The NBA Lockout: It's Gonna Happen, And It's Gonna Be Worse Than The NFL

And get the community psychologically invested in the team again.

When I was younger, we used to go to the Suns all the time and I developed a lifelong love for the team. And everybody I knew felt the same way. We went when they were good, and we went when they were awful, because they were our team and our guys.
My kids don’t have that, because I can’t afford to take them more than once or twice a season.

Never see jerseys on the street? You used to all the time, before it started costing $60-$325 for a piece of clothing that probably costs about $10 to produce. They could the cut price to $20 and sell metric tons of them, still make a tidy profit and essentially get people to pay for the privilege of advertising the team.

Luxury boxes? There was never a more over-rated revenue source. Basically, you never really catch up to the cost they add to the arena in the first place. So instead of a couple thousand actual fans you could fit in the same space, you get a relative handful of corporate poseurs sipping Dom Perignon and talking business while a basketball game is going on nearby.

What’s happening to basketball is what happened to boxing. Back in the day, everyone followed boxing fanatically. Then they priced everybody but high rollers out of the stands and offered expensive pay-per-view in its place. Today, neither I, nor I’m sure, my teenage boys could even tell you who the heavyweight champion is.

Greed kills.

I do understand that some dont make that much money, of 100 probably 30 make more than 10 mil the rest is getting 5 mil, 3 mil,0.5 mil per year, but that 30 percent should be ok on getting less money and making the cap more stable, same as LeBron did.

I see it this way, Dallas can expend 20 mil more than us per year, so they can sign big FA and we dont, as i said before the poor is condemned to lose.

However is really puzzling to me to see the NBA on economic issues, honestly i feel like everyone is watching basketball around here, my bro and his friend , they both got the official NBA jersey of their respective team and they were like 20 dollars each, we got subscribed to NBA via pc, cant recall program name’s, what i mean is that NBA and their teams are getting great sponsors and they’re making money from merchandise, maybe the problem is in the local fan area, prolly the seats are butt-free, right ?

As I see it, the owners are counting on the players not to have been smart enough to save enough money to get by, which will cause them to cave after they miss a few paychecks. That might not be a bad strategy for them.

I’m firmly on the side of the players in the NFL lockout. A little more ambivalent about the NBA. Ideally, player salaries would get cut by 25-30%, because I think they’re overpaid, and the savings would be passed along to fans in cheaper tickets, etc. But I’m a realist and don’t expect that so I don’t really have a side, just want the lockout to end ASAP.

They will eventually fold. Right around November.

Which is unfortunate. The league as a whole claims to be losing money, but that is really only “proved” by some fancy and less-than-fully-honest accounting. The truth is the league is making money hand over fist as a whole, but that’s combined from big market teams making lots of money and small market teams making much less (and in some cases losing depending on how you quantify losing money).

To give you one example, owners are attempting to include depreciation in their yearly profits. This would be like me buying a brand new $25,000 car, and the following year seeing the value drop to $20,000 resale, and claiming that I made $5,000 less this year than last, because even though I’m paid the same as last year, my net worth decreased by $5,000. While this is true, it’s also a bit disingenuous.

The owners want to fundamentally change the way money is split. To oversimplify, the current setup splits revenue – total money taken in by the league. The league pays their bills out of that share and keeps the rest as profit. They want to change it to a split of profit instead – the remaining money after the league pays their bills. The players ask why? Their mortgages and taxes aren’t paid before revenue is split, why should the owners be paid?

That represents a big loss for players. It’s extra hard for the players to stomach such a pay cut when they know that business is better than ever, and every projection over the next five years agrees that it will continue to improve.

It’s hard to take a side when millionaires argue with billionaires and fans and workers lose out on a season, but they still both have reasonable arguments. The league owners want to completely ensure a minimum level of profit for every owner (with every owner keeping their own profits), while the players don’t want a pay cut when they are certain that their work has enabled their bosses and companies to make record profits.

Just like most fans, more than anything else I want the lockout to end (or not be at all). That being said, I do think the owners are absolutely taking advantage here. They’ll try to write the story as them folding to overpaid players demands, but in the end, it will be the players who give up due to the way the player’s association votes.

That you guys think ticket prices are too high. I couldn’t believe the prices available when I went over.

Over here, to go to a Premiership game you’re paying £35-40 a game. That’s around $60. Those aren’t good seats, but the worst seats (still great view though).

I guess it’s two completely different sporting cultures and models. Regardless, there is far too much money in sport which, ultimately, the fans end up funding. It is frankly ridiculous how much money a sports club can generate, and likewise, how much a professional athlete can earn.

But when you have an immense amount of revenue generated due to the popularity and entertainment of these sports and, specifically, the amount of money thrown around by TV to acquire the rights to show them, what can you do? The flawed world of sports finances goes a lot deeper than the NBA.

I felt so lost on what exactly it was they were arguing over and this clears it up a lot.
I still don’t really understand what can be done to fix it, I guess, but at least now I understand the problem.
It’s hard to choose a side.. I just want them to get it resolved.

Great story, Alex. Well explained

In sport is too much money. More popular sport need more money and create new “heroes”.This is a problem because how to shine in this situation.?Borrow some money (look at Barcelona or Real Madird in Europe)or ask "unlce"from Middle East to buy a team and new “heroes”. It doesn’t mean they worth those money.
I also agree that hard to choose a side. However I know one thing. Rich team almost always win.

Sounds like a lot of uplah to me. Lot of crap. It just sucks. Here we are making all these punks rich and now they’re taking basketball from us? Those fiends!

Yet, I would like to see a balance. I would like to see the lesser market teams have just as fair a chance as the big ones, but you kind of can’t help it. LA is just bigger than Minnesota. New York is just bigger than New Orleans.

I just want my basketball back.

Although,

You can bet that Robert Sarver is one of those owners fighting to lower salaries and institute a hard cap. But that’s not only to save money for his back pocket.

It’s also to improve the Suns’ chances of winning a championship amongst bigger markets with much deeper revenue pockets. Take a look at this pretty picture to illustrate the problem, thanks to Tom Ziller at SBNation.

Anything to improve our chances of winning a championship is good with me, so that way I can stop pretending we won in 93 and 07.

Say the lockout lasts a long time. What’s to stop a handful of stars from getting approached by investors to start up their own league? Seems crazy, but really why couldn’t it happen? When it comes down to it the NBA is like no other league. You could have 8 teams of 10 players each and that would get down to seeing what the people want to see. They want to see Kobe play Lebron more than twice a year. They want to see DRose taking it to the rack with a real shooter to pass to. They want to see Dirk’s misses put back by Dwight Howard.

Besides it seems crazy to think Kobe at $25 mil a year is underpaid, but honestly he’s gotta be worth double that to his owners and the league. If he owns a team and plays for it, he could earn it.

Yeah probably not going to happen, but in no other sport could you even contemplate it. Keep this lockout going for a full season and it may not be so crazy. And quite frankly the lockout can go more than a season when so many teams would probably lose less money not playing than getting in a full season.

I’m just saying that if the USA players son’t have competition, they could lose again to less teams like Spain, Argentina or even Russia or Greece

But would the NBA want to do that. If they pegged the bigger markets back would the NBA stand to make less money or would they share the wealth? I don’t know of any major sports where it’s a level playing field, i don’t think we will see one anytime soon.

I’d like to think that when the Suns win it all, one day i’ll still be around to see the smaller brother rise up and be the champion for just one year.