I’m generally pretty ignorant about the economics of professional sports so maybe I’m missing something, but the thing that bugs me about the owners’ point of view in this whole thing is that it isn’t like these contracts they’re claiming are crippling the league are ancient history. If the real problem was a lot of holdover Shaq or Arenas-type contracts that still had some years left on them, then I think it’d be fair to say that conditions have changed, those terms should be revisited for the good of the league, whatever.
But fuck, owners. Joe Johnson just got 124 million last year. James/Wade/Bosh got like 320 million. And it’s not just the stars: Tyrus Thomas, 40 million. Brendan Haywood 55. Travis Outlaw 35. Richard Jefferson 40. In 2010. You didn’t see this coming? If it’s broken, who broke it?
While I’m somewhat more on the player side than the owner side, neither of them “broke” anything.
It’s a function of the market for basketball talent. The incremental value of a player is extremely high when a team is on the “bubble”. Make the playoffs, you are punching a ticket for millions of dollars of additional revenue. Miss the playoffs, and you lose out on money from extra games, and lack of interest in your team for the next year. For these teams, it’s “worth it” to blow big money on someone because they may be your ticket to big time money. From a team by team standpoint, it makes sense, but puts the hurt on teams that spend the money and don’t get the payoff.
The only way to reign in this spending is with pre-negotiated salary caps, not because owners are stupid, but because the market makes risky choices appear to make sense.
I side with the owners FWIW. Colin Cowherd mentioned something that is spot on: the superstars and scrubs are paid what they’re worth, the guys in the middle are usually WAY overpaid. This phenomenon is why we are where we are.
The system being broken is the NBA’s actual position, not an accusation I’m throwing at it. It’s all well and good to say this is what the market encourages, but it’s their own market, and it’s basically how every market works - spend more than the next guy, and do it wisely, and you’ll probably benefit from it. Maybe they want to rein in the big spenders and fix the problem that they’ve created where they pay tens of millions to get some marginal edge on each other, but at what point in there is there a legitimate justification for demanding that the players give up salary?
For the Nth time, the big issue is not really the contracts to guys like Joe Johnson or Eddy Curry. The owners are claiming a large loss (approx $200m) last year, partially because they had to pay the players 57% of basketball-related income. The funny thing? Despite all these awful contracts, player salaries still didn’t meet 57% on their own. The owners had to cut the players’ union a check to get to that number.
That’s why, in these negotiations, owners have been fairly quick to abandon a lot of their original proposals–non-guaranteed contracts, hard cap, etc. The big issue is really that percentage of income. Everything else exists on the periphery.
That throws my 6% thing out the window, I didn’t understand what was going on. Correct me if I’m wrong, the owners want to pay the players a total of 47% and the players want 53%?
Supposedly the owners are holding to a 50/50 split and the players are at 53/47. Sure, it’s “only” 3%, but when you’re cutting up $3.8 billion, each percentage point is pretty big. ($38 million, to be precise.)
I don’t understand why you’re treating it as a separate issue.
In the past, player salaries have constituted more than 57%, and the players have had to pay some of that back, agreed? Per this Nate Silver chart (about a quarter of the way down) it’s actually been 57%+ each year in the 2000s. I don’t know what accounts for the difference between his 2010 number and the one that led to the owners cutting that check - higher revenue from somewhere, I guess. But they’ve spent up to the line without any trouble, historically, and 2010 was the first time they cut such a check.
Regardless of what that means, though, if the revenue split dips enough in favor of the owners – say, by as much as the owners have been demanding – player salaries would necessarily have to dip to keep in line, since they’re already bumping against the current number. So why does it matter if last year they were a bit ($26 million) under the figure that they say is way too high anyway? They’re trying to cut salaries, is the bottom line.
I agree that they are trying to cut salaries en masse. I just bristle at the (oft-repeated) notion that the owners have created this horrible financial situation for themselves by handing out foolish contracts. The only way the owners have created this situation is by agreeing to the previous CBA in 2005.
The reason player salary dipped below 57% this past season was that teams started to become more wary of handing out dumb contracts. They still did, of course, but fiscal sanity was actually an option this past offseason. The reason for all the doom-and-gloom from the owners’ perspective is that overhead has been steadily increasing. The current split of BRI does not account for much of this overhead.
For example, the league can invest $100m in advertising in China. This advertising could generate $150m in revenue (advertising, streaming games, cable packages, whatever) and since it’s considered basketball-related income, they have to give 57% of it to the players. I suppose the league could try to eliminate all of these types of expenditures for short-term financial gains but clearly it’s in the long-term interests of the league to promote itself to the entire world.
I care. I love the NBA and hate football. This winter will suck even more
As opposed to those salt-of-the-earth owners. The owners are richer than the players.
Unless the owners are willing to open their books, assume they’re lying about their big losses. Until then, I’m with the players. Why should they take a cut? Shoot, last time the owners opened their books, they got a salary cap out of it. One of the worst precedents in sports.
If the owners are stuck having to pay the difference in the contract to the players’ union, I bet they’re looking to dump the salary cap.
I’m pretty sure they opened their books to the players months ago.
I live in a small town in southern Missouri and I do not know anyone that cares, including me. I have never been to an NBA game and I doubt most of my buddies have ever been to one. Memphis is the nearest NBA city.
I care. I’m a Raptors fan, painful though it is to be that. At least I have hockey.
As a Cavs fan, this works out well for me, as this will limit them to maybe 50 games of being terrible instead of 82. My only concern is whether the trade deadline will stay the same, because the Cavs have like 20 Forwards on the roster that need to be evaluated and dealt. I was also hoping Baron Davis could have the chance to give an nice audition to the contenders to maybe induce one of them into grabbing him for a playoff run, but they’re talking about maybe doing another Allan Houston amnesty, so they could just wipe him from the roster that way.
(Quick aside: I really get annoyed when professional athlete stat pages don’t include what their contract is and when it expires. This is crucial information when talking about NBA players, and I shouldn’t have to search for it)
Despite all that, I am disappointed in the NBA. I was actually very interested in the Cavs this season because I’m curious to see what moves they make and what direction they go. They’ve got a potentially solid foundation of Kyrie Irving at the point, Tristan Thomas and Omri Casspi at the forwards, Varejao at center, and Ramon Sessions off the bench. They really need to target a SG.
Apparently they didn’t open them enough.
http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/15317168/nba-losses-justify-player-pay-cuts-open-the-books-and-show-us They did not open them. The problem is if you present an argument that the players should take a cut because the owners are not making money, they have to prove it. Otherwise it would be stupid for the players to simply accept the honesty of the owners.
The owners overpay for teams because they want them badly enough due to ego . The evaluations of the teams is generally about 25 percent less than the new owners are willing to pay. They overpay because of vanity. Why should the players lose because of that? That should not be part of the salary equation.
Do you have a recent cite?
Why should the owners make their tax records available to the general public? We don’t have a need to know. They have given the players’ association their fully audited tax records, both for the teams and a league as a whole. There is still some debate about how much the league lost last year, but there’s not much of a debate that it did lose money.