i dont understand why you guys keep saying hte owners have all the leverage?
honestly the only people with leverage in this issue are the stars - thats who people watch. The owners are replaceable there are lots of billionaires. The role players are replacable, there are hundreds of guys just as talented as derek fisher. Its the Kobes, lebrons, nash's, dirks, dwights, garnetts, pierces, wades, roses, griffins, stoudemires that are irreplaceable.
the stars are about to go on a world tour and kobe and lebron are each getting 1 mill from it. tahts just in 3 weeks of work.
Wow--your math (or logic) is so bad, you're not embarrassing Duke; you're embarrassing the entire Research Triangle. Kobe and Lebron would make as much in 3 weeks in the NBA than they would from this world tour. And in the NBA, they can do that times 15 or 20 or 25 every year--something that they cannot repeat nearly as often on a "tour."
You guys know sports didnt always exist with this structured league with balanced schedules culminating in a playoff. Sports used to be more like college football, with a bunch of games and then a bunch of trumped up exhibitions. Sports used to be more like the fair, it came to town every once in a while and everyone showed up to see the spectacle.
Yes, and that's what you would get if the players or these imaginary investors start up an alternative league.
If the players decide that they are tired of being insulted and condescended too then the nba is done. I went to school at duke, and they routinely sell out that stadium to see alumni play. I'm talking about guys like roshown mcleod and chris carrawell. And thats a school with a small local fanbase. At carolina, alumni games with guys like ed cota are hot tickets.
Yeah, Cameron indoor arena holds what--12,000? And you're talking what--one game a year?
You are really a bad representative of a Duke education.
It would be so easy to rebuild a pro basketball league using the college stadiums and stadiums in places like kansas city and seattle. It wouldnt be hard at all to find investors for the new league, investors who would be happy to take 43% of revenue (even if they calculated BRI differently). But it would never come to that, because if the players started to formulate a credible plan guys like buss and cuban would have no choice but to fold - lest their franchise values disintegrate.
Wow--I hope you don't have a Duke MBA or econ degree, because you are already embarrassing your school.
Let me fill you in on a concept: fixed costs. There's no way that the fictitious new league that you are dreaming about would get a $4 billion TV contract, because it would take years (if ever) to replicate the stability that the NBA has; the Utah Jazz are a great example of that.
Investing in or buying a sports franchise is already a poor-ROI proposition (look up ROI if your Duke education didn't teach you what that means), so you'll be hard-pressed to find 20+ entities who are willing to put up money for a new, alternative NBA that has to operate out of arenas that don't already have contracts in the NBA. I agree that possibly the optimal league size is about 25 teams, but the 30-team league can operate profitably at 50-50.
Why do you think the players are refusing to budge? Do you think a guy like garnett gives a **** about 53 v. 50 percent? He loses more in a single month, than he will over the difference in that number. Do you think his agent doesn't know that? The reason these guys are holding out is that they know that if push comes to shove they have alternatives - its the owners who have no leverage.
The most likely alternative to the current NBA is that the current NBA owners blow things up and start things over at a much lower cost basis, which would decimate the NBA players' salary. The superstars and journeymen alike are FAR better off taking the 50-50 and running. It is the owners who have alternatives; they have other businesses, and most of them already consider their NBA team as a poor ROI proposition, even at 50-50. Meanwhile, most NBA players have alternatives overseas at 1/2 the salary (see Deron). Or at McDonald's. The journeymen especially are crazy to let this holdout go longer, and I doubt that they've been able to vote on this with the knowledge of the real impact of this holdout.
The reason that Garnett and others are supporting this holdout is that their high-school education is telling him that being greedy is better than the more profitable alternative of partnering with the existing wildly successful NBA organization at 50-50. Which is about as much as your education is telling you.
