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
Showing posts with label Carmelo Anthony. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carmelo Anthony. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Carmelo Anthony in New York is unlikely to make NBA owners melo
WEDNESDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2011 13:47
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/carmelo-anthony-in-new-york-is-unlikely-to-make-nba-owners-melo
When George Young was running the New York Giants in the General Manager's chair back in the late 1970s into the 1990s, he used to say that "a general manager has to general manage, an owner has to own, a player has to play and a coach has to coach" in order to be successful George Young's formula worked for his team as he put together two Super Bowl championship squads in 1986 and in 1990.
George Young probably would not enjoy being a general manager in the National Basketball Association these days. Owners general manage, players general manage and the industry is on the verge of a labor shutdown on July 1, 2011. The Carmelo Anthony trade from the Denver Nuggets to the New York Knicks probably put the NBA a step closer to a lockout and probably will push another owner, Denver's Stan Kroenke (whose wife Ann is the daughter of Wal-Mart co-founder Bud Walton — Wal-Mart is notorious for hiring cheap labor and preventing unionization among the company's employees) probably can now be counted among the NBA owners hard line faction that wants to reduce players salaries.
Kroenke is also the owner of the St. Louis Rams franchise in the National Football League. You might have heard that the football owners are thinking about locking out their employees — the players — on March 4. National Football League owners also want to reduce employee's salaries.
Carmelo Anthony seemingly called all the shots in the trade that ultimately brought him to the building that sits between 31st and 33rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue in Manhattan (a building that is not on the New York City property tax roll since 1982 which means that New York City is losing about $14 million annually in taxes). Anthony has joined LeBron James and Chris Bosh as big name talent who have switched teams. The difference between Anthony and the other two is simple. James and Bosh fulfilled their contractual obligations, James in Cleveland and Bosh in Toronto and the two could legally shop around their talents.
Anthony still had a few months left on his Denver Nuggets deal before he could legally shop around his talent. Carmelo Anthony usurped his Denver general manager Masai Ujiri's power last summer by accident at his wedding when New Orleans Hornets star Chris Paul toasted Anthony and his new wife Lala Vasquez, "We will form our own Big 3" referring to the Miami Heat's signing of James, Bosh and reupping Dwayne Wade and the Knicks signing of Amar'e Stoudemire. Stoudemire, Anthony and Paul would team up with the Knicks by 2012.
New York now has two-thirds of Paul's "own Big 3."
The NBA's collective bargaining agreement with the players ends on June 30 and NBA Commissioner David Stern wants to cut salaries and the players want to keep status quo. There was pressure on Anthony to get his situation squared away before June 30. No one knows what the outcome of the agreement will be, but if Stern and the 30 NBA owners want to cut expenses, it is a good bet that Anthony was putting millions at risk if he played out his Denver contract.
Last summer, Stern said something about the league needing to cut player costs somewhere around $700 to $800 million and that the league's 30 teams combined would lose $340-350 million in 2010-11 and something has to be done and that would start by players giving back items earned in collective bargaining.
The NBA no longer wants to give the players 57 percent of the revenues.
Of course not every team is going to lose an average of ten million dollars a season. The New York Knickerbockers franchise, despite putting a poor product on the court (until this season, the team is now a notch above mediocre), sells out every game and the Dolan family owns the franchise, the building and, of course, the Dolans have the Madison Square Garden TV network and Cablevision. There is no way without creative accounting the Knicks franchise is losing money given the team's revenue stream availability.
Also on the table is a threat by Stern aimed right across the bow of the National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Billy Hunter's ship. The elimination of financially wobbly franchises. The best guess is that those markets could be New Orleans or Sacramento or maybe Charlotte or Memphis. The contraction of the league would mean fewer jobs for players. Left unsaid in the possibility of lopping off teams is what happens with the leases between the franchises that didn't make it into the future and the municipalities which built the arenas and gave away the house to the owner of the local franchise that was set adrift along with compensating the owner whose team has been put out to pasture.
Chris Paul is under contract to the New Orleans Hornets through June 30, 2012. Stern is Paul's boss these days. The NBA took over the ownership of the Hornets franchise. Stern has on one hand said the franchise could be disbanded but the NBA wants to make the team attractive for local Louisiana investors to keep the team in the Crescent City. But Stern has contradicted himself saying potential investors are interesting in buying the team and moving the franchise to another city. Based on the last NBA franchise sale, the Golden State Warriors franchise of Oakland, California (the nation's fifth biggest market), the Hornets franchise should fetch at least $300 million (depending on the market) which means each NBA owner would get $10 million or more dollars in a sale. The NBA is not going to get rid of the New Orleans franchise but that doesn't mean that Louisiana will keep the team. The franchise could end up elsewhere.
