Deron Williams revives NBA players' interest in Europe
WEDNESDAY, 13 JULY 2011 10:23

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/deron-williams-revives-nba-players-interest-in-europe
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
It has been 36 years since high school, college, and the NBA had a legitimate choice when it came to where they wanted to play professional basketball. In 1975, a high school player could go to college or into the American Basketball Association. A college player could leave school early and have either the NBA or the ABA offer him a huge — by 1975 standards — pro contract. And NBA players could jump over to the ABA, and vice versa. Since the NBA's absorption of four ABA teams in 1976, players have been limited in their location choices.
The NBA lockout wants to tighten player movement in free agency and bring down salaries and owners expenses. But the locked players may be looking elsewhere to work if you believe Deron Williams. The New Jersey Nets player is thinking of playing professional ball in Turkey if the National Basketball Association lockout lasts an extended time. But Williams is not the first player in recent time who is considering European basketball.
In 2008, just before the global financial meltdown, some players such as Ben Gordon, who was a restricted free agent, suddenly thought they had a European option. Gordon, the first rookie ever to win the NBA's Sixth Man of the Year Award in 2004-05, considered leaving the NBA for Europe if the circumstances were right.
Gordon ultimately signed a five year contract with Detroit in 2009 foregoing Europe. But the NBA has locked out the players and the hostility between the two sides is evident on individual team websites. Current players have vanished from team sites and are apparently free to play in any other league in the world. It seems that the players are free to go elsewhere like National Hockey League players did in 2004 when NHL owners shut the doors on the players.
"What has been happening this year (2008), especially with the free agents, you are starting to see guys who are using overseas as another option," Gordon said in an interview. "To me, personally, I think it is a beautiful thing that people from all over the world and players from all over the world have a chance to play in the NBA, and players over here a chance to play in Europe.
"When you get a guy like Kobe Bryant mentioning or considering playing overseas, if everything was right, I think it totally changes the whole landscape of basketball."
In 2008, nine NBA players have decided that the league isn't the end-all for them, and have signed with European, Russian, and Israeli teams. No big names crossed the Atlantic but Bryant sent out a message that once he was done with his Lakers contract after the 2009 campaign he thought Italy could be calling him. LeBron James said at that time that he might be open to a European team offer when his deal with the Cleveland Cavaliers ends in 2010. Dwyane Wade's deal with Miami also ended in 2010. In the NBA, there is a salary cap that limits how much money Bryant, James, or Wade can be paid. There is no salary cap in Europe.
None of the three players left the NBA.
"I know, growing up, my dream was to play in the NBA, hands down. It wasn't about the money," Gordon said. "Once you get to the NBA, things begin to change, it becomes more of a business. When you hear players as big as the Kobes and LeBrons talking about the possibility of playing overseas, it [shows it] is more of a business now. They are just not basketball players — now they are businessmen, so they have to think from a different aspect."
James and Bryant are corporations and brand names, and that could have played into the final decision on where they want to play. What if James's shoe partner, Nike, wanted to make him a bigger brand name in Europe and whispers in his ear that it makes sense for him to play in Barcelona or Athens. Because of the partners and the strength of the euro against the American dollar it was conceivable that James could have played in Europe. And Bryant might have ended up owning a team in Italy.
Nothing happened after 2008 but with the NBA out of business it could be a different story. Big name Americans may jump across the pond.
The commissioner of the NBA, David Stern, has spent the better part of the last 10 years promoting European expansion. Originally, Stern envisioned an NBA European league by 2010. Europe is lagging in building NBA state-of-the-art facilities, but more are coming online. London is ready, Berlin has an NBA-style arena opening and Rome may soon follow suit. The other European problem is whether or not local companies will want to pay the price for NBA tickets, and if local cable and satellite TV networks would want to pay a heavy price for the rights to NBA games.
The players who left the NBA in 2008 (the last major migration of NBA players to Europe), for the most part, were Europeans returning home, with the exceptions of Josh Childress, who left the Atlanta Hawks to sign a more lucrative deal with Olympicos in Greece's basketball league, and Carlos Arroyo, who will play with Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel. Arroyo got a deal that was better than what he would have received with his former team, the Orlando Magic.
The NBA doesn't seem too concerned that Childress or the others have left, and the league has adopted the position that the best players in the world will want to play in the NBA anyway. But eventually wheelbarrows filled with Euros can trump that notion.
Not every elite player can play in the NBA, because of Stern's desire to keep 18-year-olds out of his league. Ultimately, American college basketball could find itself in the same position as it was when elite high school players skipped college and went into the NBA. Brandon Jennings could have been the trailblazer who could upset the applecart.
Jennings didn't play much in Europe but when he came back to the United States after a year overseas, he became a star with Milwaukee. A few other players tried to go Jennings' route but didn’t succeed.
The Jennings signing with Pallacanestro Virtus Roma of the Italian pro league didn’t hurt the NBA and had virtually no impact on college basketball. Jennings was supposed to play as an 18-year-old at the University of Arizona on a college scholarship. Instead, he signed a multiyear contract with an escape clause should an NBA team take him in the 2009 draft. Jennings may have been the best point guard in high school in 2007-08, and under the old collective bargaining agreement, he would have been eligible to be selected that year.

Had Jennings been able to make a smooth transition from being a high school player to living in Rome while playing pro basketball that would have opened up Europe as a pretty good alternative to college basketball in America. Sneaker companies will again be able to sign top American high school basketball players to endorsement deals, and this time, they will be able to showcase the player to a European market. But Jennings didn’t get much playing time and very few followed him overseas.
The timing may be better for a jump across the pond now that the NBA is on hiatus.
"The landscape is changing and the market and climate is a little different than it has been in the past," Gordon said in 2008. He was correct three years ago and is right today: The NBA may still be the best basketball league on the planet, but it has been closed down and it is not the only league willing to pay big salaries, and players and their agents know it.
The NBA lockout may revive an idea that some players were thinking of pursuing in 2008. Go to Europe and play.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

