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.

Will the NBA become a 'fly over' league?
TUESDAY, 31 MAY 2011 14:28

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/will-the-nba-become-a-fly-over-league
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The NBA Champion Final series is one of the National Basketball Association’s crown jewel events but behind the glitz and glamour of the competition is a real question that no one wants to discuss. Is the NBA in danger of becoming what Louisville lawyer and player agent Bruce Miller calls a fly over league?
A fly over league is a term that needs to be defined.
This seems to be the best definition. The NBA may become a league of just major cities with three teams in New York – Manhattan’s Knicks, Brooklyn’s Nets and a small market team moving to Newark. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has already told NBA Commissioner David Stern that Newark is open for NBA business as soon as the Nets franchise moves over to Brooklyn. New Jersey Devils owner Jeffrey Vanderbeek wants an NBA team in his Newark building. Three teams in the Los Angeles area, two teams in the San Francisco Bay Area
The Sacramento Kings owners, the Maloof brothers, have toyed with the idea of moving their franchise to Anaheim to give Los Angeles three teams, the Lakers and Clippers along with the proposed Anaheim Royals. Sacramento officials are scrambling to find hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Maloofs a new arena despite proposed layoffs of municipal workers along with the shut downs of public parks and scaling back of educational opportunities from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Anaheim doesn’t have an NBA team because city officials gave the lion’s share of the Anaheim arena revenues to the Walt Disney Company when Disney signed a deal to put a National Hockey League expansion team in the building. There weren’t enough revenues left over for Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling to move his team from the Los Angeles Sports Arena to Anaheim. That is why Anaheim lost an NBA team.
Priorities are priorities for a small market franchise that cannot keep up with the Knicks, Lakers and other large market teams.
National Basketball Association owners and players do not have a collective bargaining agreement after June 30th. The National Basketball Players Association has already filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that NBA owners are not negotiating in good faith.
NBA owners want to roll back salaries and there is a claim that as many as 22 of the 30 franchises are losing copious amounts of money.
Newark officials want to replace the Nets. San Jose is looking for an NBA. The NBA owns the New Orleans Hornets franchise; Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl is not running for re-election and owns the Milwaukee Bucks, a franchise looking for a new facility. The Indiana Pacers franchise is heavily subsidized by local taxpayers in Indianapolis and surrounding areas. The very successful on court Oklahoma City Thunder franchise is also very heavily subsidized by Oklahoma City taxpayers.
That franchise was in Seattle until a few years ago when local elected officials decided not to build a new arena for the team. The then SuperSonics owners squeezed every last nickel they could out of Oklahoma City and state politicians.
This is the NBA today.
Miller is charge of an effort to bring the NBA to Louisville. The Kentucky market is small yet it is basketball crazy. The state has two “professional” basketball franchises already – the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville – but the city has not had a “big league” team since the American Basketball Association folded in 1976 and the Louisville Colonels owner John Y. Brown took some NBA cash and left the world of basketball.
Brown returned to pro basketball after in 1976 when he purchased a piece of the NBA’s Buffalo Braves.
Louisville started seeking an NBA franchise about 10 years ago but struck out in efforts to land George Shinn’s Charlotte Hornets, Michael Heisley’s Vancouver Grizzlies and Leslie Alexander’s Houston Rockets. Shinn moved his team to New Orleans (which is a financial disaster), Heisley went to Memphis (another fiscal problem) and Alexander stayed in Houston.
Miller isn’t doing a whole of lobbying for an NBA team at the moment. No one is going to sink $300 million into a small market team without knowing what the new Collective Bargaining Agreement looks like.
Could Louisville work? Under the right set of circumstances, yes. But it has to start with NBA owners increasing revenue sharing between the large market Knicks and Lakers and the ownerless New Orleans, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Indianapolis and other small market franchises.
Will the Knicks Jim Dolan and the Lakers Jim Buss (the Lakers scored a huge deal with Time Warner Cable to form a Lakers regional cable station in English and in Spanish starting in 2012) to share revenues? One of the major coups of Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig’s career was getting New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to give up some of his dollars in a revenue sharing scheme. Can David Stern, who really has never been very successful in twist the arms of Buss and Dolan to give up some of their dollars to help the smaller markets.
The NBA plans to manufacture what 2008 Republican Presidential candidate John McCain denounced. He claimed Barack Obama wanted to redistribute the wealth of the country.
NBA owners want a shift in wealth the in the business.
McCain, of course, was using a new campaign slogan but Stern and small market owners have been after a shift in wealth for four years now. Mainly the owners want to stop paying the playing enormous salaries over a long term commitment. A lot of players are not as productive as owners and general managers projected and a lot of contracts are bad investments on the court.
The National Basketball Players Association should not be in the business of protecting owners from a bad investment. The NBPA already gave the NBA owners a huge concession in the last go around for a CBA by agreeing to bar players just out of high school and high school graduates from applying for a job as a player in the league.
NBA Commissioner David Stern came up with flimsy excuses which included that he didn’t want to see NBA scouts at high school games. Does that clean up the high school game?

No.
The real reason Stern and his owners didn’t want 18-year-old out of high school players was simple. Why pay for research and development when you have a college willing to do just that? By getting a 19-year-old instead of an 18-year old, you have a more finished product and more importantly, a contract renewal comes at 22 or 23 years of age not 21 when a player still has a perceived upside.
Jermaine O’Neal was a total bust with Portland after getting millions from ownership as the 17th player picked in the 1996 draft. He cost Paul Allen a lot of money and did nothing for Allen’s Trail Blazers franchise. Allen though stuck with him and at 21 offered O’Neal a huge contract. O’Neal’s second contract was big but his playing time wasn’t and he languished costing Allen millions.
Portland traded him to Indiana where he flourished. Had O’Neal been in college, Allen would have invested his money in another player. Allen, under today’s CBA, would have been protected against a bad investment because O’Neal would not have come into the league at 18 and qualify for a new contract at 21. Players second contracts come at 22 or 23.
If the NBA owners don’t get rollbacks, Miller’s job of trying to get an NBA team in Louisville will be difficult. The league has not given up on New Orleans yet and is looking for a person who has an interest in keeping the team in New Orleans. The Sacramento arena deal has not been fully explained but the league is committed to remain there through spring 2012. Of course if the owners lock out the players and there is a long work stoppage, it doesn’t matter what will happen in New Orleans and Sacramento in 2011-12.
The new CBA may very well determine whether the NBA becomes a fly over league or not. Charlotte, Memphis, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Sacramento, Portland, Orlando, New Orleans, Indianapolis, Cleveland and Denver may become fly over cities in the NBA owners minds if they don’t get what they want in the new collective bargaining agreement. The players? They just want status quo.
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.

NFL lockout, failure of Atlanta Thrashers, and other sports struggles can be blamed on Ronald Reagan
WEDNESDAY, 25 MAY 2011 08:29

