Ok for clarity sake, and to stop this back and forthing and arguing all over the place, here is what I would like to see implemented. 1. Revenue sharing for all teams. 2. Draft with players getting one year roll over deals, team options in year 2,3,4,& 5 3. One year Franchise tag 4. Elimination of sign and trade 5. Hard cap 6. Teams that originally draft player can offer 5 year extention - other teams 3 years. 7. All contracts have team and player options after 5th year in league. 8. 5% of all revenue set aside in a bonus pool for final 4 teams. 9. Teams must spend 90% of their cap every year. I think that about covers it....I might have missed something but that would be a system that promoted competitive balance. DD
another thing from the Owneres. I think attendance is less and less the revenue source. We need less games. I am a diehard, but there just TOO many meaningless games. I think 52/60 games is good at max really. Make them count more, Tv deals to compensate the money difference
Never happen, the TV deals would shrink then too....look at MLB, they have 162 games, too danged many. DD
The owners will never agree to this. Why can't the players get an option? The players will never agree to this and I doubt you can list many examples to show that it's even necessary. And to be clear, I don't think the LeBron or Melo situations qualify, unless you can finally answer why a team should have rights to restrict a players movement 7+ years into their career. Well the league is currently trying to make this harder. Your posts make it appear that you don't realize this does benefit the prior team. The players will never agree to this. Not a bad idea, but it still won't discourage guys that truly want to leave from leaving. LeBron passed on his max extension with Cleveland once (the max years) and was willing to do it again to go to Miami. How can a contract have a team and player option? To be clear, please define competitive balance? Our definitions may be different, but I believe my earlier post clearly shows that competitive balance and parity are myths in the NBA. Two franchises have combined for over half of the titles and the league is most popular when one of those 2 are winning. Every decade besides the 70's, when the league was in trouble, revolved around 2 teams winning the majority of the titles.
again, with you not supporting free agency. why should carmelo anthony never be allowed to leave the nuggets just because they drafted him? why should denver's ability to suck horribly guarantee them a star until he's old and washed up and they don't want him any more? and i'm sure those short, non-guaranteed contracts that would make stars into free agents even more often will make it even harder for them to leave and much less likely that they could hold a team hostage who desperately wants to keep them each time their contract is up.
and by the organization that drafted him, you mean the organization that acquired melo through poorly running their organization to the point they were one of the worst teams in the league and the organization that then mooched money off of melo's talents and popularity for 7.5 years. that organization? apparently the punishment for poorly running your organization is 7.5 years of service from a highly valuable employee. you mean 3 or 4 teams in big cities that built up cap room, right? i think you may have forgotten that. and by get all the talent, i assume you mean after everyone else has had, in almost every single case so far, at least 7 years to use that talent for no other reason than luck? when will somebody think of the poor teams who only get 7 years back on their investment of being a terrible team? some more of that good ol' fashioned "free" agency. unless you're an owner, apparently. the system caused such a drastic loss of popularity last year that ratings went up 30%. must be like one of those diets where you have to gain weight before you lose weight.
tell george shinn to not leave a basketball-loving city and relocate to a [censored] of a city and then whine about the fact that it didn't magically start paying all of his bills. apparently the solution to shinn's terrible decision making is to have the players give back some more money to help him cover his costs. apparently the owners also want to be able to move wherever they want and make as much money as possible.
Wait, please explain how Denver poorly ran their organization. THey had Chaunce, Nene, Kenyon martin, Affalo, Smith. They brought in Talent, brought in Money, they made his playoffs his regular season. showed they were willing to move pieces AND spend big money. Had a winning coach, I mean they literally did everything they could to convince him to stay.
He left to go play with another star player, in his hometown. The Knicks also have a shot to bring in a 3rd star player. Amare is better than any player Melo ever played with in Denver. I'm not saying they failed but they had 7 seasons to build a title contending supporting cast and they didn't do it. Things may have been different if they did. Let's look at recent champs. 09-10 Lakers - It took them what, 4 seasons to build a title contender around Kobe? And this was done via the draft and trades. 08 Celtics - They put that team together in one offseason, via trades. 07, 05, 03 Spurs - It took 4 years to rebuild the team from the 99 team that won the title. 06 Heat - It took 3 years to build a title contender around Wade. 04 Pistons - Assuming this one took a few years....too lazy to look. 00-02 Lakers - Shaq arrived in 96 I believe, so it took 4 seasons. 99 Spurs - Won in Duncan's 2nd season but he joined a ready squad so can't really count this. 94-95 Rockets - It obviously took forever to build around Hakeem but his loyalty is rare. Bulls title teams - It took around the same time to build around MJ, but the studs (Pippen & Grant) were drafted by his 4th year I believe. I don't think Melo is on the level of any of those guys who led the above teams to titles, but 7 years is really a long time. So if you have the chance to go play for the hometown and join a player better than any teammate you've ever had?