A sports FAQ guide to NFL and NBA lockouts

FRIDAY, 08 JULY 2011 07:52
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/a-sports-faq-guide-to-nfl-and-nba-lockouts
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
Sports lockouts should come with a frequently asked questions guide for the sports media and sports fans. You see whether it is the National Football League lockout or the National Basketball Association lockout they is a small impact on virtually every American taxpayer and those who a cable TV basic expanded tier subscribers.
There are some questions that need to be answered for everyone. For instance, why are cable TV subscribers underwriting sports owners lockout? The Walt Disney Company plans to pay the National Football League a rights fee whether the NFL plans a full schedule or misses some games. Will cable TV subscribers get any refunds or rebates from ESPN? The answer is no.
National and regional cable TV sports networks have a long history of not refunding subscribers for missed sports programming including the 1998-1999 National Basketball Association lockout. Don't expect any refunds from ESPN, Cablevision's Madison Square Garden Network for missed Knicks games or Comcast for missed Philadelphia 76ers games. Cablevision owns the Knicks and Comcast owns the 76ers.
There are numerous sports owners who either own regional cable TV networks outright like Comcast or pieces of cable TV regional sports networks. In Chicago, Comcast is partners with Jerry Reinsdorf's Chicago Bulls, Reinsdorf's White Sox, the Chicago Cubs ownership and Rocky Wirtz's Chicago Blackhawks in the city's regional sports network.
What kind of economic impact will the lockouts have?
Not as much as people think. A National Football League team has 10 home dates (Buffalo has eight or nine with one regular season game in Toronto depending on the season) while an NBA team might host on average about six games a month between the beginning of November and mid-April to complete a 41 game home schedule. There may be a couple of pre-season games and playoff games. But the overall economic impact is minimal.
Visiting teams don't bring a lot of fans with them to attend NBA games and a typical NBA team sends players, coaches, equipment guys and trainers along with broadcasters on the road. It is not a big traveling party and that means not many hotel rooms are needed and restaurants aren't making a living off of having NBA teams come through.
In 1998-99, Golden State Warriors owner Charles Cohan didn't want to pay rent at the Oakland Arena for missed games during the NBA lockout. The municipally owned arena operators took Cohan to arbitration where he lost. How many owners in both the NFL and NBA will attempt to withhold rent payments?
That should be a FAQ.
Some municipalities will lose some sales tax monies from ticket sales and concessions but municipalities have decided not to collect property taxes on arenas throughout the country. In New York, Philadelphia and in California, municipalities will be denied of the "Michael Jordan tax" and collect taxes from players who are in for a day playing.
Some businesses around arenas and stadiums will lose money and that has caught the attention of the Attorney General of the State of New York. Eric T. Schneiderman claims he is taking action acting on behalf of a handful of businesses and workers whose incomes are threatened if there are no Bills games in Orchard Park.
The Florham Park, N.J.-based New York Jets franchise, which plays games in East Rutherford, will not be holding training camp at Cortland State in central New York.
Schneiderman's office sent NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell a letter informing him that the state plans to investigate the NFL to see if the league, the 31 owners and Green Bay, has violated New York antitrust laws.
The letter overstates the real impact the NFL lockout has on businesses but Schneiderman is the first politician seeking to involve himself in the lockout. Schneider is looking out for hotels, retailers, the New York transportation system of buses and trains and cars and the per diem workers who could lose between nine and 12 days worth of work in Orchard Park and the couple of weeks of pre-season workouts a New York State universities in Cortland, Albany and Fredonia training facilities.
To quote Donald Trump, the economic impact is small potatoes. A few people will get hurt but the jobs Schneiderman is protecting are part time minimum wage positions at the stadiums and training camps.
Sports teams’ economic impact on a given area is always overstated. Also people are going to spend money on entertainment, they will just shift that football or basketball dollars elsewhere.
"The expected blow to the state's economy will be tremendous," wrote Assistant Attorney general Richard L. Schwartz. "Many New York public and private institutions depend heavily on the NFL training camp and regular season games to generate revenue."
A note to the assistant attorney general, Cortland State, doesn’t depend on whether the New York Jets training camp takes place at the campus’ main stadium. Mr. Schwartz might want to check the books of the college to see just how profitable or unprofitable having an NFL team on the premises is for the school. It might startle him and others in the Attorney General’s office to see the books at Cortland.
Ralph Wilson's Buffalo Bills gets about $7 million in subsidies for stadium maintenance and day of game operations.
The entity formally known as the National Football League Players Association put out a paper that contended that if there was no 2011 NFL season, that $160 million in local spending in each league city and 3,000 jobs would be wiped out. The NFLPA stance seems absolutely ludicrous given the fact that the league plays just 10 home games except in East Rutherford where the stadium houses two teams and stadium jobs are dead end per diem positions which would supplement someone's income.
The real money losers are the players and cable TV subscribers underwriting labor actions and not even knowing it.

If Schneiderman really wanted to conduct a thorough investigation, he would start with the television networks, Sumner Redstone's CBS, General Electric's NBC (now majority owned by Comcast), Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (FOX), the Walt Disney Company (ESPN) and DirecTV and ask why those entities are underwriting the owners costs in the lockout. Schneider can also check in with the NBA and see if Time Warner's Turner Sports and the Walt Disney Company's ESPN are underwriting the NBA lockout and investigate the Dolan family's Cablevision and ask if any fees that are being collected are going to the Knicks from the Madison Square Garden Network. He can also ask Goldman-Sachs and the New York Yankees owned YES Network about fees going to the New Jersey Nets.
That would just be a New York investigation. Similar inquiries could take place around the country.
Those are just a few FAQs that should be asked and answered. In the toy store of media, the sports department-writers, TV talking heads and radio talk show hosts are infuriated that their world has collided with the real world sort of - after all they want to be entertained with games and want no part of how sports really operates. If Schneiderman was truly serious about probing sports, there is a lot out there but his inquiry will be forgotten once the two sides in the NFL battle call a truce and reach an agreement.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

2011 NBA lockout can trace its roots back to 1983
FRIDAY, 01 JULY 2011 16:19

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/2011-nba-lockout-can-trace-its-roots-back-to-1983
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Dear National Basketball Association fans:
A couple of weeks ago LeBron James told you like it is in sports when he said, “All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. So they can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they got to get back to the real world at some point.”
James apologized for his statement even though what he said was true. But his rant was just the prelude to the next moment of truth in the world of a sports fan, an NBA fan. The owners and players don’t care if you offer unconditional loyalty to a logo or, as Jerry Seinfeld aptly says, dirty laundry. The NBA – and all sports -- are big business and if the NBA owners have to lock out the players to get a better deal, so be it.
The NBA is in a lockout mode. There will be teeth gnashing about greedy owners and greedy players but one day fans will have to be broken from their unconditional love, the face painting of colors, the tattoo team logo proudly displayed on some part of the body, the shirts, hats and realize that sports is nothing more than a business.
NBA fans really have not lost anything yet. Sure the rookie leagues have been cancelled and free agency is being delayed but there are still more than three months to go before the product disappears from the shelf -- pre-season games.
There is a question about the finances of the NBA. Commissioner David Stern, the owners’ front man, wants hundreds of millions of dollars in worker givebacks so that the league can be financially viable. Twenty-eight years ago, Commissioner Larry O’Brien was looking for givebacks to make the then 23-team league financially viable.
These were desperate time for the league, so much so that the owners of Madison Square Garden, Gulf and Western, somehow convinced New York City Mayor Ed Koch that the Gulf and Western’s subsidiary -- Madison Square Garden and the two franchises, the NBA Knicks and the National Hockey League Rangers -- could not compete with San Diego, Indiana, Cleveland, Salt Lake City for basketball players and Winnipeg, Hartford, Quebec City, Edmonton, Calgary along with Denver for hockey players.
Without property tax relief, Gulf and Western would relocate the Knicks to Nassau County and the Rangers to the Meadowlands. Gulf and Western never did like Madison Square Garden all that much and within four years of the building’s reopening in 1972, the company was considering moving both teams to an arena that would be built in East Rutherford.
Gulf and Western got the property tax break that the Dolan family, the Garden’s current owners, presently enjoys.
Despite the fact that both Larry Bird in Boston and Magic Johnson in Los Angeles were winning titles and a strong presence in Philadelphia where the old ABA star Julius Erving had won a title, the NBA was at the crossroads in 1983.
A good many franchises were losing money, the Collective Bargaining Agreement was up and the 23 team NBA was thinking of cutting as many as seven teams with Cleveland, Denver, Indiana, Kansas City, San Diego and Utah losing an enormous amount of money. Some teams fell behind on their deferred payments, estimated to be between $80 million and $90 million, which nearly prompted a player’s strike in 1982. 