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nfl-lockout-failure-of-atlanta-thrashers-and-other-sports-struggles-can-be-blamed-on-ronald-reagan
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
If and when the Atlanta Thrashers National Hockey League franchise is sold and moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, there will be those who will analyze the failure of the business to catch on in Georgia. Yes, the Thrashers ownership was bad, and there is enough evidence to completely convict the ownership of being thoroughly incompetent as a court proceeding proved.
But it is far more than just bad ownership that doomed the Atlanta Thrashers franchise and after a quarter of a century it is time to place the finger of blame on the real culprit on the potential Thrashers move along with the National Football League lockout, the potential National Basketball Association lockout and the struggles of various franchises to succeed economically in the sports arena.
It was the 99th Congress that revised the 1986 tax code and President Ronald Reagan who signed those changes into law.
A good number of cities should never have had "major league" sports franchises but those cities decided to go into the sports business by building stadiums and arenas and handing out leases to owners that became an albatross around the necks of taxpayers.
The smaller market cities went after teams to show other businesses that their city was a great area for business. Memphis, Nashville, Jacksonville and other smaller towns all of a sudden became big league and paid handsomely for the “title."
The 1986 tax code revision redistributed the wealth and shifted the burden of paying for new facilities from team owners to taxpayers. Only eight cents of every dollar generated in new facilities could go to pay down the debt of the municipally built facility unless a local government got tough and negotiated a better deal.
In most cities, the local governments who were so desperate to build "major league" structures rolled over and gave owners whatever they wanted in an attempt to be "major league" and forced all sorts of tax hikes on local residents. The stadiums and arenas were peddled to voters as "economic engines" that would provide first construction jobs then build up an area. Local residents who had to vote on the expenditure were told that they would pay nothing (in some cities) that the money would come from hikes in hotel and motel taxes and car rentals. Other tax hikes were imposed on beer, alcohol, cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, water, sewer and a general sales tax hike to fund facilities. There were breaks given on property tax payments (the combined Giants-Jets real estate holding pays East Rutherford, NJ about $6 million a year in combined rent and taxes on the Meadowlands facility on a property that is probably worth about $13 million a year on the tax roll.)
Sports owners jumped on the 1986 Congressional act which Ronald Reagan approved. This is what the change in the tax code has brought. A 2011 NFL Lockout, the probable move of the Atlanta hockey team to Winnipeg, the Glendale, Arizona government paying the National Hockey League $25 million to keep a franchise in the city, the delay of a move of the National Basketball Association's Sacramento Kings to Anaheim, California until cash-poor Sacramento along with other local governments in the area find an arena funding formula. The move of the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn has New York City and New York State politicians fingerprints all over it. The building will be heavily subsidized by New York taxpayers as are the new Yankees Stadium, the Mets ballpark in Flushing (complete with the logos of the taxpayers bailed out corporate sponsor--Citibank) and New Jersey kicked in well over $300 million for infrastructure for the Giants-Jets new stadium. New Jersey still owes hundreds of millions of dollars in paying down the debt at the departed Giants Stadium. New Jersey is not alone in paying for sports facilities that were blown up. Pittsburgh was paying off the debt at Three Rivers Stadium for years, Seattle and King County will be paying off the bonds on the long gone Kingdome until 2014. Those stadiums were replaced after the changes in the 1986 tax code.
The NFL lockout's roots can be directly traced to Ronald Reagan's signature in 1986. It is no coincidence that the majority of NFL cities built new venues after the 1986 legislation. As more and more stadiums were opening on the public dime, revenues kept rising. By the late 1990s, the New Orleans Saints ownership claimed it could no longer compete in the NFL unless they got a new stadium in the city because the team no longer was in the top of the NFL in stadium revenues and fell to the bottom.
Eventually the state of Louisiana came up with a $186.5 million deal to satisfy the owner, Tom Benson, and handed him direct checks every July 1 between 2002 and 2010 to make him happy and keep the team in town. As far as anyone could tell, it was the first time a state gave money to a team. New York State gives $3 million annually to make Ralph Wilson elated in Orchard Park, New York. Indianapolis virtually gives away the new football facility and all of the revenues generated inside the place to Colts owner Jim Irsay. Small market owners need help from governments.
In places like Cincinnati, the local government has to take money from other services to pay down the debt at the football stadium. The new stadiums have helped the owners but in cities like Minneapolis, Oakland and San Diego where the stadiums are old (although renovated in Oakland and San Diego) and cannot produce the revenues that are found in Arlington, Texas (Dallas Cowboys), East Rutherford, Philadelphia, Houston, Foxboro and Washington (Landover, Maryland) and that has hurt the franchises in Minneapolis, San Diego and Oakland. Those teams cannot keep up with the salary floor as NFL revenues rose. The old stadium franchises cannot keep up with the Joneses, Maras-Tischs, Johnsons, Krafts, Snyders, Laniers and the other big boys in revenues.
The NFL lockout is designed to help the old stadium owners who don't have the revenue sources in the local market that new stadium owners have. That's the whole reason behind the NFL lockout strategy. It's not a difficult concept to grasp even though the league and players continue to slug it out in the judicial system. The NFL has been reluctant to spell out the real reason it has locked out the players. They need taxpayers dollars to fix the problem in Minneapolis, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco (Santa Clara) possibly Buffalo and certainly in Los Angeles and it is a tough sell for the prosperous NFL to beg for tax dollars to build stadiums to help the lower revenue teams. But the league needs taxpayers dollars to make everyone equal.
The National Hockey League came up with a grand plan to expand the business in 1990 from 21 franchises to 30 with most of the nine franchises to take root in the United States. The expansion scheme was hatched long before Gary Bettman became National Hockey League commissioner, something that seems to be conveniently forgotten by sportswriters who don't have any understanding of business and politics and sports.
The official line was the NHL needed to expand their United States footprint for television purposes and the unofficial line was that Wayne Gretzky popularized the NHL because he was in Los Angeles and attracted the Hollywood crowd to Los Angeles Kings games. But the truth was that cities were building arenas and ready to give away the house in exchange for a franchise. In Anaheim, the Walt Disney Company decided to capitalize on the success of the Mighty Ducks movie franchise and bought a team from the league after securing a sweetheart lease in the new Anaheim arena. Disney ended up with everything at the arena and apparently would not share revenues with say Donald Sterling and his National Basketball Association Clippers. Sterling and other potential NBA owners could not get into Anaheim because there was not enough money available for an NBA team to be financially successful thanks to the Disney lease.
Before Bettman got to the NHL, the league split the Minnesota North Stars franchise with some players staying in Bloomington, Minnesota and the rest ended up with an expansion team in San Jose although the franchise started at the Cow Palace in Daly City south of San Franchise. The league expanded into Ottawa and Tampa and then Anaheim and Miami. The NHL owners began splitting a lot of money, $50 million per new franchise. Bettman joined when they league had 26 teams. Bettman came into the league in 1993 when Norman Green was attempting to move his Minnesota North Stars franchise to either Anaheim or Dallas. Green moved to Dallas. In 1995, Quebec City officials refused to provide funding for a new arena and the franchise moved to Denver. Winnipeg officials did not build a new arena and the Winnipeg Jets franchise ended up in Phoenix in a poor conceived arena that was built to satisfy Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo need for a new basketball arena for his team. The facility was built in such a way that it had thousands of obstructed seats making it unusable for anything but basketball.
In 1997, the NHL expanded to planned new buildings in Nashville and Atlanta (two cities that could hardly be called hockey mad cities), along with St. Paul, Minnesota and Columbus. St. Paul Mayor Norman Coleman pushed heavily to build a taxpayers subsidized arena in St. Paul while private money was found to build a venue in Columbus, Ohio. Also in 1997, Hartford Whalers owner Peter Karmanos moved his franchise to Raleigh, North Carolina. That deal also came with Karmanos promising to move a piece of his Compuware business to the Raleigh area. Connecticut Governor John Rowland was too busy trying to get Robert Kraft to move his New England Patriots NFL franchise to Hartford. Kraft listened said yes and then got a deal in Massachusetts abandoning Rowland.
The NHL expansion gave owners $450 million which was split between 21 owners. That was not Gary Bettman's plan but it was the NHL's business plan was developed by league owners in 1990.
The NBA added four franchises after Reagan changed the tax code but those arenas in Orlando, Charlotte, Miami and Minneapolis were online prior to the change in the law. All four cities became problems for NBA Commissioner David Stern and the league. The buildings were not state of the art 21st century buildings as they were designed in the 1980s. Orlando, Charlotte and Miami didn't have the real revenue producers, club seats and luxury boxes for corporate customers. All three cities replaced arenas that were 20 year old or less. Minneapolis's building was funded by private money---which nearly snuck the franchise---and by the mid 1990s the building was taken over by the government.
The NBA lockout of 2011 will be caused by reckless spending. The NBA went into markets that cannot compete with New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and other large markets without a real revenue sharing plan. Those markets will never have had franchises without the Reagan signature. Memphis, Charlotte, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, San Antonio have teams because of new arenas, Seattle lost a team because local politicians would not spend money for a new build some 12 years after renovating the city's arena bringing the building up to 1990s standards. Despite giving all the revenues away at the arena in Indianapolis, Pacers owner Herb Simon may eventually move his team. Indianapolis cannot make money even though the city has given away the building.
Major League Baseball went through the same dance. New stadiums, great leases and broken promises of stadiums being an economic engine.

Major League Soccer owners learned their lessons well as they sold local politicians on the benefits of new stadiums starting with the failed economic engine theory.
The NHL is still playing the arena game. Charles Wang's New York Islanders franchise needs a new building and Nassau County voters will be asked on August 1 to sell bonds for a building. Edmonton is seeking a new arena, Columbus wants the city to take over the building, and Calgary is looking for a new building. Major League Baseball wants new venues for the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A's. The NBA could become a league with three New York area teams, three Los Angeles area franchises and two franchises in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Taxpayers are on the hook for billions thanks to Ronald Reagan's signature. Reagan supporters and apologists will probably try to debunk the impact of the 1986 tax code changes on sports. It would be a futile argument. There is plenty of blame to go around starting with the House and then the Senate. Two Senators, New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, and then Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania (before he switched parties) tried to close the 92 percent loophole in the tax code but to no avail.
Reagan and Congress changed sports in 1986. A quarter of a century later the impact is astounding. The NFL lockout, the NBA lockout, the Sacramento arena problems, the Glendale subsidies, the Louisiana subsidies which continue to this day for Benson's NFL Saints and the NBA Hornets, Nassau County's vote, the Atlanta relocation, baseball's "Bay" problems in St. Petersburg and Oakland. It goes on and on with no relief in sight for sports 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.