The NBA has some financial problems. According to one of Herb Simon's friends, the mall developer and owner of the Indiana Pacers, Simon is losing money on the basketball team even though the team is getting big money from Indianapolis to help pay the maintenance at the Pacers home arena. Simon is committed to keep his team in Indianapolis until 2013 as part of a deal. The Indianapolis' Capital Improvement Board gave the Simon $30 million for the 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13 seasons in $10 million annual payments. The board will pay for a minimum of $3.5 million in arena improvements. If Simon moves the team in 2013, he has to repay the $30 million. If he stays in Indianapolis until the lease ends in 2019, he can leave without paying back any money.
Simon gets revenues from every event held in the building.
Next Tuesday is the NBA's deadline for an owner to move his franchise. The Sacramento Kings ownership group, the Maloof brothers, have been unable to secure public funding for a new arena and according to Stern, the Maloofs have checked out Henry Samueli's arena in Anaheim as a possible relocation site. Samueli owns the National Hockey League's Anaheim Ducks and it is hard to imagine Samueli would cut a deal with the Maloofs which would give them a significant revenue stream in the building. There would also be the question of whether the Maloofs would have to pay off Jerry Buss (Los Angeles Lakers) and Donald Sterling (Los Angeles Clippers) for invading the LA market.
Sacramento mayor and former NBA player Kevin Johnson is continuing his efforts to get a Sacramento arena built.
Milwaukee owner (United States Senator) Herb Kohl is seeking a new arena. Senator Kohl (D- WI) is limited in his ability to threat a franchise move as they would signal that in his opinion Milwaukee and Wisconsin are not good places to do business.
Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis is a fan of the National Hockey League's hard salary cap. Leonsis is also the owner of the NHL's Washington Capitals and was in the NHL in 2004-05 when the owners locked out the players in a labor dispute.
Small market NBA owners have been after Stern for years to find a way to increase revenue sharing between the big money teams (the Knicks and Lakers) and the small market franchises (Memphis, Charlotte, Indiana, Milwaukee, Portland and Sacramento).
Paul's toast at Carmelo Anthony's wedding, the LeBron James "Decision" last July and the rumors that another small market star Dwight Howard might not stick around Orlando when his contract ends has to be catching the attention of the owners. The big name stars are dictating moves but that isn't all that unusual for NBA. Kareem Abdul Jabber forced his way out of Milwaukee and ended up in LA with the Lakers, Julius Erving didn't; get a bonus after Roy Boe and his New York Nets joined the NBA in 1976. Erving went to Philadelphia. Shaquille O'Neal left Orlando for the Lakers.
The NBA owners will lockout the players on July 1 unless something unanticipated suddenly appears. The star players have too much power and the owners will correct the imbalance. Chris Paul's toast and LeBron James' decision will come back to haunt the players.
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
WEDNESDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2011 13:47
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/carmelo-anthony-in-new-york-is-unlikely-to-make-nba-owners-melo
When George Young was running the New York Giants in the General Manager's chair back in the late 1970s into the 1990s, he used to say that "a general manager has to general manage, an owner has to own, a player has to play and a coach has to coach" in order to be successful George Young's formula worked for his team as he put together two Super Bowl championship squads in 1986 and in 1990.
George Young probably would not enjoy being a general manager in the National Basketball Association these days. Owners general manage, players general manage and the industry is on the verge of a labor shutdown on July 1, 2011. The Carmelo Anthony trade from the Denver Nuggets to the New York Knicks probably put the NBA a step closer to a lockout and probably will push another owner, Denver's Stan Kroenke (whose wife Ann is the daughter of Wal-Mart co-founder Bud Walton — Wal-Mart is notorious for hiring cheap labor and preventing unionization among the company's employees) probably can now be counted among the NBA owners hard line faction that wants to reduce players salaries.
Kroenke is also the owner of the St. Louis Rams franchise in the National Football League. You might have heard that the football owners are thinking about locking out their employees — the players — on March 4. National Football League owners also want to reduce employee's salaries.