There were rumors that Denver and Utah were going to consolidate into one franchise and that other teams would move. Donald Sterling moved the San Diego Clippers to Los Angeles following the 1983-84 season without the NBA's permission. The Kansas City Kings, a franchise that tried to regionalize itself in the 1970s by splitting home games between Kansas City and Omaha after leaving Cincinnati in 1972, went west to Sacramento in 1984-85. Utah attempted to solve some of its financial problems by playing a number of home games in Las Vegas.
The players and owners met for nine months and completely rewrote the Collective Bargaining Agreement from its foundations. The league opened its books and let the players see what the profits and losses really were and a deal was brokered.
“I think it just had a number of important consequences,” said NBA Deputy Commissioner Russell Granik who was part of the NBA management and negotiating team in 1983. “One, by having rolling around in that stuff, for the first time, I think that process in the nine months or the year of negotiations, was that the players for the first time got complete financial information. Everybody knew everything.
“That really, I think, sort of created a feeling of we are in this together as a partnership that maybe hadn’t existed between the players and the league. I think that was a great boast. The other thing by having the salary cap and the revenue sharing system in place, we were able to go out and attract new ownership in places that up until then we were struggling.”
Two franchises that were struggling were the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Indiana Pacers. All together the league might have been left with just 16 teams without the new bargaining agreement.
“I believe Gordon and George Gund at the time would not have purchased the Cleveland Cavaliers shortly thereafter except we had this deal. At that point Indiana was really struggling. Shortly after that Herb and Mel Simon purchased the team in Indiana. Both are still in the league (in 2001) many years later. Two of the strongest ownership groups we had. I think there were others that followed thereafter that probably would not have happened if we hadn’t been able to say OK I think we got a system that’s going to make sense.
“At the time we were very serious and I think Larry (Fleischer) and the players, you know your first reaction is they are bluffing, but again having been in the process and learn all the numbers, we were seriously thinking of at least right away folding two or three times, buying them back or merging them or something. I don’t have any doubt but for that kind of deal that would have happened as well,” said Granik.

The 1983 Collective Bargaining Agreement that put a salary cap in place is considered to be the turning point in the league's history by the owners and by the players. The 23-team league survived and both sides formed a working alliance, which would allow the league to grow. It also helped that two entities were about ready to join the league, Michael Jordan and Nike. The salary cap was the brainchild of a new lawyer that came on the scene named Gary Bettman. Bettman would become one of the three key people that would run the NBA in the mid-1980s and beyond. David Stern would be the boss, Granik the No. 2 guy, followed by Bettman.
The Collective Bargaining was Commissioner Larry O’Brien’s last major work for the NBA.
O’Brien was in a sense a transitional commissioner. The NBA was a business under his predecessor Walter Kennedy, but under O’Brien it became a bigger business. O’Brien replaced Kennedy in 1975 and guided the NBA in the league’s “merger” with the ABA. O’Brien was the lead negotiator in two Collective Bargaining Agreements in 1976 and 1983. During O’Brien, gate receipts doubled and TV revenues increased by threefold. Still O’Brien was unable to financially stabilize the league and without the 1983 labor agreement, which established a partnership with the Players Association and its Executive Director Larry Fleischer, the NBA might have contracted franchises.
The 1983 agreement propelled the league into a better financial position.
Or did it? Kansas City ownership sold the franchise to a Sacramento group. Twenty-eight years later, Sacramento is in dire fiscal shape. Indiana remains a troubled franchise. The league over the years added teams; Charlotte was an initial success but eventually moved. Vancouver lasted just six years before the owner Michael Heisley uprooted the franchise and placed it in Memphis. A second Charlotte franchise has not been financially successful. The second New Orleans franchise is on the financial ropes. Seattle no longer has a team.
Cost certainty is fleeting. The owners and players celebrated in 1983 a new deal. In retrospect, it didn’t work for everyone.
David Stern replaced O'Brien as commissioner on February 1, 1984. Stern was an attorney who had been the NBA's Executive Vice President. Stern would direct a tremendous expansion in the marketing of the NBA and develop a cohesive and profitable broadcasting strategy. He would move try to ensure the stability of NBA franchises by increasing licensing revenues, and developing corporate sponsorships.
In the buildup to the potential NBA lockout of 1998, NBC and TNT guaranteed owners that they would pay out $465 million dollars for broadcast rights whether the league played a game or not. The NBA had been very good to NBC and TNT in 1997-98 as they shared $400 million in profits from TV. Those two items did not go unnoticed by the National Basketball Players Association.
The players promised that it would boycott interviews with NBC and TNT personnel because the association’s leadership felt the networks were bankrolling the lockout and provided a guarantee of money against losses if no basketball was being played. Phoenix Suns CEO Jerry Colangelo disputed that saying television had no influence on the lockout and that owners were merely seeking a better collective bargaining agreement.
Each owner would get more than $15 million from the NBC and TNT and more from local cable contracts. Cable consumers would help pay for the lockout unknowingly. Cable consumers did not receive any rebates from games missed because of work stoppages in Major League Baseball in 1994 and 1995 and in the National Hockey League in 1994-95.
On March 23, 1998 NBA owners voted to reopen the talks because the players’ share of the revenues exceeded 57 percent. The league shut down operations on July 1, 1998 and both sides dug in. The owners had a nest egg and could afford to wait until the players caved. The television unit of General Electric, the National Broadcasting Company and Ted Turner’s Turner Sports agreed to pay the owners a rights fee even though there was a possibility that games would be cancelled. If the games were cancelled, NBC would get money back either in a form or a rebate of a reduced rights fee schedule in the final three years of the TV agreement while Turner would have the contract extended by a year.
A few players boycotted NBC TV interviews whether they were on a national or a local affiliate level but TV interviews with NBC or CNN (TNT’s sister network) were of little concern.
The players sat for 202 days. In the end, the owners kept the salary cap, keep the draft and got a ceiling on top salaries at $14 million and a limit on how many years a team could pay a player at the $14 million level at seven. There was always a rookie minimum salary and stiffer drug testing policies. The middle class NBA player got more money; the stars were capped. David Stern had turned the middle class player against the stars in the fight and won the battle and the war.
The NBA got cost certainty in 1999 but not everyone made out. Charlotte and Vancouver quickly became former NBA cities. In 2005, the NBA and the players cut yet another cost certainty deal. Seattle didn’t make it and Sacramento ownership seriously considered moving to Anaheim this past spring.
The business of the NBA will go on despite a lockout. Anaheim will continue to push to get the Maloof brothers’ Sacramento Kings. Louisville may want in once the dust settles. San Jose and Newark will be buyers as well. Meanwhile the fans take another one on the chin. But they will be back … well some of them in the arena if they can afford the price of the tickets. If not, the corporate crowd will go to a game and treat it as an event and the real fans can stay home and watch it on TV.
LeBron told it like it is and he was vilified for that. David Stern, Players Executive Director Billy Hunter and others won’t be as blunt. The NBA is a business and the two sides will eventually settle this dispute without any worry about the fans.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

