Wow, K-Mart! At least he realizes how lucky he is. That's the only player quote I've seen that doesn't reek of self-entitlement and arrogance about this being the players' league.
Wade makes more money from endorsements than he does with his NBA contract. To be honest I didn't think guys like Wade, Kobe, and KG would be this willing to miss games. They are set for life. Both sides are being irrational and greedy, but it's easy to say that when the money is not yours.
For me it is on the players being greedy. I know it's not my money, but they get paid tons to do what they do. If you paid me 40k a year to play ball, I think most people would be happy with that. With that said, the owners are greedy as well. They are businessmen, that's like a requisite for being one. Also though, they can actually LOSE money and they say they are. The players on the other hand are not losing money, they only gain. They only lose money when they lose games...the sad part is they will have to cave eventually and they are just delaying the inevitable.
Frankly, you'd have to be a complete idiot to play professional basketball for 40 K a year. There is no way a professional basketball player over the course of his career should not make enough money to take care of himself for the rest of his life.
You are talking about one owner vs a union. You are not talking about the NBA. read this: Hunter: "The bigger market (owners), the guys who want to cut a deal, don't have the votes This is a multiple owner situation. The owners don't agree with each other. So, I guess in your terms, some owners have a deficient understanding of economics and others don't?
This is completely silly. The NFL players did this...and they aren't regretting it now, or much less, for the rest of their lives. It's obvious you simply hate the players for some reason. And I hate the owners. And I guarantee you as a 10yr season ticket-holder that I have far more reasons to hate the owners than you have to hate the players. What are your reasons for hating the union so much that you skew everything into something like "they are idiots and greedy." If you want to call them idiots and greedy, I can offer you a Malcom Gladwell article explain exactly that about the owners...that some do not operate on business logic...they operate on "psychic benefits" of owning a team and don't care about making a profit. And that is proven to be true for decades of every sport.
Really a basketball player deserves to live comfortably his whole life? HE PLAYS A GAME MOST PEOPLE PLAY FOR FREE....Basket ball doesnt change lives folks... logic like this, logic that says.. ATHLETES DESERVE EVERYTHING makes the players greedy.. and the owners as well..
This is pretty much how I feel now too. http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/15775427/after-latest-nba-impasse-good-luck-finding-someone-who-cares More at the link.
The funny part about K-Mart's comments, for me: who the hell has a 9-to-5 job anymore? I guess there are a few out there, but most everybody works more than 40 hours a week at their main job (or two jobs, to get by), and tons of us work most nights and weekends after we get home, via glorious technology. So, I'm just saying right on, K-Mart, and you don't even know how much you guys don't know! /rant!
If you can't "take care of yourself" for the rest of your life with $2 million then you don't deserve my pity.
Okay, let's play. Take an average player like Jason Maxiell or Jose Calderon. They earn 40 K a year playing basketball, and their careers end by the time they're 32. And when they get out of the league? They're freaking screwed. So why would they play basketball?
here it is...good read. he's such a good writer: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6874079/psychic-benefits-nba-lockout and the text is here, spoilered for length: Spoiler he Boston Red Sox signed their first black player in 1959, a utility infielder named "Pumpsie" Green.1 This was 12 years after the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the color line with Jackie Robinson. No other team in baseball dragged its feet on integration like the Red Sox. It wasn't until 1965, in fact — 18 years after Robinson started at second base for the Dodgers — that Boston had its first full-time black player. Why? The simple answer — that the Red Sox owner at the time, Tom Yawkey, was a racist — is not terribly satisfying. Lots of racists are happy to hire black people, particularly if they can exploit them as spectacularly as baseball owners exploited their players in the postwar years.2 There was a lot of money to be made by raiding the Negro Leagues in the 1940s. The talent pool was extraordinary: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Willie Mays, among others. The Sox were well aware of this. They tried out Mays and Robinson — both of whom they could have used in the lean years of the 1950s, when the team was known as "Ted Williams and the Seven Dwarfs." In a recent academic paper, the economist Jonathan Lanning has also shown that almost without exception integration in the 1940s and 1950s had an immediate and significant positive impact on a team's attendance — even in cities where you might not think the fan base would be enthusiastic.3 Lanning calculates, in fact, that almost no team in baseball had as much to gain financially from bringing in black players as the Red Sox, particularly since they were losing money in the 1940s. Yawkey's bigotry left