject arbitration then the guy is a FA. Years that can be accessed by an arbitrator are years 2-5, so that teams still get 5 years with a guy via qualifying offers. Once your vested, as in 5 years then max length of contracts is 4 years. Before your vested a team can sign you for all of your arbitration years so a max of 5 years. No max salary just a cap, and luxury tax.
How is it that a sport which isn't as popular world wide as the NBA or NFL will have the easiest negotiations, unless Bud and the owners try to stick it to Michael Weiner.

 

[duba169]

A ten percent cut is big. Don't forget that the second the new cba is up they will be asking for another ten percent cut.

 

[duba169]

A ten percent cut is big. Don't forget that the second the new cba is up they will be asking for another ten percent cut.

 

[scotty pimpin]

Man at this point, I don't give a $$@$ who gets screwed; whether it be the players or owners. Jut get a @*!!$$@ deal done already!!!!

 

[scotty pimpin]

Man at this point, I don't give a $$@$ who gets screwed; whether it be the players or owners. Jut get a @*!!$$@ deal done already!!!!

 

[harlemtothebronx]

Originally Posted by SCOTTY PIMPIN

Man at this point, I don't give a $$@$ who gets screwed; whether it be the players or owners. Jut get a @*!!$$@ deal done already!!!!

 

[harlemtothebronx]

Originally Posted by SCOTTY PIMPIN

Man at this point, I don't give a $$@$ who gets screwed; whether it be the players or owners. Jut get a @*!!$$@ deal done already!!!!