Fans don't matter in sports
MONDAY, 16 MAY 2011 14:43


http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/fans-dont-matter-in-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
And so the National Football League lockout has become a version of the People's Court. The good guys, the National Football League Players Association, are fighting for workers' rights and are begging "fans" to help them lift the lockout. The owners, the bad guys, want to take away the players ability to make truckloads of money and are threatening their long term health care. Wait, the players have done such a great job in past collective bargaining agreements that former players lose health benefits five years after their playing careers are done and only if a player has three years in the league.
The "People's Court" is now playing in Minneapolis, Minnesota where United States District Judge David Doty is figuring out of the owners owe the players money over how the league managed to negotiate TV contracts to protect that side if in the event of a 2011 lockout. The players are seeking $707 million in damages. The fans will get ZERO if Judge Doty gives the players a monetary award even through a good chunk of that TV money comes from the cable TV subscriber-based ESPN and the satellite pay service DirecTV. In fact a good many people who never watch an NFL game on either ESPN or DirecTV are subsidizing the billions of dollars that ESPN and DirecTV pays the NFL.
The chances are that Judge David Doty will not address relief for subscribers are great. Fans are not a part of the lockout equation. Cable TV subscribers never received a rebate in 1994 and 1995 when Major League Baseball shutdown the 1994 season and the National Hockey League's lockout did not end until January leaving cable TV subscribers without a product from mid-September 1994 through January 1995. An awful lot of teams had local cable TV deals in 1994 and 1995 and subscribers were playing for something that they didn't get. Programming in terms of games which they were charged for. In 1998-99, the National Basketball Association locked out the league players for about 30 games. Not one cable TV subscriber received a penny back for missed games. Interestingly enough the owner of the Golden State Warriors, Chris Cohan, tried to stiff the Oakland Alameda Coliseum Authority and not pay rent at the Oakland Arena during the NBA lockout.
An arbitrator smacked down Cohan and forced him to pay rent for missed games.
No one has ever looked after cable TV or satellite TV subscribers and gotten consumers money back for missed games because of labor actions.
Judge Doty also should bring up the fitness of Rupert Murdoch (FOX owned and operated stations such as Channels 5 and 9 in New York and Channel 29 in Philadelphia), Sumner Redstone (Channel 2 in New York, Channel 3 in Philadelphia) and Comcast-GE's Channel 4 in New York and Channel 10 in Philadelphia for agreeing to deals with the NFL that would underwrite a lockout by supplying a full TV rights fee even if there was a lockout.
The question here that needs to be asked in court is how people who have public licenses to run TV stations nationally (and program networks and syndication arms—FOX is not a network but a syndication company) like Murdoch, Redstone and the NBC owners (General Electric when the contract was signed) could use monies generated by a business that is owned by the public---a television station---to provide a foundation for a lockout/strike war chest?
Television is one of the three essentials of the sports business. The trilogy is government (government builds stadiums, provides tax breaks for the business, creates cable TV rules and allows businesses to write off part of the expense of a luxury box, club seats, tickets and dining in a stadium or arena restaurant), cable TV (in the case of the NBA, NHL and Major League baseball through regional sports channels) and corporate support.
The fans don't count for much except undying loyalty to a team.
Despite all of the fans "concerns" no one is protecting them while the owners and players have an army of high priced lawyers taking care of their interests.
The other "People's Court" venue is in St. Louis where an Eight Court of Appeals panel has been reviewing Judge Susan Nelson's order to lift the lockout.
The battle between the NFL and the former players association has been defined as billionaires versus millions. That is not true at all. It is multi-faceted with elected officials having their hands all over this lockout. Here's why. Politicians pushed stadiums after the 1986 federal tax code revisions to become "big league." Canadian sportswriters have it all wrong when they blame National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman for the league's "sunbelt strategy" and expansion into Atlanta, Nashville, Tampa, Miami, Anaheim and San Jose (although neither Anaheim nor San Jose are in the sunbelt) and franchise relocations into Raleigh, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix. New arenas came online with sweetheart leases and begged to get into the NHL. The same thing happened in the National Basketball Association, the NFL and Major League Baseball.
To those Canadians sportswriters who keep spewing the same nonsense about Bettman’s southern strategy and get it wrong constantly. The NHL decided to expand to 30 teams from 21 in 1990, four years after the revision in the tax code while Bettman was working at the NBA.
Cities bid against one another for teams and when the league would not expand into a city, an existing club owner picked up and moved to a city waiting with open arms. In the NFL, Baltimore, St. Louis, Nashville and Oakland got teams. As more cities built NFL facilities and handed out sweetheart leases, the ones left behind---Minnesota, Oakland and San Diego---could not maximize or match the revenues in their old stadiums. The new places in East Rutherford (for the Jets and Giants), Arlington (the Dallas Cowboys) and Indianapolis (where Jim Irsay hit the lottery in terms of what he has to pay in order to rent the new facility) pushed up league revenues and raised the salary cap for players. It also brought up the salary floor and the less revenue producing stadiums were not printing out the right amount of money for NFL owners. Literally some teams cannot keep up to the Joneses (okay Jerry and Stephen Jones and the Cowboys) and that is why the NFL wants to cut the slice of the revenues the players get from 59 to 48 percent and reduce salaries.
The players, of course, want no part of that seeing how TV monies are enormous and that NFL owners seem to be swimming in money. The players want the owners to show them the books. The owners won't give them the books the players are seeking. The majority of the players don’t make millions and have short careers.
It is all about "Money Now" on both sides of the argument.
Previous incarnations of the National Football Players Association (this version doesn't exist, wink-wink, as the players association officially decertified in March) have ignored the long time health needs of the players and have always stuck to the "Money Now" mantra, a slogan which appeared in 1982. A lot of people knew that playing surfaces in Philadelphia and Houston and other places were not good for the players. The players did nothing about the surfaces of stadiums that were built on the back of taxpayers.
The multi-purpose stadiums built in the 1960s, Houston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and other places had an artificial field which was separated from a concrete type surface by a piece of foam or other flimsy padded material. Players knew the fields were not safe yet the people who were watching out after their interests worried about "Money Now."

By the way, where are the municipal leaders who lead the rush to get stadiums built for NFL owners (and other sports)? President Barack Obama has washed his hands of the NFL lockout as has the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Lamar Smith of Texas. Apparently all elected officials want to stay clear of the NFL lockout despite the fact that the NFL clearly has been built by Congress (the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961, the 1966 AFL-NFL merger, the 1984 Cable TV bill that allowed cable operators to bundle channels on a basic tier and forced subscribers to pay for all channels on a basic tier -- the tier that became the home to sports -- whether the subscribers watch sports programming or not and the 1986 tax code revision which changed the way municipally funded stadiums and arenas were financed and placed the burden of paying off the debt on taxpayers) and helped along by local elected officials.
There is no bully pulpit pressure on either side. There is no Congressional pressure. Missing in action on the subject are Governors like Chris Christie, Andrew Cuomo, Tom Corbett, Rick Snyder, Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Jerry Brown, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Jan Brewer. Minnesota's Mark Dayton is busy looking to get New Jersey's Zygi Wilf a stadium for his Minnesota Vikings despite the lockout. Tough guy politicians are beating up on municipal workers and teachers yet have not voiced an opinion on the NFL lockout which may close stadiums in the fall. The same stadiums politicians have claimed are economic engines for the community.
The fans are being hosed and yet they always come back although not necessarily in the stadiums or arenas. Fans have been priced out by NFL owners unless they want to pay a fortune of money for a seat. But fans can always sit in front of a TV and the owners will make money from rights fees and from cable TV, it doesn't matter if no one watches. The ESPNs and the regional sports channels of the world get their money from subscriber fees. That is part of the argument that has been redacted from the Judge David Doty's courtroom. No one, from NFL lawyers, to the people who are representing an organization that allegedly went out of business on March 11, the NFLPA, to the cable TV network executives want to touch. It would just bring unwanted trouble.
NFL beat writers for newspapers aren't going to report on that either and it would not be in the best interests of ESPN SportsCenter, ESPN's Outside the Lines, the fluff ESPN shows that feature sportswriters like Mike Lupica and a gang of know nothings talking about nonsense, or the CBS, NBC, FOX or Disney's ABC news to discuss that aspect of the lockout. The television executives have a big role in this lockout. They are not complaining about their partner's---NFL owners--business strategy. Corporate partners have also been very quiet about the NFL's tactics. The only ones complaining are the bottom feeders---the fans.
The NFL is just the first in the queue. NBA owners and players don't have a collective bargaining agreement after June 30. The Major League Baseball owners and players six-year collective bargaining agreement ends in December and the National Hockey League owners and players deal is done in September 2012.
It's all about money.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.