Carmelo Anthony seemingly called all the shots in the trade that ultimately brought him to the building that sits between 31st and 33rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue in Manhattan (a building that is not on the New York City property tax roll since 1982 which means that New York City is losing about $14 million annually in taxes). Anthony has joined LeBron James and Chris Bosh as big name talent who have switched teams. The difference between Anthony and the other two is simple. James and Bosh fulfilled their contractual obligations, James in Cleveland and Bosh in Toronto and the two could legally shop around their talents.
Anthony still had a few months left on his Denver Nuggets deal before he could legally shop around his talent. Carmelo Anthony usurped his Denver general manager Masai Ujiri's power last summer by accident at his wedding when New Orleans Hornets star Chris Paul toasted Anthony and his new wife Lala Vasquez, "We will form our own Big 3" referring to the Miami Heat's signing of James, Bosh and reupping Dwayne Wade and the Knicks signing of Amar'e Stoudemire. Stoudemire, Anthony and Paul would team up with the Knicks by 2012.
New York now has two-thirds of Paul's "own Big 3."
The NBA's collective bargaining agreement with the players ends on June 30 and NBA Commissioner David Stern wants to cut salaries and the players want to keep status quo. There was pressure on Anthony to get his situation squared away before June 30. No one knows what the outcome of the agreement will be, but if Stern and the 30 NBA owners want to cut expenses, it is a good bet that Anthony was putting millions at risk if he played out his Denver contract.
Last summer, Stern said something about the league needing to cut player costs somewhere around $700 to $800 million and that the league's 30 teams combined would lose $340-350 million in 2010-11 and something has to be done and that would start by players giving back items earned in collective bargaining.
The NBA no longer wants to give the players 57 percent of the revenues.
Of course not every team is going to lose an average of ten million dollars a season. The New York Knickerbockers franchise, despite putting a poor product on the court (until this season, the team is now a notch above mediocre), sells out every game and the Dolan family owns the franchise, the building and, of course, the Dolans have the Madison Square Garden TV network and Cablevision. There is no way without creative accounting the Knicks franchise is losing money given the team's revenue stream availability.
Also on the table is a threat by Stern aimed right across the bow of the National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Billy Hunter's ship. The elimination of financially wobbly franchises. The best guess is that those markets could be New Orleans or Sacramento or maybe Charlotte or Memphis. The contraction of the league would mean fewer jobs for players. Left unsaid in the possibility of lopping off teams is what happens with the leases between the franchises that didn't make it into the future and the municipalities which built the arenas and gave away the house to the owner of the local franchise that was set adrift along with compensating the owner whose team has been put out to pasture.
Chris Paul is under contract to the New Orleans Hornets through June 30, 2012. Stern is Paul's boss these days. The NBA took over the ownership of the Hornets franchise. Stern has on one hand said the franchise could be disbanded but the NBA wants to make the team attractive for local Louisiana investors to keep the team in the Crescent City. But Stern has contradicted himself saying potential investors are interesting in buying the team and moving the franchise to another city. Based on the last NBA franchise sale, the Golden State Warriors franchise of Oakland, California (the nation's fifth biggest market), the Hornets franchise should fetch at least $300 million (depending on the market) which means each NBA owner would get $10 million or more dollars in a sale. The NBA is not going to get rid of the New Orleans franchise but that doesn't mean that Louisiana will keep the team. The franchise could end up elsewhere.
The NBA has some financial problems. According to one of Herb Simon's friends, the mall developer and owner of the Indiana Pacers, Simon is losing money on the basketball team even though the team is getting big money from Indianapolis to help pay the maintenance at the Pacers home arena. Simon is committed to keep his team in Indianapolis until 2013 as part of a deal. The Indianapolis' Capital Improvement Board gave the Simon $30 million for the 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13 seasons in $10 million annual payments. The board will pay for a minimum of $3.5 million in arena improvements. If Simon moves the team in 2013, he has to repay the $30 million. If he stays in Indianapolis until the lease ends in 2019, he can leave without paying back any money.
Simon gets revenues from every event held in the building.
Next Tuesday is the NBA's deadline for an owner to move his franchise. The Sacramento Kings ownership group, the Maloof brothers, have been unable to secure public funding for a new arena and according to Stern, the Maloofs have checked out Henry Samueli's arena in Anaheim as a possible relocation site. Samueli owns the National Hockey League's Anaheim Ducks and it is hard to imagine Samueli would cut a deal with the Maloofs which would give them a significant revenue stream in the building. There would also be the question of whether the Maloofs would have to pay off Jerry Buss (Los Angeles Lakers) and Donald Sterling (Los Angeles Clippers) for invading the LA market.