millions of dollars on the table. Yawkey was not just a racist, in other words. He was a racist who put his hatred of black people ahead of his desire to make money. Economists have a special term they use to describe this kind of attitude. They would say that Yawkey owned the Red Sox not to maximize his financial benefits, but, rather, his psychic benefits. Psychic benefits describe the pleasure that someone gets from owning something — over and above economic returns — and clearly some part of the pleasure Yawkey got from the Red Sox came from not having to look at black people when he walked through the Fenway Park dugout. In discussions of pro sports, the role of psychic benefits doesn't get a lot of attention. But it should, because it is the key to understanding all kinds of behavior by sports owners — most recently the peculiar position taken by management in the NBA labor dispute. The rationale for the NBA lockout, from the owner's perspective, goes something like this. Basketball is a business. Businesses are supposed to make money. And when profits are falling, as they are now for basketball teams, a business is obliged to cut costs — which in this case means the amount of money paid to players. In response, the players' association has said two things. First, basketball teams actually do make money. And second, if they don't, it's not the players' fault. When the two sides get together, this is what they fight about. But both arguments miss the point. The issue isn't how much money the business of basketball makes. The issue is that basketball isn't a business in the first place — and for things that aren't businesses how much money is, or isn't, made is largely irrelevant. Basketball teams, of course, look like businesses. They have employees and customers and offices and a product, and they tend to be owned, in the manner of most American businesses, by rich white men. But scratch the surface and the similarities disappear. Pro sports teams don't operate in a free market, the way real businesses do. Their employees are 25 years old and make millions of dollars a year. Their customers are obsessively loyal and emotionally engaged in their fortunes to the point that — were the business in question, say, discount retailing or lawn products — it would be considered psychologically unhealthy. They get to control their labor through the draft in a way that would be the envy of other private sector owners, at least since the Civil War. And they are treated by governments with unmatched generosity. Congress gives professional baseball an antitrust exemption. Since 2000, there have been eight basketball stadiums either built or renovated for NBA teams at a cost of $2 billion — and $1.75 billion of that came from public funds.4 And did you know that under the federal tax code the NFL is classified as a nonprofit organization?5 Big genial Roger Goodell, he of the almost $4 billion in television contracts, makes like he's the United Way. But most of all professional sports owners don't have to behave like businessmen. For every disciplined and rational operator like the Patriots' Robert Kraft or Mark Cuban, there is also someone like Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder. Snyder was a brilliant entrepreneur, who at the age of 36 sold Snyder Communications — the marketing company he built from scratch — for an estimated $2 billion. He has subsequently run the Redskins like a petulant 14-year-old fantasy owner. Snyder Communications was a business. The Redskins are a toy. The former he ran to solely maximize profit. The latter he runs for his psychic benefit — as a reward for all the years he spent being disciplined and rational. And it is one of the surreal qualities of professional sports that they are as welcoming and lucrative for those owners who chose to behave like 14-year-olds as they are of those owners who chose to behave like grown-ups. The Financial Times recently interviewed Diego Della Valle, the chief executive of the Italian luxury goods manufacturer Tod's. Della Valle owns the celebrated Italian football club Fiorentina. "I ask if the decision to buy the club was made from the heart, or for business reasons," the Financial Times interviewer writes. Della Valle replies: "With football, business reasons don't exist." Exactly. Yawkey did not have "business reasons" with the Red Sox either. Why did he care that keeping the club lily white cost him millions of dollars? He inherited $40 million from his grandfather when he turned 30 in 1933 (which is roughly $700 million in today's money). He fell in love with baseball growing up in Detroit. Ty Cobb was one of his best friends. The Red Sox were his heart's desire, and in his case his heart's desire — so the story goes — included things like running out on the field during Jackie Robinson's tryout and yelling "Get those [expletive] off the field." In case you were wondering how this kind of thing goes over with the baseball establishment, Yawkey was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1980.6 The best illustration of psychic benefits is the art market. Art collectors buy paintings for two reasons. They are interested in the painting as an investment — the same way they would view buying stock in General Motors. And they are interested in the painting as a painting — as a beautiful object. In a recent paper in Economics Bulletin, the economists Erdal Atukeren and Aylin Seçkin used a variety of clever ways to figure