New Jersey might have shot at New Orleans Hornets when N.J. Nets move
WEDNESDAY, 12 JANUARY 2011 11:55


http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/new-jersey-might-have-shot-at-new-orleans-hornets-when-nj-nets-move
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
There was a rather interesting sports business interview on WWL Radio in New Orleans last week that occupied some of my time during the drive from New Orleans to Daphne, Alabama. Doug Thornton, who is SMG's senior vice president and de facto head of the New Orleans Superdome and New Orleans Arena, was talking about the $85 million publicly funded expansion of luxury seating at the Superdome (which is designed to put more money into New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson's pockets despite NFL owners claiming they need to reduce expenses and players salaries because they need to cut salaries and expenses — the NFL seems to be awash in money) and the future of the New Orleans Hornets and the NBA's need to find a new financial model so that New Orleans and other small markets can survive.
It is a conversation that you will never hear on the sports radio talk shows in New York or Philadelphia or read about in area newspapers. It is an issue that never gets discussed on cable TV sports talk shows. The NBA's big market teams are in decent financial shape; the New York Knicks have to be rolling in dough with sellout crowds, not paying New York city property tax and owning a cable TV regional sports network. Mikhail Prokhorov must think the New Jersey Nets will be a goldmine once the franchise moves to Brooklyn and it would be fascinating to take a look at Comcast's real books when assessing the Philadelphia 76ers finances given that the country's largest cable TV multi systems operator owns the team, the arena and the regional cable TV network in Philadelphia.
The National Basketball Association now owns the small market New Orleans Hornets.
There are reports that the Maloof brothers are thinking about moving their Sacramento Kings franchise after failing to secure a new arena in the California capital and having financial problems with their core businesses. Indiana's ownership claims mounting losses despite playing in an Indianapolis arena and paying virtually no rent. There are similar stories in Charlotte, Memphis and other NBA outposts. Louisiana is pumping money into the Hornets operation. The state is used to handing out paychecks to major league sports owners.
The Saints Benson received in the neighborhood of $185 million in state handouts between 2002 and 2010 as a thank you for not moving the team. Benson has a new deal with the state that lessens the amount of direct handouts (from about $23 million to as much as $6 million annually) but includes other perks like giving him an office building (the Benson Tower which is across from the Superdome) for a small amount of money (the building has been renovated) and a guarantee of a number of leases for office space for state agencies.
Benson is not getting quite the same state bailout under the new deal but Louisiana is paying him in other ways to keep him happy through 2025. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, one of these let's cut everything to the bone including laying off municipal employees and not raise any taxes to pay for services, boasted that the new deal saved the state hundreds of millions of dollars. What Jindal should have said is simple, we are moving money around and we are still paying. NBA Commissioner David Stern knows the Saints deal and since he and 29 NBA owners run the Hornets, he probably will try to get Jindal to give him a "deal" that will "save" Louisiana millions of dollars before attempting to sell the team to an owner who will decide whether to stay in the Crescent City or take the business elsewhere.
The NBA has run out of North American cities to move franchises. The Las Vegas arena that was supposed to open in 2010 was nothing more than a mirage in the desert, San Diego has no arena, and Pittsburgh has no interest in an NBA franchise. Seattle has no arena, Louisville has an arena but it would be just a small market and most small markets in the NBA with the exception of San Antonio are in bad financial shape.
Newark is "hosting" the New Jersey Nets until a Brooklyn arena is open. Newark might be the best open market the NBA will have but that will not happen for a few years.
The New Orleans situation is dire. The former owner George Shinn reached a deal with Louisiana that included an attendance clause and if certain benchmarks are not hit by the end of the month, the Hornets former ownership and presumably the NBA can tell Louisiana that they plan to move the franchise to another city. The team has a clause in the lease that allows the franchise to pay $10 million to Louisiana at the end of March and leave if the attendance does not average 14,735 per game. The team needs an average of 14,915 people per game by January 24 to insure that the Hornets franchise will be in the city in 2011-12. But the Hornets-Louisiana lease is done in 2014 and presumably Prokhorov's Nets will be in Brooklyn by that time leaving Newark open as a relocation possibility.
The New Orleans business community is buying up tickets to make sure the Hornets attendance meets the benchmark but according to Thornton even if this year's version of the Hornets does exceed the benchmark there is a serious question as to the financial viability of the team going ahead in a small market without help from the NBA. That help would be a new collective bargaining agreement, which would reduce salaries and significant revenue sharing from the big market owners (the Knicks-Dolan family) to the lesser revenue generating markets like New Orleans.
New Orleans is a small market with limited cable TV revenues and that is a major problem for the franchise. Shinn could not get Knicks TV money or Los Angeles Lakers TV money.
The NBA owners and players are trying to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. NBA Commissioner and more than likely chief negotiator David Stern has left open the possibility of contracting teams. If the owners and players do not come up with a collective bargaining agreement by July 1, the owners will more than likely lockout the players, which means that all NBA business will stop.
The free agent market will close, which is why there is pressure on Carmelo Anthony to get a new contract now instead of going into an uncertain free agency period where he might find different rules and lose millions of dollars.
The NBA has been given a free ride by the sports media who seem to love to bang on Gary Bettman and NHL financial problems in Phoenix, Atlanta, Columbus, Nashville and other cities. Stern has not received the criticism that has been directed at Bettman even though like Bettman he has been forced to take over a franchise, New Orleans (Bettman ended up with Phoenix and presided over bankruptcies in Ottawa, Buffalo and Pittsburgh). Major League Baseball took over the Montreal Expos in 2002. Stern has a good number of problem franchises, which is why he will play hardball in talks with the players although he has not taken care of the revenue sharing issue that has been floating around for years at owners meetings.
If New Orleans can no longer support a franchise and Sacramento fails, where do those franchises go? There is a suggestion that the Maloofs will look at Anaheim and San Jose but the problem in those cities is the NHL. The Amaheim Ducks ownership and the San Jose Sharks ownership get the lion share of the revenues out of the arenas in those cities and the ownership groups probably would not welcome an equal partner in the buildings unless they become part of an NBA ownership group.
Louisville is college basketball country. Does the area have the financial wherewithal to support what really is elitist entertainment for the people who like to watch games in an arena? Neither Seattle nor Las Vegas have an NBA state of the art building, Kansas City doesn't seem to be a viable option even though the city has a new arena. Vancouver had an NBA team and might be more viable financially with the Canadian dollar on par with the US greenback but no one is pushing for an NBA return in western Canada, at least not yet.
If the Hornets franchise is sold and the new ownership is forced to stay in New Orleans until 2014 under the terms of Shinn's lease but wants out when the agreement ends, would New Jersey be a viable option if Prokhorov's Nets are finally in Brooklyn? That's a good question. David Stern's three legged stool theory of being financially successful requires a city to provide government support (an arena, tax breaks, etc.), a strong cable TV money deal and corporate support.
Newark and New Jersey Devils owner Jeffrey Vanderbeek built an arena. So there is government support and Vanderbeek is now housing the Nets. The New York area has three regional cable TV networks. An owner could come into New Jersey and get a large cable TV deal with SNY. Why SNY? Because the Comcast-Time Warner-New York Mets owned entity does not have an NBA or NHL presence in the late fall-winter-early spring. The Dolan's MSG Network has the Knicks, Rangers, Devils, Islanders and college basketball. The YES Network has Prokhorov's Nets.
The third leg of the stool is the problem. Corporate support. Neither the Nets nor the Devils have been able to get a high level of support (if attendance figures are a true barometer) of corporate backing over the decades that the franchises have been in the Garden State. Would New Jersey business leaders embrace a new NBA team in Newark in 2014 if that scenario plays out?
Would the Dolans and Prokhorov want a third team in the New York area? The NBA could block any attempt by a prospective New Jersey team owner to put a franchise in Newark in 2014 even though there is the Los Angeles Clippers precedent. Donald Sterling moved his team in 1984 without league permission. Eventually Sterling and the NBA resolved their differences. The NBA blocked the sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves to boxing promoter Bob Arum and his group in 1994. Arum wanted to move the franchise to New Orleans.
The NBA owners and players have to get a new collective bargaining agreement and after the dust settles, there will be assessments. If the owners cannot get rollbacks in salaries, some owners may throw in the towel and sell off money losing franchises. Newark might be in line for a failed franchise under the right set of circumstances.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com

