What prevents say … Mark Cuban from buying a european team, say FC Barcelona, then signing the top 15 prospects in europe to long-term contracts, and then refusing to sell those contracts to teams that draft those players ?
Only allowing your team to get those players.
Would that violate some contract the owners have between themselves or with the league ?
what ? nothing ?
I believe the NBA has agreements in place with the basketball federations of various countries that preclude such arrangements. The European and Chinese federations have a vested interest in being able to wrangle as much money as they can from the NBA.
If Cuban was to try to buy FC Barcelona and sign Podkolzine, Andriuskevicius, Varejao, and all the other top foreign prospects down the line, he’d have a bunch of problems. First of all, the teams that had the rights to all these players would have to allow it, and I doubt that they would. (Any Chinese player, for example, is essentially the property of the government. When Yao Ming wanted to come over to the U.S. two years ago, there were a lot of questions about whether the Shanghai Sharks would allow him to leave -they prevented him from doing so for years- and also whether the government, which runs the entire basketball league over there, was going to force him to return from time to time for the national team. As it turned out, I think they ended up letting him go as long as he turned over some (significant) percentage of his salary to the government.) Every club could ostensibly refuse to allow their player to negotiate, or demand some significant payments, but let’s assume Cuban can afford it.
So Cuban manages to pay up enough to acquire all these guys. He’s still got a major problem. There are no “minor leagues” of the NBA in the sense that players can be called up to one team, and only one team. The only way to play in the NBA is to enter the draft first- you can’t just start out as a free agent. Anybody on Cuban/FC Barcelona would still be subject to these rules. When Podkolzine’s ready to move into the NBA, he’s got to enter the draft, and so Cuban’s got no control over where he goes. That’s really what it all boils down to, I guess, so my answer could’ve been a lot shorter- you don’t own a player in the NBA unless he’s been through the draft.