The never-ending business of sports
FRIDAY, 06 MAY 2011 08:34

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/the-never-ending-business-of-sports
Two Saturdays ago, my son and I were at the Yonkers, N.Y. Planet Fitness working out. The 55-year-old man and the 25-year-old son were talking sports – but not anything about on-the-field action.
It was about the Mets ownership and Bernie Madoff and the Los Angeles Dodgers owners divorce with Jamie McCourt hiring David Boies (who tried Gore v. Bush in front of the Supreme Court after the 2000 Presidential Election on behalf of Al Gore) in her battle against Frank McCourt and how Boies was now also representing the National Football League in court in a proceeding against the remnants of the decertified National Football League Players Association.
My son is of the opinion that the sports bubble has burst, which it has, but it doesn't appear that way on the surface. Sure, National Football League owners have locked out the players because of finances and National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern is ready to put the lock on the door on July 1, telling the players they are no longer welcomed until they give back some $800 million in revenue.
But more and more money is being poured into sports in the United States and elsewhere. In Australia, the Australian Football League signed a record four-year, $125 billion (in Australian dollars or about $137 billion in American currency) agreement with three networks including one partially owned by Rupert Murdoch. In the United States, NBC's new bosses, Comcast opened up their checkbook for a 10-year, $2 billion deal with the National Hockey League. The Pac 12 signed a 12-year, $3 billion contract with FOX and ESPN, which will give each member school $21 million annually over the life of the contract.
The bubble has not burst despite patches of empty seats at the new Yankee Stadium and a drop in Major League Baseball attendance early in the season. Television money is making up for the lack of revenue from unsold seats.
As we spoke in the locker room, a man decided to join in on the conversation saying that he agreed with my son. The explained that he had New Jersey Nets season tickets for the past 26 years and he would have to pay triple for his seats when the franchise moves to Brooklyn. He has to pay $385 per ticket for the same type of seats in Brooklyn as he had in the Meadowlands and at Newark. He was undecided about renewing his Nets tickets given that he could get Giants or Jets tickets at the Meadowlands as the wait list for season tickets for both teams has disappeared.
But the man was undecided about whether paying $385 per ticket starting in 2012 was the prudent thing to do.
This is the hold sports has on fans.
The late John McMullen, when he owed the New Jersey Devils, told me that sports is the only business where emotions – not rational thinking – guides the business for owners, executives, players and fans. How else can you explain the cheering in Sacramento when the NBA's Kings owners – the Maloof brothers – decided to stay in the city for another season with the hope someone will find $500 million to build an arena and then give virtually all of the revenues in a mostly taxpayer-funded facility to the Maloofs.
This even though Sacramento’s unemployment rate is around 12 percent and the city is letting go of municipal workers because Sacramento (along with California) is broke.
That happened on Monday. Sacramento kept the team for a year and while that was happening NFL lawyers and attorneys representing the defunct NFLPA were positioning themselves to beg the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis to either allow the NFL lockout to continue or lift it. Also this week, the Department of Justice wants to know more about the Bowl Championship Series in college football.
The DOJ is trying to figure out whether the Bowl Championship Series runs afoul of federal antitrust laws. The DOJ wants to know why there is no college football championship game. The DOJ is not asking any questions about the education of so-called "student-athletes" (a term invented so colleges could shield themselves from workers’ compensation claims) or the limit on how much money the so-called "student-athlete" can make from off-the-field jobs. Or why college programs have antitrust protection and college football teams appearing in bowl games don't pay taxes on the take home revenue from the games.
Sports fans endure a lot of nonsense but they never turn their back on the games. A lot of people have been priced out of MLB, NFL, NBA or NHL games but that's fine. They can watch games on television and buy all the overpriced jersey and hats and other things with team or league logos on it.
Owners and leagues care about the logo, not necessarily players. A logo is worth more than a great player. Sports fans like "our guys" no matter what city "our guys" play in – even though "our guys" are itinerate workers at best who sell themselves to the highest bidder after being "drafted," in an illegal act that is under labor law made legal through a collective bargaining agreement.
In Sacramento, the Kings, are "our guys" and we need "our guys" for some reason. It isn't because "our guys" are economic magnets who will propel the economy (that argument died in the 1990s) and bring new business to the California capital. But "our guys" bring some unexplainable something to any city or area. A small segment of the population feels good because their area is major league.
In Charlotte, after George Shinn moved his NBA Hornets franchise to New Orleans in 2002, one of the reasons that Charlotte Mayor Pat McCoury gave for wanting to build a new arena to replace the then 14-year old Charlotte Coliseum and get the NBA back in town was because Charlotte would get mention on ESPN's SportsCenter. McCoury got a new arena built and a replacement team -- which has been an economic disaster.
In Glendale, Arizona, the city gave the NHL $25 million to cover the financial losses incurred by the league-owned Phoenix Coyotes. The city hopes to get the NHL to sell the team to a Chicago businessman shortly and keep the franchise in Glendale. If the city fails, the team will go to Winnipeg and make Winnipeg a "major-league city" in North America, complete with that feel good feeling that sports is supposed to bring.
Since Monday, Sacramento has kept a basketball franchise and now will turn over every rock possible to find money to satisfy the NBA and the Maloofs that the city (and a six county area stretch out to Lake Tahoe and the California-Nevada border) can act like a major-league city and pay for an arena that will make the Maloofs feel good. Glendale has forked over $25 million to the NHL, the Department of Justice is looking into the Bowl Championship Series, the NFL is playing at a St. Louis courthouse, the International Olympic Committee put the word out to American TV networks that it is time to pay a king's ransom if they want a crack at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics and the Rio 2016 Summer Games.

The NFL is hoping someone in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area will build the NFL Vikings a new stadium while Toronto Mayor Rob Ford wants to go after the Jacksonville Jaguars or the heavily taxpayer-subsidized New Orleans Saints and bring one of those teams to his city.
The NBAPA is not happy with the latest NBA owners’ proposal for a new collective bargaining deal as the old one expires on June 30 and David Stern has already bought a padlock. Major League Baseball may have to pick up the tab and pay Los Angeles Dodgers players as the Dodgers ownership – allegedly – has no money to pay the players.
The Wilpon-Katz-Madoff saga continues with the Mets ownership still locked in a battle with Irving Picard, the trustee overseeing the Madoff victims claims, and there is no end in sight although Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz are looking to sell a piece of the franchise to cover debts.
Just another week in fantasyland.
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.

Two decades later, sports is out of whack
TUESDAY, 03 MAY 2011 08:26
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/two-decades-later-sports-is-out-of-whack
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
About two decades ago, a tall man with an identifiable nasal twang was holding court at Gallagher's Steak House one afternoon as he lifted a martini with a shaking hand to his mouth. The septuagenarian with a bad wig was standing near the slabs of meat that were hanging at the steak house and in a crescendo was complaining about the world of sports. The empty room began filling up as the man droned.
"Sports is out of whack," said the man with the familiar voice in a loudish way as he fumbled to take a sip of his martini. He was disgusted with the industry that he first entered in the 1950s as Willie Mays’ advisor.
Last week was yet another week of vindication for the man who was despised by sportswriters for telling it like it is.
The three -- make that about five -- events of the week of April 25-April 30, had nothing to do with actual games. There was the draft in a locked-out-then-open-for-business-then-locked-out National Football League.
There was Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson moving as much earth as he could to try and keep the city's National Basketball Association team in team in town despite the fact that the unemployment level had hit 12 percent in his region. At the same time he was rounding up $10 million in marketing partnership for the owners of the NBA Kings, the Maloof brothers, Johnson was cutting workers at the city's police and fire departments and school administrators were trying to figure out whether they can keep sports going in Sacramento public schools.
East of Sacramento on US 50, Lake Tahoe interests were beginning a plan to bring the 2022 Winter Olympics to the area and were beginning the campaign to try and sell the idea to locals as a job creator and a moneymaker like the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, which cost Canadians a fortune in taxpayer subsidies.
Just another week in the toy store of life, as sportswriters like to refer to their little world.
The National Football League lockout is being played out in a various courtrooms and has political overtones whether people want to believe it or not. The players scored a big victory when Susan Richard Nelson, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, lifted the lockout last Monday.
Judge Nelson was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, a Democrat who is believed to be labor friendly. Judge Nelson, in her opinion, wrote that she was convinced of the players’ argument that the lockout was irreparably harming their collective careers.
The irony here is that Judge Nelson fell into line with National Football League Players Association thinking of 1982 -- Money Now -- and her ruling did the retired, discarded players no favors. The present players are the ones who have to help out the disabled former players -- the discarded ones -- who have no health benefits because the NFLPA never got around to getting players long-time health care and have to depend on social security and Medicare for health coverage. Judge Nelson worried about the present day players but nowhere is there a players association worry for retired players who are hurting.
The discarded players are wondering whether one of their own, former Giants defensive lineman George Martin, can lobby the NFLPA or whether they have to have a group to pressure the NFLPA to do something about their financial/health benefits problems.
The owners and players don't plan to get back to the bargaining table until May 16. More time has elapsed for the former players who need real help, not government assistance for their pre-existing medical conditions.
The NFL won Game 2 in this best-of-who-knows playoff series when the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the league a temporary stay of Judge Nelson's order with two judges -- both Bush appointees -- agreeing with the league, while a Clinton appointee sided with the players. The 8th circuit in St. Louis is thought to be more business friendly.
The two lead negotiators in the talks are very political. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is the son of Charles Goodell, a Republican, who represented Western New York in the House of Representatives and replaced the slain Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 in the Senate. Goodell's father-in-law, Sam Skinner, was Chief of Staff for President George H. W. Bush.
NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith was a member of President Obama's transitional team.
In a sense it is the Democrats versus the Republicans. Labor versus business.