Major league sports facing a turbulent 2011
MONDAY, 03 JANUARY 2011 12:05

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/major-league-sports-facing-a-turbulent-2011

It is rather silly making any sort of sports predictions. The predictor is generally wrong and does not have the best available data on hand to accurately come up with what is going to happen particularly in National Football League and National Basketball Association business in the next few months.
The 2011 big time sports calendar has two rather significant dates that could throw hard core National Football League and National Basketball Association fans into a depressed state. The National Football League owners and players will have no collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in place on March 4 unless there is major movement and the National Basketball Association owners and players will have no collective bargaining agreement in place on July 1 unless there is major movement.
Major League Baseball owners and players will have a full 2011 season as that industry's CBA does not expire until December and the National Hockey League will continue playing games until the 2012 Stanley Cup final game as the league's owners and players have an accord until then.
The National Football League owners and players have been practicing saber rattling for a while. The owners are well fortified to do battle with an enormous war chest built on over-the-air, cable and satellite TV revenues that FOX's Rupert Murdoch, GE's Jeffrey Immelt (NBC), Sumner Redstone's CBS, Robert Iger's ESPN division of Disney and DirecTV have endowed. The owners can withstand a lockout of players; meanwhile the National Football League Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith has been urging his players to save money because there might not be a 2011 NFL season.
Smith has filed a protest with the Special Master who was appointed by a federal court to oversee NFL matters about the use of television money to assist the owners through a trying time. Smith may also decertify the association in an attempt to circumvent an owners lockout and claim the players are independent contractors with valid working agreements with the teams. If the Special Master, Stephen Burbank, sides with Smith — the owners could cave because there will be no money in the bank and the owners lose significant leverage.
The decertifying process may take a long time. That would take the dispute to another battlefield, the judicial system.
The NFL owners and players dispute is all about money. The owners, who are 31 of the biggest captains of industry in the country (Green Bay is run by a board of directors) want to reduce salaries by 18 percent and cut the players share of the football generated revenues from 59 to 48 percent. It appears Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, a former player with the Baltimore Colts in 1959 and 1960 and a major player in the fast food industry until his retirement from that line of work in the 1990s, is leading the lockout charge.
Richardson is not the only one. The owners want to change certain elements of the collective bargaining agreement including rookie's salaries. The NFL has a hard salary cap but teams have been about to devise ways of getting around it.
The owners have a wide gap between the big markets and small markets in terms of generating local revenues. The old "Leaguethink" idea pioneered in the 1960s by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle (who, in 1960, co-opted the notion from American Football League founder Lamar Hunt who borrowed it from Branch Rickey after Rickey was establishing the Continental Baseball League in 1958, a league that never got off the ground). The "Leaguethink" idea was simple and in a way was a form of socialism. All the teams shared equally in TV revenues and shared gate receipts (Rickey, who was a sports business genius, understood the role TV was going to play in sports back in the 1950s even though his fellow baseball executives disdained the idea of TV because potentially it could cut into home attendance — Rickey understood that TV could be both a money maker and marketing tool).
The owners are now divided between the "haves" NFC East, Dallas' Jerry Jones, the Giants Mara/Tisch, Philadelphia's Jeffrey Lurie, Washington's Dan Snyder, half of the AFC East, New England's Robert Kraft and the Jets Woody Johnson, and a few other owners like Houston's Robert McNair and Denver's Pat Bowlen and the smaller market owners. The big boys no longer want to share local revenues with Buffalo's Ralph Wilson, Cincinnati's Mike Brown, and Jacksonville's Wayne Weaver to name three teams. But if the 32 NFL teams hold together, the thought is the can extract concessions from Smith and make up lost revenues to players by expanding the season to 18 games.
The dispute will be all about money and it will be interesting to see if the players try and collectively bargain a much better health care plan for the present players and the retirees.
One of the buried issues in all of the owners-players labor talks is that a good many former players are under 65 but a getting handouts from the government in disability and Medicare — it is rather interesting that Tea Party members shouting about entitlements have not bothered to look at the afterlife of football players and how many of them have been abandoned and are cared for by government programs.
The NFL off-season will include the annual draft but if there owners lockout the players out, the players will have to scramble to be insured by COBRA as the owners will be cutting off NFL benefits. There will be no free agency, no mini-camps, no organized team activities, no training camp and no games until the two sides work out an agreement.
The NBA dispute is also about money. Commissioner David Stern wants to get about $800 million in concessions from his players and give small market teams a chance for profitability. The league wants to cut guaranteed contracts (the NFL does not have guaranteed contracts), trim the number of years on a contract, harden a loose salary cap and get cost certainty. There is no real revenue sharing between the haves (Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks) and the have-nots (the league-owned New Orleans Hornets, Memphis Grizzlies). The league will lockout the players on July 1 and that means Carmelo Anthony and other free agents cannot shop around their services and may in fact be caught in a new system which could cause them to lose millions of dollars.
It is unlikely that small market owners (who have been asking Stern for years to address the revenue sharing issue) will go along with any new deal that does not produce a hard salary cap and a reduction of revenue to the players.
Like the NFL owners, the NBA owners will have a war chest from Iger's ESPN and from Time Warner's Jeffrey Bewkes (Turner Sports). NBA owners will also be getting revenues from regional cable TV networks (the Knicks owners, the Dolan family, are a multiple system operator with Cablevision and their assets include the Madison Square Garden Network, the Philadelphia 76ers owner, Comcast, is a multi system operator and the company's assets include regional cable sports networks in Philadelphia and other outposts including Washington, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago). The owners will be getting money and can withstand a lockout.
The cable TV issue is one that needs to be addressed by Congress. House Speaker John Boehner and Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, if they are truly doing the business of the American people, need to grill NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, NBA Commissioner David Stern, Iger, Bawkes, Comcast's Brian Roberts, MSG's Charles Dolan (although it would be a comedy to watch Dolan's son James testifying in a Congressional hearing) and ask them if it is just for the leagues to have their lockout war chests funded by cable TV basic expanded tier consumers — many of who never watch sports but are forced to buy ESPN, TNT, regional sports networks because of tiering.
While House Speaker Boehner and Senator Majority Leader Reid are at it, they should call down Murdoch, Immelt and Redstone and ask if they believe that it is a proper use of a television license to use monies generated on the public airwaves (FOX, NBC and CBS) to underwrite a lockout.