Sacramento mayor and former NBA player Kevin Johnson is continuing his efforts to get a Sacramento arena built.
Milwaukee owner (United States Senator) Herb Kohl is seeking a new arena. Senator Kohl (D- WI) is limited in his ability to threat a franchise move as they would signal that in his opinion Milwaukee and Wisconsin are not good places to do business.
Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis is a fan of the National Hockey League's hard salary cap. Leonsis is also the owner of the NHL's Washington Capitals and was in the NHL in 2004-05 when the owners locked out the players in a labor dispute.
Small market NBA owners have been after Stern for years to find a way to increase revenue sharing between the big money teams (the Knicks and Lakers) and the small market franchises (Memphis, Charlotte, Indiana, Milwaukee, Portland and Sacramento).
Paul's toast at Carmelo Anthony's wedding, the LeBron James "Decision" last July and the rumors that another small market star Dwight Howard might not stick around Orlando when his contract ends has to be catching the attention of the owners. The big name stars are dictating moves but that isn't all that unusual for NBA. Kareem Abdul Jabber forced his way out of Milwaukee and ended up in LA with the Lakers, Julius Erving didn't; get a bonus after Roy Boe and his New York Nets joined the NBA in 1976. Erving went to Philadelphia. Shaquille O'Neal left Orlando for the Lakers.
The NBA owners will lockout the players on July 1 unless something unanticipated suddenly appears. The star players have too much power and the owners will correct the imbalance. Chris Paul's toast and LeBron James' decision will come back to haunt the players.
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
Friday, January 14, 2011
When Football and Basketball Were Just Games
By Evan Weiner
January 14, 2011
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/when-football-and-basketball-were-just-games
(New York, N. Y.) -- As the National Football League playoffs roll on and the "drama" continues to unfold surround the will the Denver Nuggets trade Carmelo Anthony to the New Jersey Nets so he can sign a huge multi-million dollar before the opportunity dissipates should the National Basketball Association owners change working conditions in the next collective bargaining agreement, it should be remembered that at one time that being a "big league" athlete was job a seasonal job.
Back in the 1940s, 20-somethings played ball for fun, a little money or used it as time filler until a real job opened up.
Sports began to change in the 1950s when municipalities started building stadiums for baseball (and football) teams and television began sprinkling money into the leagues because sports programming filled up television schedules. Today major league sports in the United States cannot live without government support (stadium or arena funding, the waiving of TV antitrust issues for sports leagues, cable TV rules and corporate tax breaks on big ticket items such as luxury boxes and club seats at stadiums and arenas), cable TV and corporations buying tickets.
Today, the National Football League is a multi-billion dollar business; the National Basketball Association is a multi-billion dollar global entity with ties to Europe and China. Back in the 1940s, baseball in the United States was "the" sport but boxing and horse racing also had rabid followers. There was little interest in the pro basketball leagues at the time and the NFL was barely a notch above semi-pro status.
There is only one athlete who was been a member of a pro basketball championship squad and a pro football championship team in the same calendar year. Neither league is in existence today although the two leagues' DNA can be found both in the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.
As you continue reading and trying to figure out the answer, here is a little clue for you all. It happened after World War II and the player in question went to college (Northwestern) on a basketball scholarship and needed to be talked into playing football. Yet the player is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.
A little background is needed.
The defunct basketball circuit was the National Basketball League. The NBL was the only pro basketball league at the time and had franchises in small Midwest cities and those teams usually were company teams with the players working for a piston manufacturer or tire companies in some cases. The Rochester Seagram’s were a semi-pro independent team which was sponsored by a distillery. After World War II ended in August 1945, the NBL invited Les Harrison to bring his team into the pro league.
Harrison brought athletes to Rochester. His collection included baseball players Del Rice and Chuck Connors and an eventual Pro Football Hall of Famer, Otto Graham who led the Cleveland Browns to championships in both the All American Football Conference and the National Football League. Baseball players flocked to basketball in the off season for a chance to make a few extra bucks and the emphasis here is on the words "a few." Graham is the answer to the trivia question. He is the only athlete to win “major league” championships in basketball with the 1945-46 Royals and the 1946 Cleveland Browns of the All American Football Conference in the same calendar year.
The NBL was not a fulltime enterprise. The All American Football Conference was organized by Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward with teams in New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Miami, Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles and started play in 1946.