NFL owners have done a poor job of explaining the why behind their proposal of asking the players to take substantially less of the gross, from about 59 percent to 41 percent with 48 percent of that going to player salaries. The players don't believe there is a real financial problem in the NFL after the league got new large TV deals and a bunch of new stadiums with more revenue streams coming online.
The 1986 federal tax code update created the NFL labor dispute. Owners seized on a piece of the changes in the code that had major consequences. Municipalities could build new stadiums for teams and get as little as eight cents back on every dollar generated inside the facility. Depending on the deal an owner cut with the city officials, an owner could garner as much as 92 cents of every dollar.
But it is those taxpayer-funded new stadiums that have caused the problem. With every new stadium that has opened or has been renovated, more revenue does flow into the league -- which raises not only the salary cap ceiling but also hikes the salary cap floor.
The 1986 tax code revision was a double-edged sword. For some owners (like Art Modell) it was a lifesaver, while for others (like those in Minnesota), it has been a disaster.
Franchises playing in old facilities like the Oakland Raiders, the San Diego Chargers, the San Francisco 49ers, the Atlanta Falcons, the St. Louis Rams, the Minnesota Vikings and others cannot keep pace and are struggling to meet the salary cap floor. Additionally some owners have thrown a lot of money into new stadiums and have to pay down the stadium debt.
The 49ers owners, the York family, have not gone full throttle in getting financing for a proposed stadium in Santa Clara as of yet. The league wanted to show the players they need to contribute money for the Santa Clara facility.
Northern California's two football franchises are not alone in the need for a new facility in the region. The ongoing saga of the Sacramento Kings franchise continues apace with Mayor Johnson leading the charge to build a new arena. Johnson is a former NBA player who has some friends in high places over at the Olympic Tower in Manhattan at the NBA offices.
He wants to keep an NBA team in a city with major fiscal problems that a couple of years ago had tent cities for the homeless. Sacramento is a small market that has been a problem for NBA Commissioner David Stern and his owners for about a decade and a half. The city has been unable to get financing for a new arena for Kings basketball for about a decade. The Kings owners, the Maloofs, may see Anaheim as a financial savior.
Johnson has rounded up the business community and has gotten some economic promises but it may be far tougher to put together a wide coalition of the willing in Northern California to put up money for a new arena in very difficult economic times. But that isn't stopping people in the region from kicking the tires to find out if the 2022 Winter Games is a viable business.
The International Olympic Committee might like to go back to Lake Tahoe/Squaw Valley, a Winter Games venue in 1960, but the IOC also likes money and they really like taxpayers to pick up the tab for their two-week sports bazaar, which seems to be more than just a money loser. The IOC Games is a financial drag and California is not a place where taxpayers will be willing to put up big bucks for an event that is still 11 years away. Still the old “it will create jobs” mantra will be trotted out and it will bring attention to Lake Tahoe.
That was the week that was. It's over and sports will let it go for another week. That elderly tall gentleman who is constantly being validated for his simple statement was partly responsible for the success of the National Football League. He might have been bigger than the NFL during his prime years in the 1970s.
The man who two decades ago said “Sports is out of whack” was none other than Howard Cosell, who during the 1970s was one of the three men in the booth announcing Monday Night Football and was both the most popular and most hated man on TV.
You wonder what Howard would have said about the week that was.
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 Tale of Three Cities



By Evan Weiner

March 28, 2011

http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/a-tale-of-three-cities



(Dover, DE) -- This is the story of three cities and their approach to sports spending. In a town that was once known as the punch line for a Jack Benny radio skit and then the home of Disneyland, Anaheim has decided that it is a worthwhile expenditure to get $75 million in bonds to seduce the Maloof brothers and entice them to move their National Basketball Association franchise to the burg. The Maloofs would eventually be required to pay back the money which presumably is a loan.



Anaheim city officials plan to discuss the proposal on Tuesday. While Anaheim is apparently showing the money to the Maloofs. The expenditure will go to making improvements at the city owned arena and more than likely NBA relocation fees or perhaps going to pay off the money owed to Sacramento when the city loaned other Kings owners some dough. The Maloofs inherited that deal.



Anaheim is a much richer market than Sacramento and more importantly for the Maloofs, the market has a major opening for a winter sports team on one of Rupert Murdoch's LA regional sports cable TV networks. Murdoch is losing Jerry Buss's Los Angeles Lakers in 2012 as Buss will team with Time Warner and form two Lakers networks, one in English and one in Spanish. Murdoch has been known to overpay for sports properties and the Maloofs might be in for a financial windfall thanks to Buss's decision to start two channels and leaving Murdoch.



Meanwhile Sacramento has no money to build a new arena and at this point when Sacramento officials are talking about cutting school programs including basketball out of the budget, having an NBA team in the city in a state of the art building can be considered gauche.



While Anaheim decides and Sacramento dithers, a few hundred miles east of Anaheim, Glendale, Arizona officials have decided that they want their National Hockey League franchise to remain in the municipally funded city-owned arena. In a complex deal, Glendale plans to sell municipal bonds to help make sure the franchise stays. But a self appointed civic group named the Goldwater Institute wants to be the de facto government of the city and has threatened to sue Glendale if they sell bonds to make sure the team stays. Goldwater's threat of a lawsuit against Glendale has stalled sale of municipal bonds that will raise a $100 million that will go to Matthew Hulsizer so he can buy the financially troubled franchise. The money will be used to purchase the team from the NHL.



The NHL wants to go ahead with the sale but Goldwater, the self appointed watchdog, has mucked up the process and the group's interference has played havoc with the bond market. If Glendale does succeed in selling the bonds and there is a court case, the Goldwater Institute, the so-called fiscally responsible group watching the people's interest will cost a lot of people a lot of money in higher interest and court cases.



The Goldwater Institute has a slight problem. One of their board members, Randy Kendrick, is the wife of Major League Baseball's Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick. The Phoenix-based baseball team has been heavily subsidized by taxpayers as the team plays in a municipally funded major league stadium (complete with a swimming pool) and a new spring training facility.



The Goldwater Institute has been fine with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent for the baseball team and other Major League Baseball teams for the construction of spring training bases in the Valley of the Sun metropolitan area. What is ironic about the Goldwater Institute is this. It is one of those self important think tanks that would like to set policy and shrink government spending yet organizations like the Goldwater Institute and people like Grover Norquist (the president of Americans for Tax Reform) is that they live off the government as gadflies. Reduce government and people like Norquist lose their livelihoods and cable TV news networks and news-talk radio shows will lose guests.



Norquist and his ilk have not tried to stop Anaheim. Meanwhile how did Sacramento and Glendale get in these positions?



Sacramento owners have had a long history of flirtation with Anaheim.

For years various Kings ownership groups have sought public funding to replace the privately funded Arco Arena, which opened in 1988, and build a new arena for the city's NBA franchise. Mayor Kevin Johnson, city elected officials and business leaders have about three weeks to accomplish the nearly impossible. Get funding for a new arena and do it in an economically stressed climate in California. It probably won’t happen.

A little background is necessary.

In 1996, the Kings owner at the time, Jim Thomas, proposed building both a Major League Baseball stadium and an NBA arena in the city, but by January 1997, the idea fell apart and Thomas began threatening to sell the team because the franchise was losing money. Sacramento city leaders, fearing that Thomas might move the team to Anaheim or some other city, loaned him $82 million to help ease his financial burden.

Thomas sold the franchise to the Maloof brothers in 1998.

In 2001, Sacramento's mayor, Heather Fargo, put together a task force to study whether Sacramento should green light an arena and entertainment center in the city's downtown area and, by November 2002, there was some sort of commitment to the plan. But the Maloof brothers pulled out of the proposed venture within a year, partly because they didn't want to get stuck with a debt service bill. When the issue was revisited in 2004, the Maloofs were unhappy that a city councilman offered a resolution that would cap spending at $175 million for the city and $175 million for the Maloofs.

Apparently a salary cap on NBA players' payroll is fine for the brothers, but a municipal spending cap for an arena is unacceptable.

In 2006, there was another arena proposal on the table and Sacramento officials appeared to have deliberately used language that made it unclear what voters are being asked to approve. The two-part referendum called for a quarter of a cent general tax hike for 15 years and then asked whether voters would like to see the estimated $1.2 billion in proceeds go to building an arena and other community projects.

Why didn't Sacramento politicians mention that the tax increase in question is in fact a sales tax hike?