Local municipalities should also be checking into their agreements with cable franchises (Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner and the others) to see if they plan to offer rebates to consumers if programming (NFL and NBA games) has been canceled due to a lockout — after all consumers are paying for the programming.
No cable system has ever refunded money for missed games from the 1994-95 baseball strike, the 1994-95 NHL lockout, the 1998-99 NBA lockout and the 2004-05 NHL lockout.
Local municipalities that have built stadiums and arenas may not be sitting on the sidelines in these potential labor disputes either. Cash poor governments cannot allow owners to skip payments on rent in the event of a lockout. After the 1998-99 NBA lockout, Oakland went after Golden State Warriors owners Chris Cohan after he refused to pay rent on the arena because his Warriors didn't play games. Cohan lost an arbitration hearing and had to pay rent for missed games.
Local governments should be diligent and not sit on the sidelines if they are doing business for the people. They need to force owners to live up to their leases even if there is a lockout.
Major League Baseball owners and players have been rather quiet about the end of the industry's CBA in December. MLB has been in a good spot in that they have been third in the CBA derby since 2004. Both sides watched the 2004-05 NHL lockout when the owners shut down the industry. The NBA's CBA came up during the NHL lockout and the players and owners came up with a deal to avert an NBA showdown and soon after that, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and the Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director Don Fehr worked out an agreement with no work stoppage. Fehr has left the baseball players and is now trying to straighten out the mess at the National Hockey League Players Association. Fehr has many more problems to solve in his new post with his constituency than to worry about what NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and his owners are planning for 2012. Once Fehr reins in the various players association factions, then he can deal with Bettman and the owners.
The posturing will continue in the NFL through the Super Bowl, and the barbs from the players and the owners in the NBA will continue through the NBA Finals. The big game for both sides is not the Super Bowl or the NBA Finals. It is winning the battle for the CBA crown.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com

Why Carmelo Anthony could join the New Jersey Nets
TUESDAY, 21 DECEMBER 2010 11:53
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/why-carmelo-anthony-could-join-the-new-jersey-nets
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
SAMANA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC — One of the more intriguing aspects of giving lectures on cruise ships centers round the people who come to the talks. Over the past four years, a former Congressman, a New Jersey judge, a person who helped design the financing for the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum (he got free tickets to the Oakland Raiders first home game at the facility in 1966), an investigator in Marilyn Monroe's death in 1962, a member of the cast of the Broadway play Momma Mia and others have wandered in and listened to talks about the business and politics of sports.
Last week, during a business of sports talk, a massage therapist for an NBA was in the audience. She was on her vacation while her team played at home — she was not needed that week although she will be spending New Year's Eve on the road with her team. She also said after the speech was done something that everyone connected with the National Basketball Association knows, she will be temporarily or possibly permanent out of a job starting July 1, 2011.
The National Basketball Association owners are locking out their main employees — the players, unless the owners and players come to a new collective bargaining agreement and that seems highly unlikely by July 1 — and there will be collateral damage to non-playing personnel. Some will be furloughed and some will be fired. There will be no need for them until a new agreement is negotiated.
The NBA owners, like their National Football League peers, want to change the fiscal picture of the league. NBA Commissioner David Stern claims that his league owners are losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually and wants to reallocate revenues given to the players. The present formula gives 57 percent of NBA revenues but owners want to significantly cut players funding by a third from $2.1 billion in salaries and benefits by $700 million or so. Stern would like to see all of his 30 owners turn a profit and moving funds from the players to the owners pocket is his goal.
Carmelo Anthony may be the most impacted by the NBA's want to cut salaries. The Denver Nuggets star player is an unrestricted free agent after the season and could be the biggest loser in the CBA talks. If there is a hard salary cap in place after the owners and players reach a new deal, Carmelo Anthony could lose more than $25 or 30 million on his next contract if he does not resign with Stan Kroenke's Nuggets. Anthony could be traded and the New Jersey Nets are extremely interested in the Denver player but Anthony's best options are to either resign with Kroenke's team or force a trade and sign a contract extension with his new team.
The money that is presently available under the present CBA will not be there in 2011 and beyond. The owners want to shorten contracts and want cost certainty and that is a problem for Anthony and for others down the road like Chris Paul and Dwight Howard.
Anthony seems to be most interested in playing for the New York Knicks, if media reports are to be believed. Just how the Knicks (a franchise that has to be making huge profits: Madison Square Garden-Knicks-Rangers owners, the Dolan family, pay no New York City property taxes on top of the revenues generated by sell out crowds and the MSG cable TV network) will pay for Anthony if there is a hard salary cap and a new financial order is unknown.

The NBA will be the third major sports league in North America in the queue in the CBA derby. Major League Soccer, which is a much smaller entity, was first up in contract negotiations earlier this year. MLS players got more money and many now have guaranteed contracts but there is no free agency for the players. MLS players have global options though if they are good enough. MLS Commissioner Don Garber claimed that just two MLS teams were profitable in 2009, Seattle and Toronto. A good number of MLS owners have properties in the NFL, NBA and NHL. But the MLS talks should not be considered the bellwether indicator of what will happen in 2011 because it is not in the same category of the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.
In 2004, the NHL was the first up in the CBA talks. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and his 30 owners decided to pursue a hard line stance and locked out the players until the owners got some sort of cost certainty. Bettman, who was the "father" of the NBA salary cap (a major component of the 1983 collective bargaining agreement), ended up getting a salary cap in the NHL. Bettman also gave his former boss Stern and Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and his owners leverage in their talks with the players association in 2005. NBA players watched the NHL lockout unfolded and found out that the owners were determined to get what they wanted even if it meant shutting down the industry for an undetermined amount of time.
The NBA and Major League Baseball got new collective bargaining agreements following the NHL lockout with minimal problems. The NBA players didn't want to risk losing millions of dollars in 2005 and decided not to go to the mat with the owners.
The National Football League collective bargaining agreement is done in March. NFL owners want to cut players salaries by 18 percent and reduce the players' take of the revenue from 59 to 48 percent. The lockout won't have any impact on games until August, which means that the NBA owners and players will probably go into a lockout on July 1 and not much will happen in the NBA talks until "crunch" time in the NFL which is when training camp opens in late July and game action in August. So the NBA players will not have the NHL example like they did in 2005 and will not be able to see how far the NFL owners will dig in until regular season games are impacted and that happens in September. The NFL free agent season, possibly the NFL Draft, organized training activities and mini camps will be gone but the league will not miss any games until pre-season.
The NFL has hired Bob Batterman as an attorney in the talks with the players. Batterman represented the NHL in the 2004 collective bargaining talks and help lead the league through the lockout as a legal representative.
People around the leagues will deny the chain reaction theory but there are too many overlaps and sharing of information. Kroenke owns the NFL's ST. Louis Rams, the NBA Nuggets, the NHL's Colorado Avalanche, the MLS Colorado Rapids and the Denver based Altitude regional cable TV sports network. There are significant partnerships in arenas and regional cable TV networks. All players associations also share information.
Sports Illustrated reported last summer that the Walt Disney Company's ESPN and Time Warner's Turner Sports will continue paying rights fees (which is roughly $900 million in 2011-2012) to NBA owners whether the league plays or not. The Walt Disney Company's ESPN will also pay NFL owners a rights fee even if there are no games played in 2011.
Congress needs to step in and ask why consumers (all basic expanded tier subscribers which is about 95 million people who pay the cable bills) are underwriting an NFL and NBA owners lockout and if new House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican majority are going to have an open door and listen to the American people, they should schedule hearings immediately on the issue. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should be the same. The NFL lockout will be funded by News Corp's Rupert Murdoch (FOX), GE's Jeffrey Immelt (NBC), CBS' Sumner Redstone, Disney's Robert Iger and DirecTV. Regional sports cable TV network operators who in some instances are team owners as well (MSG's Dolan, Comcast's Brian Roberts-Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers as well as a partner in regional set ups in Washington, Sacramento, Chicago and Boston to name a few cities) will still collect subscribers fees and not show a product because of the lockout.