Graham ended up with the Browns and quarterbacked Paul Brown's championship squad in 1946 and in 1947 and in 1948 and in 1949. Graham became a football superstar and one of football’s highest paid performers, something that was not going to happen in Rochester playing basketball.
"We won the championship in all four years there (AAFC)," said Graham. "We played in the championship game six straight years (1950-55) in the NFL and won three of the six there. I went to college on a basketball scholarship. I didn't even play football I played intramural football," he said. ”I played with the Royals the season before the All American Football Conference had started. My teammates were Del Rice, Chuck Connors, the Rifleman of TV fame, Bob Davies, Red Boltzmann, Fuzzy Levine and we won the championship.
"I think I'm the only guy to have played on a championship basketball team and football team in the same year (1946). I played in Fort Wayne, Indiana and in fact they did dominate professional basketball at that time. We knocked them off. It was fun. But basketball took up too much time and I couldn't play football and basketball both, so I stuck with football.
"The NBL was the best league in the world. The Browns hadn't started yet and the Browns and the All American Football Conference didn't start until the fall of 1946. So I had nothing to do at that time, so after I started football, it overlapped with basketball and I didn't go back."
Graham was the quarterback on the dominant team of the AAFC. Rochester wasn’t too shabby either. The team won two NBL “pennants” but lost to George Milan in the NBL championships twice. Rochester joined the NBA in 1948 and won an NBA title in 1951.
Graham on the other hand had four AAFC crowns and one NFL title by 1950. The Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers entered the NFL after a merger of sorts between the AAFC and NFL after the 1949 season. Graham and the Browns quickly showed the NFL how good they were.
"It (the AAFC) was a good league. The NFL people would say our worst team could beat your best team. Go get a football before you think about playing our teams.
"Paul Brown, who was very intelligent, he was a great coach not because he knew more football necessarily. But he brought organization to professional football. I was really very lucky to have played for Paul Brown. I was drafted by Detroit (in 1944) and if I had gone to Detroit to Detroit and Paul Brown had gotten Bobby Layne, I would have liked to see what would have happened when those two collided,” recalled Graham in the 1990s.
"We did dominate the (AAFC) league and so we joined the NFL and they were going to run all over us. Well, the very first game, (NFL Commissioner) Bert Bell scheduled us to play against the Eagles who had won the two previous years in the NFL in Philadelphia and we kicked the hell out of them, 35-10 and we proved we had a good football team.
"Bert Bell said it was the best organized football team he had ever seen. From that time on we were a dominant football team. We beat the Rams in the championship 30-28 on a field goal by Graze. We proved we belong."
NFL teams targeted the Browns. The Browns were 47-4-3 in the AAFC, but the league was considered second rate.
"Our feeling, quite frankly, we did so well that every team we played against we knew was going to give their utmost to beat us because we at that time were the top team. So we never had an easy schedule because even the worst team is going to play their best game against us. Paul Brown just prepared us to do our best. We were well prepared. No other team in history was as well prepared as us,” Graham said.
Graham said the entire the 1950 season was the highlight of his career. He on occasion gave some thought about playing both sports simultaneously and with the basketball and football season not having much of an overlap except in November and December; it could have been possible for Graham to do both. But travel was limited to buses and trains in both football and basketball and that was a deterrent.
"Rochester is now out in Sacramento after going to Cincinnati and Kansas City and Fort Wayne is in Detroit,” said Graham in the 1990s. “I remember one train trip. We played a ballgame in Rochester; we spent the night on a train, not a sleeper but sitting up all night long. I was so mad and we had to go to Oshkosh two nights later. That's the way it was in those days. Our owner (Lester Harrison) wanted to save money.
"It's tough to do both sports," he said of Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson, "but if I was paid they kind of money they got, I would be tempted."
Graham made $25,000 in his best season with Cleveland. He was the NFL’s highest paid player, NBA teams were going out of business at a rapid rate and the league was down to just eight teams while Graham was quarterbacking. The All American Football Conference is just a footnote in NFL history now. The NFL took AAFC three teams, the Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers. By 1949, Chicago could not support a third team after the Bears and Cardinals, the Los Angeles Dons were financially tapped out, the Brooklyn Dodgers had merged with the New York Yankees. Buffalo supported its Bills but was not an NFL city. Buffalo was left out of the NFL-AAFC merger.