The answer seemed to be that the arena referendum had to be worded in such a way because it was never going to get the two-thirds approval needed under California law to pass a sales tax increase. Officials need just a simple majority, a 50.1% plurality, to win a general tax hike.

The politics of sports is at its best extremely messy, and politicians generally go to great lengths to keep stadium and arena building proposals off the ballot. In 2006, Sacramento city officials seemed to have reached a new high — or low, depending on one's viewpoint — in making sure they do right by the Maloof brothers and the NBA. They were determined to build an arena despite the language in Proposition 218, which calls for a two-thirds majority on specific tax increases like arena and stadium projects.

If you looked at the details of the proposed lease between Sacramento and the Maloof brothers, it was clear that the Maloofs would be walking away with a windfall, but that's how the government–sports franchise partnership works and you can't fault the Maloofs in this deal. Sacramento was so desperate to hold on to its only major league team that it was willing to give away the store if voters say yes.

The city, through the general tax, would have put up at least $470 million for the arena and parking. Sacramento officials thought it would have cost as much as $542 million for both, and there also would have been a cost of between $35 and $51 million to pay off the debt service on the loans that will be taken out for the construction. The city would own the building, but all of the revenue generated for all events held inside the building would go to the Maloof brothers. Not only that: The siblings would keep all the money earned from selling the naming rights to the city owned arena.

The Maloofs would pay off Thomas' old loan, which they inherited after they purchased the team. Additionally, they would pay $4 million in annual rent, an amount that could easily come in 2006 from naming rights. The brothers would also have had to kick in $20 million for arena repairs. It was a sweet deal for the Maloofs and a rotten one for Sacramento.

The Maloof-Sacramento "agreement" fell apart because the Maloofs did not want an "arena-village" sprouting up around the arena and wanted lots and lots of parking.

The Maloofs and the city began fighting over development surrounding the arena, the city wanted commercial and residential building to ring the new facility to spur downtown development but the Maloofs, who would get just about every nickel of revenue inside the building, wanted the land for an 8,000 space parking lot. The Maloofs wanted the big parking lot because they would keep all of the money generated from the lot. The Maloofs wanted the same parking deal they have now at the old arena.

That might not seem like a deal breaker until you do the math. Assuming the Maloofs fill the lot and charge $10 a car, that would mean $80,000 a night multiplied by 41 and you get more than $3 million annually from parking alone just from Kings events. The Maloofs would also get parking money from non-Kings events at the building, so the parking lot issue has become significant and a deal breaker.

The two questions on the November 2006 ballot were sounded defeated but there is never surrender in the "arena-game." Stern took over the negotiations in 2007 and nothing happened. The NBA recently walked away from the bargaining table leaving the Maloofs to look elsewhere.

The entire sports industry in the Phoenix area should be studied by urban planners and historians because no city or region has been dumber than Phoenix area politicians in the past quarter century.



Had the Phoenix city council been smart, which they were not, they would have approved a multi-purpose arena back in the late 1980s that would have accommodated the NBA's Phoenix Suns and an NHL team. Instead lawmakers approved a $90 million expenditure that was designed to appease Suns owner Jerry Colangelo. The arena was built in such a way that the building was only good for basketball and not hockey or Arena Football or indoor soccer and that severely limited the potential revenues that could be generated in the place. Making sure they further satisfied Colangelo, the terms of the lease between the city and the NBA team required that the franchise pay the bulk of lease payments in years 36-40 of the 40-year lease agreement. The real rent is supposed to kick in around 2028 but given the lifespan of facilities (the Miami Arena was viable for about 11 years, the Charlotte Coliseum for about 13), it is doubtful that the team will even be playing in the arena in 2028 or 2029.

The arena opened in 1992.

In 2003, the city kicked in another $17 million to modernize the place when a second Valley of the Sun indoor athletic facility opened in Glendale, which is west of downtown Phoenix.

After taking care of Colangelo, Phoenix planners decided that a new downtown could be built with the arena and a baseball park as anchors so Phoenix politicians went about the task of getting a referendum in front of the public asking for support to build a ballpark for a Major League baseball team.

Over in Tempe, Phoenix/Arizona Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill, who came to the Valley of the Sun with his St. Louis Cardinals football team in 1988, wasn't too happy with his stadium in Tempe. Bidwill started to shop around looking for an Arizona community that wanted his team and was willing to build a stadium that the public would fund and put most of the stadium revenues in Bidwill's pocket. It took 12 years for Bidwill to find the right partner — Glendale — as votes in 2000 said yes to putting up $300 million of the estimated $465 million dollars needed to build a stadium. The money would come from a rise in the hotel/motel tax and car rentals (that is a mechanism designed to placate the locals, out of towners will pay, you won't, however most of the money on the car rental side comes from locals who rent cars more than visitors), Bidwill would recoup the $165 million through stadium naming rights and through a loophole in the 1986 Federal Tax Act which limits the money a municipality can take from stadium generator revenues to eight cents on a dollar.

Mesa said no to Bidwill in 1999.

Colangelo spearheaded the baseball stadium drive. He wanted a Major League Baseball team and went back to Phoenix-area politicians to make his pitch. They listened again.

In 1994, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (despite huge budget deficits and cutbacks in the funding of services) said yes to Colangelo and gave the go ahead for a quarter-cent increase in the county sales tax to pay for a part of the stadium's cost. There was a string attached, the approval had to come by March 31, 1995 which meant Major League Baseball had to either relocate a team to Phoenix (unlikely as there was nowhere to play in Phoenix) or expand. MLB awarded Phoenix and St. Petersburg teams beginning in 1998 when the Phoenix stadium would be completed.

The Maricopa sales tax hike was a problem.

Maricopa County residents were not allowed to vote on the issue of funding a baseball stadium with general sales tax revenue. In August 1997, Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox was shot by Larry Naman after leaving a county board meeting. The shooter testified in court that Wilcox's support for the tax justified the attack. In May 1998, Naman was found guilty of attempted first-degree murder.

Colangelo had his stadium whether Maricopa County residents liked it or not. Colangelo's stadium was supposed to have cost $279 million but the ballpark actually price tag was over $350 million and Colangelo's group had to make up the difference. Colangelo's group paid $130 million for the expansion team, there was the cost overruns and a high payroll and throw in the fact that Major League Baseball didn't give Arizona and Tampa Bay full revenue sharing between 1998 and 2002, and that nearly caused the team to declare bankruptcy by 2004.


While Colangelo was looking for a baseball team, he also wanted a National Hockey League team to take up dates in the city's new arena. In 1994, Colangelo told this reporter that Phoenix was a perfect spot for the NHL. The NHL needed to fill the Mountain Time zone for TV purposes and Phoenix and Denver were in the mix for NHL franchises.



Colangelo, who was not a hockey guy, was spot on. Denver investors bought the Quebec Nordiques in 1995 and moved the team to the Colorado city and Richard Burke put together a group that included Steven Gluckstern and bought the Winnipeg Jets. Burke and Gluckstern moved the team to Colangelo's building in 1996 and that is when trouble started.



The building approved by Phoenix politicians in 1988 had more than 3,000 view-obstructed seats or about 25 percent of the house. No NHL team can survive in a flawed arena even if the building was just four years old. Burke bought out Gluckstern in 1998 after Gluckstern teamed up with Howard Milstein to buy the New York islanders (in a real estate deal).



In 1999, Burke was hoping to move the team to Scottsdale. Bidwill had struck out in his bid to win voter approval for a $1.8 billion football stadium-village on May 18 of that year but Burke had won a preliminary vote on that date for a new arena with the help of Steve Ellman.



Burke got his arena project approved by Scottsdale voters in November 1999 but the arena was never built. Ellman bought the Coyotes in 2001 after the Scottsdale deal fell through. Ellman worked out an arena-land developing deal with Glendale officials in 2001 and moved his Coyotes to a new arena in 2003. Glendale paid $180 million for the building, Ellman did some developing but the real estate deal turned bad and the NHL now owns the team. Glendale could be kicking in as much as $25 million to keep the team going in 2010-11



Glendale worked with a group called Ice Edge Holdings to keep the team in the arena and create a tax district around the building to help stabilize the Coyotes bleak financial picture. That fell through but another suitor came to the rescue, Chicago businessman Matthew Hulsizer.





Meanwhile Glendale has another problem. The Arizona Stadium and Tourism Authority (AZSTA) is broke. That is the group that has raised funds for the Cardinals Glendale stadium and various Major League Spring Training ballparks that ring the Valley of the Sun. Hotel/motel and car rental taxes (which is 3.25 percent) from tourists that fund the authority are flat.



Arizona public officials decided in the 1990s to become a sports destination. Spring Training would be a big money maker for Arizona as baseball fans would flock to see their favorite teams in March of every year. The authority took in $34 million last year and has $37 million in expenses, $16 million of which goes to the Cardinals football stadium. Surprise (Kansas City and Texas), Scottsdale (San Francisco) and Tempe (Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim) will be getting less money to pay the bills at three spring training facilities. Youth sports will take a million dollar or so hit.



