Having a convo with someone the other day and they don't beleive any team loses money. With sales, stadium, etc. I let him read the article about the Cavs owner losing 6 mill during the championship season. Any examples or someone want to shed more light on how owners lose money? Which teams in general do? I know Forbes puts articles here and there but I haven't looked at many.
I honestly don't know whether any team in the NBA loses money, but I do know that ultimately it is EXTREMELY difficult for owners to lose money in the long run. In the meantime, not every franchise makes similar money. This could be due to a multitude of factors. Payroll, stadium leasing costs, local TV revenue, fan patronage, market size, weather, amount of other forms of entertainment available in the city, local fan disposable income, cost of advertising, contracts with vendors, and on and on.
I think it was possible to lose money before, not sure now because League Pass and the tv deal they got pays a truck load of cash. Also take note "net loss" is different from actually losing money. Teams do all sorts of accounting tricks cuz they need to make it look like they are losing money so they get a higher cut of the pie from the players and to pay less taxes. For example they can say the arena is depreciating a lot and that leads to a massive net loss when in reality they aren't losing anything. I mean technically they don't even need to pay for the freaking arena, in PHX for example the tax payers are footing the bill Sarver just collects money from the league with only overhead cost lol. From what I've seen NBA teams make a ton of cash no matter what they say, the franchise valuation and NBA salaries keep going up thats not gonna happen if they are bleeding money left and right. Look at WNBA salaries thats a good indicator of a losing business.
With Regional Sports Networks (RSN) set-up the way they are, it''s difficult for NBA, NHL, or MLB teams to lose money / or not make a profit. Even if teams like NOLA Pelicans struggle to sell out stadiums, they still churn a profit due to the contracts set-up with their RSNs. Small market teams are sucessful a lot of times b/c they sell out stadiums regularly (OKC, Utah, SAS, etc.). Teams get greedy when they want to get new stadiums for more corporate suites. It's not that their losing money, it's b/c they want more money. If you were to ask, who is the least profitable team, i think it's NOLA