out just how large the second psychic benefit is, and they put it at 28 percent.7 In other words, if you pay $100 million for a Van Gogh, $28 million of that is for the joy of looking at it every morning. If that seems like a lot, it shouldn't. There aren't many Van Goghs out there, and they are very beautiful. If you care passionately about art, paying that kind of premium makes perfect sense. Pro sports teams are a lot like works of art. Forbes magazine annually estimates the value of every professional franchise, based on standard financial metrics like operating expenses, ticket sales, revenue, and physical assets like stadiums. When sports teams change hands, however, the actual sales price is invariably higher. Forbes valued the Detroit Pistons at $360 million. They just sold for $420 million. Forbes valued the Wizards at $322 million. They just sold for $551 million. Forbes said that the Warriors were worth $363 million. They just sold for $450 million. There are a number of reasons why the Forbes number is consistently too low. The simplest is that Forbes is evaluating franchises strictly as businesses. But they are being bought by people who care passionately about sports — and the $90 million premium that the Warriors' new owners were willing to pay represents the psychic benefit of owning a sports team. If that seems like a lot, it shouldn't. There aren't many NBA franchises out there, and they are very beautiful. The big difference between art and sports, of course, is that art collectors are honest about psychic benefits. They do not wake up one day, pretend that looking at a Van Gogh leaves them cold, and demand a $27 million refund from their art dealer. But that is exactly what the NBA owners are doing. They are indulging in the fantasy that what they run are ordinary businesses — when they never were. And they are asking us to believe that these "businesses" lose money. But of course an owner is only losing money if he values the psychic benefits of owning an NBA franchise at zero — and if you value psychic benefits at zero, then you shouldn't own an NBA franchise in the first place. You should sell your "business" — at what is sure to be a healthy premium — to someone who actually likes basketball. Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and most recently, What the Dog Saw. He is a consulting editor for Grantland; this is his first piece for the site.
What I don't understand about this logic (that the players aren't allowed to earn whatever they can on the open market) is would you say the same thing about movie stars, models and singers. Some of them are simply born gifted and have less trained skill than a sports star who worked his ass off in the gym to beat out other people for an NBA position. Do movie stars, models and singers deserve market and NBA players don't. Oh, and btw, they can make far more money than NBA stars can. Why are NBA stars not allowed to sign huge contracts as an entertainer like all entertainers can?
The issue here isn't whether the Players "deserve" to be making the amount of money they make to play a game that most people play for free. -The fact is the players are the only product that a multi billion dollar industry relies on for 100% of their revenue, and they are not just being asked to take a pay cut. They are being asked to take a huge pay cut from what they previously made, and give up workers rights that they should be entitled to in a Monopolized industry. This is something the Union has realized and been willing to negotiate on but I believe Fisher and Billy Hunter when they explain that this extended lockout has been pre-ordained and planned from the get-go. Its the new-money owners like Gilbert/Sarver who made bad deal after bad deal and didn't have the backing to manage an NBA team in the first place. To me, the more important issue for the NBA is how to clean up poorly managed operations, rather than spinning this PR campaign to make the players out to be the bad guys, and in the meantime re-inforcing racial divides that have been the elephant in the room in this country for a couple centuries. This lockout looks and feels bad, for so, so many reasons. In the end its the owners fault that a deal is not done, because they dont want a deal right now. They want power. They dont want the inmates running the prison any more.(ie summer of Lebron/Melo winter) The only way they win this emotional war is to buy enough time to make the players crumble at their knees in submission. Sounds more about power than money to me. This is a personal vendetta that selective owners have on "their players" that they feel wronged them by leaving their team. However, this personal vendetta will destroy the entire NBA, not just their personal teams that they have already run into the ground. The truth here is that the owners made this personal, and that will forever damage and could potentially destroy the NBA if Stern doesn't convince the owners to finally negotiate like a professional.
I'm a little surprised here. They're all walking away from a lot of money and, for the owners, their sense of obligation to tons of employees (not players, I mean.) But this definitely hurts my interest in the NBA, big time. It was waning already, outside of the Rockets, but I am one of those fans who will have a "well screw them all then" attitude for a good long while. Maybe I'll get some Olympiacos (sp) season tickets with SamFisher or something, go take in some barnball.