“They were going out of business and we just felt that getting a west coast team was important and getting Cleveland was important. We also brought in Baltimore but they didn’t make it at that particularly. But the 49ers and Cleveland Browns and were very important at that particularly time to get a national scope,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner and now American Ambassador to Ireland Dan Rooney. "That was a good move."
The other "good move" for putting money in the pockets of owners and players and front office staff was television. Television development, which was halted during World War II, resumed. That would be the important component to the skyrocketing popularity of sports in the 1950s. An interesting side note to Graham's teams. The Rochester Royals also called Cincinnati, Kansas City, Omaha and Sacramento home. The franchise could be on the move again. Graham's Browns ended up in Baltimore in 1996. The new Cleveland franchise in the NFL started in 1999. The 1946 Cleveland Browns replaced the Cleveland Rams in the city after Rams owner Daniel Reeves took his franchise to Los Angeles. The Cleveland Rams started life in the second American Football League in 1936 and joined the NFL in 1937. The franchise moved to Anaheim in 1980 and to St. Louis in 1995.
.
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
By Evan Weiner
January 14, 2011
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/when-football-and-basketball-were-just-games
(New York, N. Y.) -- As the National Football League playoffs roll on and the "drama" continues to unfold surround the will the Denver Nuggets trade Carmelo Anthony to the New Jersey Nets so he can sign a huge multi-million dollar before the opportunity dissipates should the National Basketball Association owners change working conditions in the next collective bargaining agreement, it should be remembered that at one time that being a "big league" athlete was job a seasonal job.
Back in the 1940s, 20-somethings played ball for fun, a little money or used it as time filler until a real job opened up.
Sports began to change in the 1950s when municipalities started building stadiums for baseball (and football) teams and television began sprinkling money into the leagues because sports programming filled up television schedules. Today major league sports in the United States cannot live without government support (stadium or arena funding, the waiving of TV antitrust issues for sports leagues, cable TV rules and corporate tax breaks on big ticket items such as luxury boxes and club seats at stadiums and arenas), cable TV and corporations buying tickets.
Today, the National Football League is a multi-billion dollar business; the National Basketball Association is a multi-billion dollar global entity with ties to Europe and China. Back in the 1940s, baseball in the United States was "the" sport but boxing and horse racing also had rabid followers. There was little interest in the pro basketball leagues at the time and the NFL was barely a notch above semi-pro status.
There is only one athlete who was been a member of a pro basketball championship squad and a pro football championship team in the same calendar year. Neither league is in existence today although the two leagues' DNA can be found both in the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.
As you continue reading and trying to figure out the answer, here is a little clue for you all. It happened after World War II and the player in question went to college (Northwestern) on a basketball scholarship and needed to be talked into playing football. Yet the player is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.
A little background is needed.
The defunct basketball circuit was the National Basketball League. The NBL was the only pro basketball league at the time and had franchises in small Midwest cities and those teams usually were company teams with the players working for a piston manufacturer or tire companies in some cases. The Rochester Seagram’s were a semi-pro independent team which was sponsored by a distillery. After World War II ended in August 1945, the NBL invited Les Harrison to bring his team into the pro league.
Harrison brought athletes to Rochester. His collection included baseball players Del Rice and Chuck Connors and an eventual Pro Football Hall of Famer, Otto Graham who led the Cleveland Browns to championships in both the All American Football Conference and the National Football League. Baseball players flocked to basketball in the off season for a chance to make a few extra bucks and the emphasis here is on the words "a few." Graham is the answer to the trivia question. He is the only athlete to win “major league” championships in basketball with the 1945-46 Royals and the 1946 Cleveland Browns of the All American Football Conference in the same calendar year.
The NBL was not a fulltime enterprise. The All American Football Conference was organized by Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward with teams in New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Miami, Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles and started play in 1946.
Graham ended up with the Browns and quarterbacked Paul Brown's championship squad in 1946 and in 1947 and in 1948 and in 1949. Graham became a football superstar and one of football’s highest paid performers, something that was not going to happen in Rochester playing basketball.
"We won the championship in all four years there (AAFC)," said Graham. "We played in the championship game six straight years (1950-55) in the NFL and won three of the six there. I went to college on a basketball scholarship. I didn't even play football I played intramural football," he said. ”I played with the Royals the season before the All American Football Conference had started. My teammates were Del Rice, Chuck Connors, the Rifleman of TV fame, Bob Davies, Red Boltzmann, Fuzzy Levine and we won the championship.
