NBA Collective Bargaining: The League Needs To Contract and Expand
I am all for union rights and their ability to get people jobs with fair and equal treatment across the board. They make sure that people will have their jobs and do everything in their power to make sure there is job expansion rather than job contraction.
This whole small market thing really isn’t working out. The shift of American economics have more people watching games from home on flat screen HDTVs, instead of going to games and spending a few hundred bucks on a single evening out with the friends or family.
This takes away ticket, concession, parking and whatever other revenue that owners rely on to make their nut.
The rising prices of tickets, concessions ($9 for ¢50 worth of beer...please), parking, souvenirs and jerseys, combined with people wanting to save money, leads to NBA owners losing money.
The owners instead are going to have to start relying more on other sources of income like local television contracts and sponsorship money.
We all know the owners claimed that they lost over $400M last year, but it’s their own fault for the most part. They are the ones that let the spending on player contracts get out of control. Darko isn’t worth his $20M contract, nor is Amir Johnson worth anything close to the $30-plus million that he ended up receiving.
Kobe is making a little over $25M this year, which I guess is kind of a bargain for a man with his skill set with how the market has been set.
The Lakers can afford that though. They just signed a lucrative television contract with FOX Sports. There are teams like the Knicks that have their own television deal. There will probably be some other larger market teams that are going to be looking for that deal.
I’m sure Mark Cuban is going to be looking into it. I am a little surprised that some of the Mavericks games don’t end up on HDNET in some form or another. With all the sports content that HDNET has on it, it’d make sense and it’d also make the Mavericks more of a national team.
More merchandise sales.
Sadly, I’ll have to go a little Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on everybody here for a few moments.
The NBA needs to contract, but yet expand at the same time.
Six teams need to be eliminated. Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Memphis, Sacramento, Charlotte and let’s say Minnesota because that franchise is a mess.
Actually let’s slow down just a bit and let’s not contract OKC and Memphis. Let’s actually move them back to where they belong and from which they should have never moved. Let’s get the Sonics back to Seattle and forever forget about the rip-off Knicks jerseys with the Doritos style logo we saw in OKC. Let’s also forget about how Stu Jackson ruined basketball in Vancouver and get the Grizzlies back to VBC. There are no Grizzlies in Tennessee, there are however, quite a few in the British Columbia province. So now we can thankfully have one less really confusing name in the NBA.
For you Oklahomans who say Seattle didn’t support the team and want to argue that point, watch Sonicsgate and educate yourselves.
Utah, it’s time to let the Jazz nickname go. We know music isn’t allowed in your state.
In the disbursement draft we’ll end up with guys like Chris Paul in Cleveland (only for a year though), Tyreke Evans in Detroit and DeMarcus Cousins playing for Golden State.
Stephen Jackson will become a bench player for a contender and guys like Marco Belinelli will find themselves completely out of the league. It’s okay though, he can go back to Italy and not make baskets and not play defense.
Seattle and Vancouver can reopen the game back to Japan and China, bring back those massive corporate dollars that each city provided to the NBA and probably start helping the league dig out of the hole.
Seattle and Vancouver provide more corporate dollars per capita than the six cities that would lose their teams in this scenario combined. Also not to mention that the earnings in Seattle and Vancouver are also a lot higher per person than they would be in any of the cities previously mentioned.
The NBA has mentioned in recent interviews (by David Stern on BS Report with Bill Simmons and Adam Silver with Biz Journal) that they do miss the Seattle and Vancouver markets. They miss all the extra revenue and exposure those markets bring.
You can bet that Mark Cuban would love to have the OKC and New Orleans markets back for himself. That is more money for him and more money for him to get star players into a top five market.
Another benefit for saving ownership money by trading six teams for two is there are less players to pay overall. If there is a hard cap, there will be less people who can make $20M or a more a year and completely destroy the economic marketplace of the game.
The finances of the league need to be tightened up on both sides. Players do not need to make concessions on their salaries. It’s gotten a little bit out of control and they need to rein it in. Owners need to quit being so stupid on how they spend their money and the contracts that they hand out.
They need to finance their own arenas rather than relying on a broke public to pay for their palaces. Those palaces have nicer seats and lots of great amenities, but for the average fan they are further from the court and cost twice as much if not more than a game just 15 years ago cost.
The game was better in smaller, more intimate arenas like KeyArena, the Forum, Boston Garden and old Chicago Stadium. You were on top of the court, on top of the person next to you. You could taste the sweat, the blood and the energy.
The fans didn’t have to rely on these giant cash-sucking caverns to tell them what to do. If you wanted a hot dog or a beer, you got one from the vendor walking up and down the aisle. If you wanted to stand and cheer for your team you didn’t feel so weird doing it without a cue from the scoreboard and multimillion-dollar sound system.
I think by eliminating a few teams and cutting back player costs we can get back to where the owners aren’t so money hungry. They will no longer run the league like a business. They will want to win championships, and families can attend more than one or two games a year.
I know this scenario is completely wishful thinking on my part and the chances that the NBA even eliminates one team are slim to none.
If the NBA wants to be truly successful it’s time to end this small-market experiment and go back to the big markets. Seems to work out for the NFL. They tend to make a few billion a year and play much fewer games.