Cable TV consumers never received rebates for games lost to the 1994-95 Baseball strike, the 1994-95 and the 2004-05 NHL lockouts and the 1998-99 NBA lockout. Boehner and Reid should be asking questions about cable TV's role in abetting labor stoppages in sports because hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer dollars are being used to give owners leverage in the bargaining.
A massage therapist will be looking for other work starting July 1, Carmelo Anthony may or may not be with the New Jersey Nets this year and consumers will fund sports lockouts. The captains of industry and make no mistake sports owners are captains of industry and are among the most powerful people walking the earth have decided that they have paid out enough money to athletes — for the time being. The whole sports industry is out of whack in the United States and globally but an NFL lockout or an NBA lockout will do nothing except transfer money from the players to the owners although players will still be handsomely compensated on the major league level, whether it is in football, basketball, hockey and baseball for their services. The lockouts won't bring down ticket prices or reduce cable TV costs associated with sports. The owners want a bigger slice of the sports economic pie and that is why the players will be sidelined and there will be some collateral damage like the massage therapist losing her job on at least a temporary basis and the others who work on a per diem basis at games who will be impacted.
American sports will be battered in 2011 but the people will come back in droves and watch games after the lockouts are done. They always do.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com

NBA Preview: Labor woes are coming
SUNDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2010 19:51

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nba-preview-labor-woes-are-coming

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern has sent Billy Hunter the Executive Director of the National Basketball Players Association a happy New Year note. The note included something about the league needing to cut player costs somewhere around $700 to $800 million and that the league's 30 teams combined would lose $340-350 million in 2010-11 and something has to be done and that would start by players giving back items earned in collective bargaining.
The NBA no longer wants to give the players 57 percent of the revenues.
Of course not every team is going to lose an average of ten million dollars a season. The New York Knickerbockers franchise, despite putting a poor product on the court, sells out every game and the Dolan family owns the franchise, the building (they pay no New York City property taxes despite owning a good chunk of Manhattan real estate) and, of course, the Dolans have the Madison Square Garden TV network and Cablevision. There is no way without creative accounting the Knicks franchise is losing money given the team's revenue stream availability.
Also on the table is a threat by Stern aimed right across the bow of Billy Hunter's ship. The elimination of financially wobbly franchises. The best guess is that those markets could be Memphis and Charlotte. The contraction of the league would mean fewer jobs for players. Left unsaid in the possibility of lopping off teams is what happens with the leases between the franchises that didn't make it into the future and the municipalities which built the arenas and gave away the house to the owner of the local franchise that was set adrift.
"Easy Dave" is not someone who is to be taken lightly. He divided the players in the 1998-99 lockout pitting the lesser valued players against the Patrick Ewings, Charles Barkleys and other high salaried players and got a cap on top salaries.
This isn't the first time the NBA hierarchy has thought about dropping franchises. In the early days of the league, many teams dropped out every year. The last time a team folded was on November 27, 1954 when the Baltimore Bullets ownership gave up after 14 games.
It almost happened again in the early 1980s.
Despite the fact that Larry Bird was the star in Boston and Magic Johnson was winning titles in Los Angeles and a strong presence in Philadelphia where the old ABA star Julius Erving was winning a title, the NBA was at the crossroads in 1983. A good many franchises were losing money, the Collective Bargaining Agreement was up and the 23 team NBA could have been whittled to 16 with Cleveland, Denver, Indiana, Kansas City, San Diego and Utah losing an enormous amount of money. Some teams fell behind on their deferred payments to players, estimated to be between $80 million and $90 million, which nearly prompted a player's strike in 1982.
There were rumors that Denver and Utah were going to consolidate into one franchise and that other teams would move.
Starting in 1982, the players and owners met for nine months and completely rewrote the Collective Bargaining Agreement from its foundations. The league opened their books and let the players see what the profits and losses really were and a deal was brokered. The agreement came in March 1983.
"I think it just had a number of important consequences," said then NBA Deputy Commissioner Russell Granik who was part of the NBA management and negotiating team in 1982-83. "One, by having rolling around in that stuff, for the first time, I think that process in the nine months or the year of negotiations, was that the players for the first time got complete financial information. Everybody knew everything.
"That really, I think, sort of created a feeling of we are in this together as a partnership that maybe hadn't existed between the players and the league. I think that was a great boast. The other thing by having the salary cap and the revenue sharing system in place, we were able to go out and attract new ownership in places that up until then we were struggling."
Two franchises that were struggling were the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Indiana Pacers. All together the league might have been left with just 16 teams without the new bargaining agreement.
"I believe Gordon and George Gund at the time would not have purchased the Cleveland Cavaliers shortly thereafter except we had this deal. The same we got at that point Indiana was really struggling. Shortly after that we got Herb and Mel Simon purchased the team in Indiana. Both are still in the league (in 2001) many years later. Two of the strongest ownership groups we had. I think there were others that followed thereafter that probably would not have happened if we hadn't been able to say okay I think we got a system that's going to make sense.
"At the time we were very seriously and I think (NBPA Executive Director) Larry (Fleischer) and the players, you know your first reaction is they are bluffing, but again having been in the process and learn all the numbers, we were seriously thinking of at least right away folding two or three times, buying them back or merging them or something. I don't have any doubt but for that kind of deal that would have happened as well," said Granik.
The 1983 Collective Bargaining Agreement that put a salary cap in place is considered to be the turning point in the league's history by the owners and by the players. The 23-team league survived and both sides formed a working alliance, which would allow the league to grow. It also helped that two entities were about ready to join the league, Michael Jordan and Nike. The salary cap was the brainchild of a new lawyer that came on the scene named Gary Bettman. Bettman would become one of the three key people that would run the NBA in the mid-1980s and beyond. David Stern would be the boss, Russell Granik the number two guy followed by Bettman.
The Collective Bargaining was Commissioner Larry O'Brien's last major work for the NBA.
O'Brien was in a sense a transitional commissioner. The NBA was a business under his predecessor Walter Kennedy, but under O'Brien it became a bigger business. O'Brien replaced Walter Kennedy in 1975 and guided the NBA in the league's "merger" with the ABA. O'Brien was the lead negotiator in two Collective Bargaining Agreements in 1976 and 1983. During O'Brien, gate receipts doubled and TV revenues increased by threefold. Still O'Brien was unable to financially stabilize the league and without the 1983 labor agreement which established a partnership with the Players Association and its Executive Director Larry Fleischer, the NBA might have contracted franchises.
Following the March 1983 deal, some franchises ended up in different cities. Donald Sterling moved the San Diego Clippers to Los Angeles following the 1983-84 season without the NBA's permission. The Kansas City Kings, a franchise that tried to regionalize itself in the 1970s by splitting home games between Kansas City and Omaha after leaving Cincinnati in 1972, went west to Sacramento in 1984-85. Utah attempted to solve some of its financial problems by playing a number of home games in Las Vegas.
Knicks and Nets patrons need to be careful in what they wish for. If either team gets Carmelo Anthony in a trade from Denver and the league has new salary restrictions, there is a real possibility that paying Anthony the max six year deal allowed under the present CBA could blow up a team's future payroll and that Melo could end up playing with Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo. The Miami Heat's Lebron James-Dwayne Wade-Chris Bosh trio could also be torn apart.
Stern's "Happy New Year's" greeting will send shock waves throughout the NBA world but it is just part of collective bargaining. The present CBA ends after this season and a lockout may come as early as July 1, 2011 right on the heels of an NFL owners' lockout of the players.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Business and Politics of Sports." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com