All of this is a product of Proposition 302 that was approved by Maricopa County residents 10 years ago.



The Maricopa County Stadium District and the Arizona Stadium and Tourism Authority are responsible for stadiums around Phoenix. The stadium district was formed in 1991 to make sure Phoenix area-based spring training teams were not lured by Las Vegas.



How expensive is spring training?



The Los Angeles Dodgers now share a new $110 million stadium in Glendale with the Chicago White Sox, who moved from Tucson. Glendale is providing $54 million in financing for the stadium.



Scottsdale and the stadium authorities put together a $23 million package to refurbish Scottsdale Stadium to make the San Francisco Giants ownership happy. About $13.3 million is from the AZSTA funds, $6.67 million from the Maricopa Stadium District, and $3.1 million from the city.



Arizona officials contend that the 2010 spring training slate had an economic impact of $348 million yet there is a deficit.



All of the maneuvering has left an impression. The baseball landscape has changed with all 15 Major League Baseball teams that train in Arizona located around Phoenix. Tucson has lost three teams (the White Sox, Colorado Rockies and the Diamondbacks). The arena in Phoenix has to fight Glendale for non basketball events. Glendale, not Phoenix or Tempe has the Super Bowl and while Phoenix gets a piece of the event buck, it is Glendale that gets sports spending money from those crown jewel events. The downtown envisioned with the arena and stadium as the pillars of a new downtown Phoenix has not materialized.



The question of whether it was worth spending billions in a state that is broke is never addressed by politicians. Arizona is selling off state buildings to plug a financial gap which in part was caused by poor sports decisions on every level.



They could have said no to Colangelo. They could have said no to Bidwill. They could have said no to the NHL. They could have said no to Major League Baseball. Don't blame the owners for asking for money, they could have asked for whatever they wanted.



There was an awful lot of economic miscalculation when it came to sports planning in Arizona and the battle is far from over. Mesa would like to hold onto the Chicago Cubs, the franchise that allegedly is the economic engine of the Cactus League, and the Milwaukee Brewers ownership could be looking to exit Maryvale. The Goldwater Institute seems to not have any problem with the All-American game of baseball despite all of the money being spent on the sport in Arizona. This is the tale of three cities and all should be figured out in a couple of weeks. The Maloofs will either stay in Sacrament o or leave for Anaheim and the city of Glendale will either sell the bonds or lose the main tenant in the city build arena. Sports business is pretty simple until politicians gets involved and make financial guarantees.

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 's xplana.com, kobo's literati or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com

Are sports fans resilient or suckers?

MONDAY, 14 MARCH 2011 09:10

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/are-sports-fans-resilient-or-suckers
There is an old saying: March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. For sports fans, March 2011 has come in with the full fury of a lion. There is more March Madness than normal.
Last Friday, the National Football League Players Association and representatives of the National Football League owners broke off negotiations and started the machinery, which promises an interesting offseason. The players association is legally no more – it has decertified – while the owners have locked players out of training facilities and suspended football operations as the 2006 collective bargaining agreement expired.
The breakdown in negotiations and the subsequent actions by the owners and players is just another blow to sports fans in the month of March. The Maloof brothers, the owners of the National Basketball Association's Sacramento Kings, asked the NBA for an extension of the league's March 1 moving deadline until mid-April as the Maloofs attempt to work out an agreement with Anaheim officials to relocate to the Southern California city.
The Maloofs have apparently soured on Sacramento as an NBA city because they cannot get a taxpayer-funded arena that is loaded with high-revenue luxury boxes and club seats – the very type of seats that are beyond the price range of the average worker in Sacramento financially – and Orange County, California residents might be a better fit as they seem to be wealthier than the people in the California capital of Sacramento.
While the Maloofs continue to negotiate with Anaheim officials, Sacramento mayor and former NBA player Kevin Johnson is forging ahead with new arena plans with or without the Maloofs. The Maloof/Kings drama is playing out against an interesting backdrop. Sacramento officials are thinking of cutting school programs like sports and basketball because they don’t have any money for anything but school basics.
Just in case fans haven’t noticed, sports owners are social class segregationists. One owner of a team never hid from his belief that fans are on the low end of the totem pole in sports society and he wanted more well-heeled people in his building.
“Nothing comes from the fan,” said the owner. “Support comes from the customers. Big difference. Fans scream on talk radio. Customers bring their kids, their families, their wives, their dates, their companies, their business partners. They have lives and don’t talk to the radio talk show hosts.”
Sports owners and athletes seem to not care all that much about fans. But fans seem to have very little problem being abused. All of those people who claimed in 1995 that they would never attend another baseball game after the Major League Baseball Players Association went on strike in August 1994 and the owners brought in replacement players or scabs in an effort to break the association in March 1995 seem to have broken their vow and have come back to the ballpark in record numbers in the 21st century.
The news from the New York Mets ownership has not been good for a good while as the Wilpon family has been battling with the trustee involved in the Bernard Madoff case. Irving Picard is looking to get victims money and is going after the Wilpons in an attempt to recover it. The Wilpons seem to be in financial trouble and that is not good news for Mets fans. Still Mets fans have not given up on either baseball or the team, they are hoping the Wilpons go down with the ship and a new owner will step in and bring the Mets back to contention.
In Glendale, Arizona, a conservative watchdog group has been causing havoc with Glendale's ability to sell municipal bonds with a lot of the bond money going to bail out the Phoenix Coyotes National Hockey League franchise so that the team will stay in the city-built arena. National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman went after the Goldwater Institute in a news conference last week in Glendale. There are rumors floating around that Glendale would sue the Goldwater Institute for poisoning the well by bad mouthing the city's attempt to sell the municipal bonds.
The irony of the potential lawsuit is that it might cause a great deal of embarrassment for one of the Goldwater Institute's trustees, Randy Kendrick. Mrs. Kendrick's husband Ken is the Managing General Partner and one of the owners of Major League Baseball's Phoenix-based Arizona Diamondbacks, a franchise that plays in a stadium that was funded by taxpayers and a franchise that just moved into a new spring training facility that was also paid by Arizona taxpayers.
While Bettman was in Glendale, the league had other health problems crop up. Former NHL tough guy Bob Probert left his brain to be studied following his death last June. There was suspicion that Probert, who died of a heart attack at the age of 45, suffered from brain damage that might have been connected to hockey injuries. Researchers at Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy confirmed Probert's fear that he suffered from a brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Boston University is building up a brain bank of deceased athletes, mostly football players and university added a brain recently that of former NFL player Dave Duerson who killed himself on Feb. 17. The Boston University center is attempting to find a link between playing football and permanent head injuries – something that football officials and hired medical experts say is not true.
On Thursday, Montreal police began a criminal investigation into the on-ice hit by Boston's Zdeno Chara that left the Montreal Canadiens' Max Pacioretty with a severe concussion and cracked vertebra. Chara checked Pacioretty into something called a turnbuckle, which is a piece of glass that separates the team benches in the Montreal arena. The NHL didn't take any disciplinary action against Chara but Air Canada let Bettman know they are not happy with the violence in the league and threatened to end the airline's various league marketing partnerships and Bettman responded by saying the league could end an agreement to use Air Canada in chartering teams around Canada and the US. Another NHL Canadian sponsor, Via Rail also wants the league to clean up the violence.
Meanwhile, Quebec Premier Jean Charest criticized NHL violence and wants the league to address the issue. But fans are not all that concerned. They want Bettman fired for ruining their game and don’t understand there is a business component that overrides the concern of the fans. But many fans had no problem with Chara’s hit. Fans in Canada and in the United States, stoked by know-nothing sports writers when it comes to business concerns, want Bettman’s out of office because he is in their minds incompetent and has ruined the game.
The sports fans and the Canadian hockey writers are failing to realize Bettman works for the owners and not for them. The fans blame Bettman for the NHL’s massive Sun Belt expansion plan that dates back to 1990 -- three years before Bettman took over as NHL Commissioner – and that there were 26 teams in the league when Bettman walked into his office for the first time.
In the New York metropolitan area, the Giants and Jets gave their fans a pre-lockout present. A hike in ticket prices for the 2011 season -- a season that at the moment will not be played. Cablevision also has given Knicks and Rangers fans a present for 2011-12, a whopping 49 percent average price hike for Knicks tickets and 23 percent for Rangers ducats. Jim Dolan is renovating Madison Square Garden (again) and needs money for the sprucing up of the 43-year-old building that is not on the New York City tax roll.
Give Jim Dolan some credit.
Knicks tickets are high priced items. Courtside seats are $3,000 a piece. Dolan is doing what politicians refuse to do, raising “his” tax for seats on well-heeled people to close his budget gap. Dolan has far more courage than Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg and many politicians who will not ask high income earners to share in the sacrifice that lesser income earners are doing whether it is union givebacks and outright government layoffs or paying higher tolls on roads or higher fees to use parks and other government services which means the poorer people of American society are sacrificing far more than the people who have the ability to buy Jim Dolan’s soon to be $3,600 courtside seats.
Dolan is forcing well-heeled customers and corporations who buy Knicks tickets to share in the sacrifice. Of course those people and the corporations that buy the high-ticket items get a tax write off of 50 percent. Someone else is paying for the entertainment-tax writeoff, perhaps the public at large for a few who are entertained at games?