by BeefySwats on Nov 15, 2011 Of the 450 active NBA players, including Al Harrington and Derek Fisher, each and every one of them is the product by which the NBA makes its fortune. You and I and every other NBA fan don’t pay to watch Stan Kroenke or Donald Sterling sit in their luxury boxes. We pay to watch the talent on the floor. These players have skillsets and abilities that are irreplaceable – by which I mean, the NBA cannot put forth a product fans will watch without them. I certainly would not watch a “scab” NBA. This includes both superstars and non-superstars. A big issue is that people naturally try to relate to the players as regular employees: “What the ****? I don’t get a share of the profits for working at Subway and my job ****ing sucks! Why should they get a share for doing something awesome?” I think a much more obvious counter-argument for the players would be that the owners bring absolutely nothing unique to the league. They are all merely rich white guys who provide capital, something this country has plenty of. If the NBA as a business completely self-destructed and you were going to build a new league from scratch and you had to choose which group to keep, would you pick the owners or the players? I think the answer is obvious. The players have wholly unique abilities and skills that are irreplaceable, while the owners just provide cash and arenas. You argue that the Derek Fishers and Al Harringtons of the NBA get “unnecessarily showered with millions of dollars thanks to mid-level exemptions, luxury tax thresholds and other loop holes available to NBA general managers that ensure a player is worth whatever the dumbest of 30 owners is willing to pay for said player’s services.” How is that the fault of the players, exactly? Is the argument really “ownership and management is too dumb to competently run and NBA franchise without additional rules to protect from themselves?” Because that’s what I’m getting from that statement. Who, exactly, forced Orlando to make Rashard Lewis the highest paid player in the league? Did Kenyon Martin strongarm Kiki Vandeweghe into giving him a massive contract? It boggles my mind that “mediocre players being overpaid” is the argument central to your post. Owners have extended offers that offer no concessions from their previous share of the CBA. Their offers are “(1) Cut off a foot and here’s a cane or (2) cut off both and here’s a wheelchair”. The players were willing to take an 8% paycut and the owners are demanding they take 18%. After one of the most successful seasons/postseasons in NBA history. Over ten years that is three billion dollars. Here, this is how many zeroes that is: 3,000,000,000. Eating a pay cut because the owners want their generally profitable while steadily increasing value in a down economy investments to make MORE money is ridiculous. The dudes with a monopoly on basically all north american basketball and by far the world’s most popular league, in their unlimited intellectual capacity, can’t make a ****ing profit. Even Michael Jordan suggested that former Wizards owner Abe Pollin should consider selling his team if he couldn’t run it well enough to handle the costs. People are saying they’re not negotiating in good faith because the offers have largely been insulting, based on almost definitely misleading proclamations of financial losses, and designed to be rejected to keep the lockout going. Remember we’re not just talking about the offers the league has presented, but the manner in which they’ve conducted even the scheduling of these negotiations. This isn’t even hardball. This is just “What you don’t want this **** tamale? The next offer will be **** crackers, so it would be wise* to take the tamale now. b****es.” Tim Keown puts the negotiations in more easily understood terms here : And although it’s possible there are NBA teams losing money, this whole operation — charade, even — is designed to allow the owners to use the players to save them from themselves. “We were very close, and the players decided to blow it up,” Stern said. The players, according to him, are “hell-bent on destruction.” Such angry, militaristic words delivered in such a resigned, avuncular tone. Going in, we all knew this was going to get ugly, right? Everyone knew the owners were playing for keeps this time, and they’re holding up their end. The siren call was sounded after the NBA Finals in June, when Charles Barkley predicted there would be no season this season. Throughout the process, Stern seems intent on infantilizing the players and their position. He figuratively pats them on the head — he knows what’s best for you, remember — while employing questionable negotiating tactics. Case in point: Prefacing a proposal by saying that if it’s rejected, every subsequent proposal is going to get progressively worse. In truth, that’s not negotiating at all. In most bargaining rooms, he would have been called an extortionist and tossed into the hallway. In certain circles, it’s called blackmail. All of the proposed eliminations, save the luxury tax (I personally believe there should be a hard cap based around BRI) seem like proposals to further insuluate idiotic management from itself. Eliminating guaranteed contracts, despite being a huge “**** you” to a group of players who sacrifice their bodies to play at the highest level, won’t prevent teams from making bad decisions (it’s a terrible thing in the NFL and it would be terrible in the NBA). Nor will eliminating MLEs. A league that was truly concerned with competitive balance would implement a revenue sharing system that distributed money amongst the smaller markets equally based on total BRI. But I have yet to see one whit of evidence that owners are truly concerned with making the league competitive in the way you describe. What owners ARE concerned with is making their franchises as profitably as possible while putting the absolute bare minimum of a competitive product on the floor. Look at Michael Jordan trading away Gerald Wallace, or Memphis giving away Pau Gasol. Those weren’t moves made to increase competitiveness, they were purely about saving money. In all, I mostly take issue with the fact that I don’t believe that your post and other major media outlets are not presenting this issue fairly (which is no surprise when it comes to labor relations in America). Players have shown a willingness to compromise on both their take of the BRI as well as systems issues, and owners keep saying “not enough” despite massive concessions. Why isn’t there more being made of this? Why is the focus all on the players “rejecting the deal” instead of the owners asking employees to take a massive pay cut without putting out the concrete financial numbers to prove it? If the league as a whole – and that is key – is losing revenue, then why not show it? What are the local communities feelings about building the teams massive arenas that aren’t being used right now? In the end, this whole lockout is a farce and wholly on the owners of this league. Owners like Paul Allen, Michael Jordan, Dan Gilbert and yes, even Stan Kroenke, are responsible for this NBA “nuclear winter” by refusing to come to compromise that isn’t a total screwjob of the players. Make no mistake about it. http://www.denverstiffs.com/2011/11/15/2562865/nuclear-winter-is-upon-us-nba-lockout#storyjump
I think this point will be proven untrue. People understate what the owners and stern do in lying infrastructure to make the stars who they are. Their talents are the foundation of it all, but neither would be so great without the other. That said, if the owners got scabs and played, eventually we would continue to watch it. We only pay to watch teh stars? Well, how well does the College basketball TV ratings do? With stars or no stars, people love the competition and line up to watch the team they root for or just good games. IF the NBA marketed it right and fans will still resonate with the team that represents their cities in this grand scale. Eventually new stars will rise and we will cheer them on. one way or another the owners circulate and the players circulate, things move on every tyime, we just want to watch some good basketball.
