This lockout has been a long time coming in the NBA as far as I'm concerned. A competitive balance in this league has been a farce for far too long. Most teams in the NBA never ever even get a whiff of competing for a ring. Don't believe me, well since 1980 that's 32 years of competitive play, 5 teams, yes only 5 teams have won 27 of those 32 championships. Lakers, Celtics, Chicago, Spurs and Detroit have won 84% of the championships in this league and barely 1/2 of the teams in the league in that same time frame, 18 of them have even made it to the finals. Since the 2 rings we've won, the Rox have won 1 playoff series in the last 15 years. Bad luck, maybe, but we've become one of the scrub teams also. Some teams stand no chance whatsoever of even competing in this league, it isn't just a couple of teams that lose their star players whenever they get a chance to leave but even some of the teams that try to stay competitive get sideswiped not because their management is just bad but because no one wants to go to those cities to play. Perfect example, think Orlando. Now Think NFL, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Oakland, Buffalo, teams with a history of great players who played their whole career in those cities with and without championships, these same cities wouldn't be able to compete in the NBA for players. No one would want to play there and as soon as they had a chance to leave, poof they're gone. Stern may have brought a lot more money to the table but the competitive balance of the league is a farce and has been for some time now. The owners of the have not cities are now losing money big time and they're sick and tired of losing every good player they do get to the elite cities and want a change. I'm thinking the answer is blowing in the wind my friends.
Cool. Uh, what? What does this have to do with free enterprise? If you wanted to make the professional sports more like free enterprise, you would first have to immediately eliminate all subsidies and tax breaks* it receives. You would then make the union purely voluntary and without any bargaining power. Without these direct and indirect state interferences, resources would be freed and the price distortions brought about by state intervention would be eliminated. Owners would make decisions based on profit and loss. Contracts, which almost assuredly wouldn't be guaranteed, would be smaller; stadiums would be more practical and less (superficially) impressive; and costs all around would go down. There would be drawbacks, of course. For example, due to the lower pay, one might argue that young basketball players would have less incentive to work on their games for a future contract, and that would result in a lower quality product. I'm not here making the case for the current cartelized system or a free-market approach, just trying to point out what would need to be done to make it free-market. *Or extend the tax breaks to everyone else... There's nothing necessarily "commie" about revenue sharing. Any private business could do it if it so desired. Whether it is good for long-term growth or not is another issue, but is an issue to be dealt with by those financially backing the business.
You are, of course, correct. Except the NBA is a governing body of sorts, albeit a private enterprise. I would just like to see team efforts rewarded more than than individual stat-stuffing. I'd like to see better basketball competition.
Trying to think of the other 5 teams that won besides those 27 Houston (twice) Dallas, Miami there is 1 team missing.
Do you want a fairly balanced league where every NBA team is near each other in terms of strength? Or do you want a league where there's only 2-3 "power teams" and the rest are just scrubs? Personally I don't care what happens in the NBA since we have one of the best FOs in the L and the owner isn't a cheap ass, but if you're a Minny Fan or a Pacers fan or a Kings fan, then you'd want more equity in the L. Stocks don't cost yearly maintenance once you buy it, so its ok for stock owners if the stocks go down since they can wait X years until it rises before they sell it. NBA teams don't just "sit on their owner's portfolios", the owner has to keep writing checks to pay the salaries of the players and all of the FO. Every year that the franchise loses fans because of the lousy record the owners needs to cough up dough so I don't see why EVERY team needs to lose money first before you can say there is a problem. What happens when 29 teams lose money but 1 team earns money? Is there still no problem? LOL
LOL this is a wrong analogy. Does the CEO own the large corporation? No he is an employee just like everybody else. This owners are well...the OWNERS. If I own something I should get the biggest piece of the pie, otherwise what's point of owning it? The mere fact that there are only 28 owners and 250 players means the owners are more special and rarer than the players.
I don't think you're going to see better basketball competition by allowing the haves to run rough-shod over the have-nots. There are market advantages to being in LA that help the Lakers....you have to mitigate against those in some fashion in order to keep competitive balance. And the franchises owners FREELY CONTRACT to do just that.
err that's far more redistributive than the current system....your train of logic is careening all over the rails from hardcore free-market to straight-up collectivism
Ummm No... I will miss my rockets and basketball in general like crazy!!!!! But i agree that the system is broke! I think there should definitly be a hard salary cap. There should be non guaranteed contracts. This would keep players playing at a high level not just in a contract year. The league should also follow the NFL regarding the minimum age requirements to enter the draft. I would love to adopt the franchise tagging system from the NFL. That would eliminate the Lebron/Cleveland issue that happened. Overall i would love to just see more balance between teams. I would love to see how the Lakers, Mavericks, and Heat can handle a hard salary cap! LoL A system where you can't simply buy championships. If it takes a whole season to get it done, then i am all for it!!!
Silver and Stern at press conference. <iframe width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/M-riwLGPVRA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I'm not sure if your serious but you do realize that the best (ie most profitatable) model for a league is the NFL. And that they are the most socialized in the sense of not just revenue sharing when it comes to TV deals but all the way down to merchandising. The system you are discribing would eventually only leave about 3 teams that would be profitable business. Moreover, if we want to go to a strictly capitalistic model maybe the owners can stop holding their respective cities hostage to build newer better arenas. Surely these capitalist don't want public money to reduce the amount of risk that they are putting into a private venture?
I have no clue how you can cite ORLANDO as an example of a team that's done everything right but their star wants to leave, and I would think that Orlando is a decently attractive free agent destination, because it's also in Florida. That team around Dwight is pathetically bad, and is filled with has-beens on ridiculous contracts. Denver's a better example, but that team was going nowhere and it seemed to be as much about Melo heading back home as it was about markets. Did you complain when Drexler came back home and played with his college buddy? I'm annoyed with the fact that the owners seem to think that they can all make a profit ( and I don't buy that 22 of them were losing money in this record season at all), and that parity is the end-all goal. I wasn't around then, but the 70s seem to be the decade with the best parity - and wasn't that the decade where the NBA nearly crashed until Bird-Magic?
Uhhh what? Do you know what it means to buy stock? It means you're buying ownership. Just because NBA franchises aren't publicly traded doesn't mean they're any different. Do you actually think JayZ forks over more money for "his team" than he does for any other asset lol? Nope, it's all exactly the same. The owners are crying because they bought their "stock" when it was at its highest and now they're trying to recoup, it's not very complicated.