So one NBA team may move, the NHL may be in a court fight with a political watchdog group that features a trustee whose husband benefited from public handouts, the NFL has locked out the players and on the horizon is an NBA lockout on July 1. What is a sports fan to do?
The sports fan who gives his or her team unconditional love and seemingly ends up like Charlie Brown in that Charlie is ready to kick the football out of Lucy Van Pelt's hold in the Peanuts comic strip. But as Charlie Brown gets ready to put his foot into the ball, Lucy pulls it away and Charlie falls on his back and head. (Hopefully Charlie Brown has a better post football career health plan than retired NFL players if he suffered any brain damage from falling on his head – American taxpayers are paying for many players healthcare through Social Security Insurance and Medicare even though the former players are in their 40s and 50s because the National Football League Players Association wanted "Money Now" in their 1982 and 1987 labor actions and didn't bother getting their membership enhanced post career health and pension benefits even though players abused their bodies in their careers.)
The United States federal government, specifically Congress and various Presidents have given owners the tools to make more and more money. But it was in Milwaukee that the shift occurred that put sports on the public dole. In 1950, Milwaukee elected officials decided to build a stadium with public dollars and get a baseball team. In the middle of spring training in the middle of March 1953, the city snagged an owner. Lou Perini moved his financially struggling Boston Braves to Milwaukee and hit the jackpot. Milwaukee gave Perini the stadium for $1,000 in rent and all concession revenue.
Wisconsin fans turned out to see Perini’s Braves in big numbers. That started the business that worked out well for owners of having cities bid for American and National League Baseball teams.
Other owners quickly moved. Bill Veeck sold the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore interests. The Philadelphia A’s baseball team was sold and moved to Kansas City. Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley took notice of Perini’s success and felt Brooklyn (which was at the top of baseball attendance annually) would not be able to compete with Milwaukee and started looking for an alternative to Ebbets Field. O’Malley took his Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957. Horace Stoneham took his Giants from upper Manhattan to San Francisco in 1957. Both got new stadiums in their new cities although O’Malley spent his own money on Dodger Stadium. But he did get all sorts of tax breaks and incentives and land.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961, which allowed leagues to sell all of their franchises as one to TV networks, which gave leagues an antitrust exemption, and it has paid off fabulously for owners, particularly those in the NFL. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson inked an anti-inflation bill, which also included the American Football League-National Football League merger. That bill led to the formulation of the Super Bowl.
The 1984 Cable TV Act has been embraced by owners who make millions off of cable channels such as ESPN and regional sports cable TV networks, like the New York Yankees’ partially-owned YES Network. The 1986 Tax Act gave owners to big help in negotiating leases at municipally built stadium and arenas. If a town built an arena, owners could get as much as 92 cents on every dollar generated in the building constructed after 1986 on a lease as municipalities were limited to just getting eight cents out of every dollar to pay down the debt on the facility.
The 1986 Tax Act is the major cause for major expansion and franchise relocation in Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and the formation of Major League Soccer.
Owners sought new buildings and people with money wanted to own teams whether it was for ego, making some money on a team or buying a franchise and holding onto it long enough and then sell it for a nice profit wanted to get into the game. Those people happily bought expansion teams.
Major League Baseball's 1993 expansion into Miami and Denver had more to do with Congress and paying off a debt than new buildings. Major League Baseball owners were found to have colluded against the players by an arbitrator and were slapped with a $280 million fine. The expansion helped offset the $280 million bill as MLB got $100 million each from Miami and Denver owners to join the league. Denver voters approved a baseball park to boot.
Baseball took in more money with the 1998 expansion to St. Petersburg and Phoenix. St. Petersburg had a stadium and Phoenix residents approved a stadium funding for a new facility with a March 31, 1995 expiration date. MLB expanded right before the funding was taken off the table. The 1995 NFL expansion to Charlotte and Jacksonville brought an unexpected side development. Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson hired a sports marketer named Max Muhleman, the man who introduced personal seat licensing to football.
Fourteen NFL teams use the ploy that gives “fans” the right to purchase a seat then pay for a ticket for a game. Richardson needed extra money to pay off his stadium, which did not get as much public money as needed.
Muhleman’s idea came from Donald Trump. As New Jersey Generals owner in the mid-1980s, Trump was looking to move his operations from the Meadowlands to Queens, specifically the Willets Point junkyard land. To help fund the "condo-stadium," Trump was going to have people purchase the seats and then charge for tickets. In Trump’s scheme about 2/3s of the stadium would have featured what is now know as personal seat licenses.
Fans have put up with baseball labor disputes in 1972, 1981, 1985, 1990 and 1994-95 along with a drug scandal in the 1980s and the alleged usage of illegal performance enhancing drugs in the 1990s and beyond.
Fans seemingly are unaware of the physical toll that football players endure from all levels -- Pop Warner kids football up to the NFL -- and how America’s safety net is taking care of broken down players to the tune of perhaps a billion dollars to taxpayers. When the NFL and NFLPA fight over splitting up $9 billion, former players are going through various struggles with seemingly one common theme.
Post-career business failures, broken marriages, the inability to keep a job, financial stress, depression, and disability. Neither the owners nor the players (all of whom will be former players someday) are seriously looking after the discarded players.
But NFL owners have been enriched by non-fans who pay cable bills for ESPN or pay a variety of taxes to help build NFL places of business whether it is was an increase in sales tax, car rental tax, hotel tax, motel tax, water tax, lotteries (in Maryland), a sin tax, a restaurant tax, tax breaks, tax incentives or in the case in Louisiana paying $186.5 million in subsidies to keep the New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson happy between 2002 and 2010. That lease deal has been rewritten and Benson isn’t getting the same amount of money annually from Baton Rouge politicians. He will get at the most $6 million but the state has given him a building next to the New Orleans Superdome and will rent office space in the Benson Tower.
Since the last NBA lockout in 1999, George Shinn moved his Charlotte Hornets to New Orleans, Michael Heisley took his Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis and Clayton Bennett removed his Seattle SuperSonics from the Pacific Northwest and placed the team in Oklahoma City. In 1998 and 1999 NBA Commissioner David Stern and his owners were looking for cost certainty and trying to make NBA basketball affordable to fans that had been displaced in the every spiraling up tick in process for tickets. There will be a lockout starting July 1 unless the players agree to take far less money and the reason that NBA owners will do this is because of spiraling costs of running a franchise.
The International Olympic Committee tries to shake down local governments for the privilege of paying for a summer or winter Olympics forcing the local host city to pay off Olympic size debts. Just look at the aftermath of the 2004 Athens Games that contributed to Greece’s financial failings.
Sports fans put up with an awful lot. There are groups who are demanding a say in the NFL lockout or a place at the sports table. To those groups, no offense, but you are not welcomed at the sports table. The truth is the owners only care about customers who bring money to the stadium. For fans, it is fine for you to buy t-shirts, caps, coffee cups with team logos and other merchandise and to watch the games on cable TV. Owners don’t want you. They want customers who spend money.
When the NFL owners unlock the doors, all will be forgiven. After all there is tailgating, betting and lounging around the TV on Sunday afternoons in the fall. Besides there is always college football, a place where players make money for schools and in the process break down their bodies all for the glory of someone’s alma mater. The so-called student athletes may get a scholarship but they are there to either prepare for the pros or to be used to make money for the school – big time college sports has a tax exemption thanks to the federal government. Go to a bowl game and the school doesn’t have to pay tax on their payday for playing football.
It is more than just March Madness time. Sports fans are either the most resilient bunch of people around or the biggest suckers going. The owners know the answer to that premise. Do 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. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com

A Sacramento Kings move to Anaheim could open door for new NBA franchise in Newark
WEDNESDAY, 02 MARCH 2011 14:38

BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/a-sacramento-kings-move-to-anaheim-could-open-door-for-new-nba-franchise-in-newark
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
If you listen to the sports radio talk shows, as painful as that can be at times, there seems to be a resentment that basketball players such as LeBron James, Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul and Dwight Howard are manipulating the system using impending free agency as leverage to force trades or collude to play with other big time players.
In the CNN-SI Truth and Rumors section, Howard is leaving Orlando for the Los Angeles Lakers as a free agent or maybe he will join the Brooklyn Nets.
The New York Knicks flagship radio station, WEPN which along with New York newspaper sports sections led the cheerleading for the Knicks pursuit of Anthony ran a promo pushing Chris Paul to the Knicks when Paul becomes a free agent after 2012. It seems the NBA's major market teams can somehow fit stars into big cities despite the presence of a salary cap just like Major League Baseball, which has no salary cap but significant revenue sharing.
But no one ever talks about the ultimate free agency — franchise relocation.
The prevailing thinking is that the NBA's big stars want to go to big markets. LeBron James and Chris Bosh didn't go to a big market; they went to Miami where they joined Wade. Anthony ended up with the Knicks. Will small market NBA owners look to big markets like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York (Newark) if they cannot make it in Sacramento, Indiana, New Orleans, Memphis and Charlotte to name a few struggling markets?
The National Basketball Association has approved a number of moves in the past decade. Michael Heisley left behind Vancouver, Canada for a new arena in Memphis in 2001. George Shinn took his Charlotte Hornets basketball team to New Orleans in 2002. Two years ago, Clayton Bennett failed at his attempt to get a new Seattle arena for his SuperSonics basketball franchise and literally went home — his home — to Oklahoma City.
Memphis, New Orleans and Oklahoma City are small markets and there seems to be a feeling that the small markets cannot work over the long haul in the NBA.
The Maloof brothers, the owners of the Sacramento Kings, apparently are very interested in moving their basketball business from California's capital to a very crowded professional and college market in Anaheim, California which is south of Los Angeles. The Maloofs have received permission from the NBA to pursue a transfer to the arena close to Disneyland and will tell league officials in mid April if they intend to move south.
Anaheim is a much wealthier market than Sacramento and potentially oozes TV money, which is extremely important.
The Maloofs are negotiating with Anaheim officials and could be speaking with the big bosses from Rupert Murdoch's FOX Sports West about the huge hole in programming at the regional cable network starting in the fall of 2012 when Jerry Buss's Los Angeles Lakers join forces with Time Warner and form a potentially high revenue English- language Lakers channel and a Spanish-language Lakers channel.
In the David Stern world of success, a franchise needs three components — strong government support (Anaheim is pushing to get the Maloofs to sign a deal with Henry Samueli and share the city owned arena with Samueli's NHL Anaheim Ducks franchise), a strong local cable TV contract (FOX Sports West will have an opening for programming) and strong corporate support.
Newark has an NBA franchise at the moment but the city's arena will have an opening, presumably in 2012-13 when the present NBA franchise moves to Brooklyn. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has spoken to Stern about that opening, so presumably there is strong government support for a Newark NBA franchise. The Comcast-Time Warner and New York Mets owned SNY regional cable network has no professional (NHL-NBA) games during the winter and could use programming. New Jersey has not shown strong corporate support for the Nets or NHL Devils and that might be a problem. The New York market oozes TV money too despite two Major League Baseball teams, two NFL teams, three National Hockey League teams, two NBA teams and a few of Big East basketball teams.
That leads to this question. For an owner, is being a big fish in a small pond better than being third fiddle in a super market like New York or Los Angeles?
The Maloofs are exploring that question.

If the answer is yes, the Maloofs move could open the door for Christie to recruit a disgruntled NBA owner once Mikhail Prokhorov takes his Nets through the Holland Tunnel and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (or whatever it will soon be renamed) to Brooklyn in two years. There are some financially-challenged franchises in the NBA which may trigger an owners lockout starting July 1. The suspects include the NBA-owned New Orleans Hornets, Charlotte, Memphis and Indiana.
Sacramento and Charlotte were once model NBA franchises. Both businesses had phenomenal success complete with sellouts and rabid fans. But both cities didn’t have the proper facilities to maximize revenues complete with luxury boxes and club seats along with restaurants in the arena. Shinn never got a new arena and left. The city built a new arena for an expansion team and that team has not been embraced.
Sacramento has had a long history of flirtation with Anaheim.
For years various Kings ownership groups have sought public funding to replace the privately funded Arco Arena, which opened in 1988, and build a new arena for the city's NBA franchise. Now, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player, and city officials are scrambling to put together a proposal that pleases the Maloof brothers.
Johnson and city elected officials and business leaders have about six weeks to accomplish the nearly impossible. Get funding for a new arena and do it in an economically stressed climate in California.
A little background is necessary.
In 1996, the Kings owner at the time, Jim Thomas, proposed building both a Major League Baseball stadium and an NBA arena in the city, but by January 1997, the idea fell apart and Thomas began threatening to sell the team because the franchise was losing money. Sacramento city leaders, fearing that Thomas might move the team to Anaheim or some other city, loaned him $82 million to help ease his financial burden.
Thomas sold the franchise to the Maloof brothers in 1998.
In 2001, Sacramento's mayor, Heather Fargo, put together a task force to study whether Sacramento should green light an arena and entertainment center in the city's downtown area and, by November 2002, there was some sort of commitment to the plan. But the Maloof brothers pulled out of the proposed venture within a year, partly because they didn't want to get stuck with a debt service bill. When the issue was revisited in 2004, the Maloofs were unhappy that a city councilman offered a resolution that would cap spending at $175 million for the city and $175 million for the Maloofs.
Apparently a salary cap on NBA players' payroll is fine for the brothers, but a municipal spending cap for an arena is unacceptable.
In 2006, there was another arena proposal on the table and Sacramento officials appeared to have deliberately used language that made it unclear what voters are being asked to approve. The two-part referendum called for a quarter of a cent general tax hike for 15 years and then asked whether voters would like to see the estimated $1.2 billion in proceeds go to building an arena and other community projects.
Why didn't Sacramento politicians mention that the tax increase in question is in fact a sales tax hike?
The answer seemed to be that the arena referendum had to be worded in such a way because it was never going to get the two-thirds approval needed under California law to pass a sales tax increase. Officials need just a simple majority, a 50.1% plurality, to win a general tax hike.
The politics of sports is at its best extremely messy, and politicians generally go to great lengths to keep stadium and arena building proposals off the ballot. In 2006, Sacramento city officials seemed to have reached a new high — or low, depending on one's viewpoint — in making sure they do right by the Maloof brothers and the NBA. They were determined to build an arena despite the language in Proposition 218, which calls for a two-thirds majority on specific tax increases like arena and stadium projects.
If you looked at the details of the proposed lease between Sacramento and the Maloof brothers, it was clear that the Maloofs would be walking away with a windfall, but that's how the government–sports franchise partnership works and you can't fault the Maloofs in this deal. Sacramento was so desperate to hold on to its only major league team that it was willing to give away the store if voters say yes.
The city, through the general tax, would have put up at least $470 million for the arena and parking. Sacramento officials thought it would have cost as much as $542 million for both, and there also would have been a cost of between $35 and $51 million to pay off the debt service on the loans that will be taken out for the construction. The city would own the building, but all of the revenue generated for all events held inside the building would go to the Maloof brothers. Not only that: The siblings would keep all the money earned from selling the naming rights to the city owned arena.
The Maloofs would pay off Thomas' old loan, which they inherited after they purchased the team. Additionally, they would pay $4 million in annual rent, an amount that could easily come in 2006 from naming rights. The brothers would also have had to kick in $20 million for arena repairs. It was a sweet deal for the Maloofs and a rotten one for Sacramento.
The Maloof-Sacramento "agreement" fell apart because the Maloofs did not want an "arena-village" sprouting up around the arena and wanted lots and lots of parking.
The Maloofs and the city began fighting over development surrounding the arena, the city wanted commercial and residential building to ring the new facility to spur downtown development but the Maloofs, who would get just about every nickel of revenue inside the building, wanted the land for an 8,000 space parking lot. The Maloofs wanted the big parking lot because they would keep all of the money generated from the lot. The Maloofs wanted the same parking deal they have now at the old arena.
That might not seem like a deal breaker until you do the math. Assuming the Maloofs fill the lot and charge $10 a car, that would mean $80,000 a night multiplied by 41 and you get more than $3 million annually from parking alone just from Kings events. The Maloofs would also get parking money from non-Kings events at the building, so the parking lot issue has become significant and a deal breaker.
The two questions on the November 2006 ballot were sounded defeated but there is never surrender in the "arena-game." Stern took over the negotiations in 2007 and nothing happened. The NBA recently walked away from the bargaining table leaving the Maloofs to look elsewhere. Still Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson is looking to get an arena done and the NBA has a history of going back to failed cities. Charlotte, Memphis, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City and Toronto among others were failed basketball cities. Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia (the Warriors moved to San Francisco in 1962 abandoning the town. Syracuse moved to Philadelphia in 1963.) and Chicago failed to support NBA or ABA franchises.

In April 2005, NBA Commissioner David Stern threw a hissy fit when New Jersey officials would not commit to building an arena for Nets basketball in Newark.
"New Jersey blew it," Stern said before a Nets playoff game. "We practically begged them, and the New Jersey politicians did not step up." Stern was irate because New Jersey politicians said no to public funding for a Newark building.
Newark, Seattle, Louisville, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Vancouver could be in the mix if an owner decides his present market does not work financially. The Maloof's decision to become a small fish in a large pond could have some major reverberations. Newark might be a free agent destination, not for Dwight Howard or Chris Paul, rather an NBA owner.
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