"I think I'm the only guy to have played on a championship basketball team and football team in the same year (1946). I played in Fort Wayne, Indiana and in fact they did dominate professional basketball at that time. We knocked them off. It was fun. But basketball took up too much time and I couldn't play football and basketball both, so I stuck with football.
"The NBL was the best league in the world. The Browns hadn't started yet and the Browns and the All American Football Conference didn't start until the fall of 1946. So I had nothing to do at that time, so after I started football, it overlapped with basketball and I didn't go back."
Graham was the quarterback on the dominant team of the AAFC. Rochester wasn’t too shabby either. The team won two NBL “pennants” but lost to George Milan in the NBL championships twice. Rochester joined the NBA in 1948 and won an NBA title in 1951.
Graham on the other hand had four AAFC crowns and one NFL title by 1950. The Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers entered the NFL after a merger of sorts between the AAFC and NFL after the 1949 season. Graham and the Browns quickly showed the NFL how good they were.
"It (the AAFC) was a good league. The NFL people would say our worst team could beat your best team. Go get a football before you think about playing our teams.
"Paul Brown, who was very intelligent, he was a great coach not because he knew more football necessarily. But he brought organization to professional football. I was really very lucky to have played for Paul Brown. I was drafted by Detroit (in 1944) and if I had gone to Detroit to Detroit and Paul Brown had gotten Bobby Layne, I would have liked to see what would have happened when those two collided,” recalled Graham in the 1990s.
"We did dominate the (AAFC) league and so we joined the NFL and they were going to run all over us. Well, the very first game, (NFL Commissioner) Bert Bell scheduled us to play against the Eagles who had won the two previous years in the NFL in Philadelphia and we kicked the hell out of them, 35-10 and we proved we had a good football team.
"Bert Bell said it was the best organized football team he had ever seen. From that time on we were a dominant football team. We beat the Rams in the championship 30-28 on a field goal by Graze. We proved we belong."
NFL teams targeted the Browns. The Browns were 47-4-3 in the AAFC, but the league was considered second rate.
"Our feeling, quite frankly, we did so well that every team we played against we knew was going to give their utmost to beat us because we at that time were the top team. So we never had an easy schedule because even the worst team is going to play their best game against us. Paul Brown just prepared us to do our best. We were well prepared. No other team in history was as well prepared as us,” Graham said.
Graham said the entire the 1950 season was the highlight of his career. He on occasion gave some thought about playing both sports simultaneously and with the basketball and football season not having much of an overlap except in November and December; it could have been possible for Graham to do both. But travel was limited to buses and trains in both football and basketball and that was a deterrent.
"Rochester is now out in Sacramento after going to Cincinnati and Kansas City and Fort Wayne is in Detroit,” said Graham in the 1990s. “I remember one train trip. We played a ballgame in Rochester; we spent the night on a train, not a sleeper but sitting up all night long. I was so mad and we had to go to Oshkosh two nights later. That's the way it was in those days. Our owner (Lester Harrison) wanted to save money.
"It's tough to do both sports," he said of Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson, "but if I was paid they kind of money they got, I would be tempted."
Graham made $25,000 in his best season with Cleveland. He was the NFL’s highest paid player, NBA teams were going out of business at a rapid rate and the league was down to just eight teams while Graham was quarterbacking. The All American Football Conference is just a footnote in NFL history now. The NFL took AAFC three teams, the Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers. By 1949, Chicago could not support a third team after the Bears and Cardinals, the Los Angeles Dons were financially tapped out, the Brooklyn Dodgers had merged with the New York Yankees. Buffalo supported its Bills but was not an NFL city. Buffalo was left out of the NFL-AAFC merger.
“They were going out of business and we just felt that getting a west coast team was important and getting Cleveland was important. We also brought in Baltimore but they didn’t make it at that particularly. But the 49ers and Cleveland Browns and were very important at that particularly time to get a national scope,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner and now American Ambassador to Ireland Dan Rooney. "That was a good move."
The other "good move" for putting money in the pockets of owners and players and front office staff was television. Television development, which was halted during World War II, resumed. That would be the important component to the skyrocketing popularity of sports in the 1950s. An interesting side note to Graham's teams. The Rochester Royals also called Cincinnati, Kansas City, Omaha and Sacramento home. The franchise could be on the move again. Graham's Browns ended up in Baltimore in 1996. The new Cleveland franchise in the NFL started in 1999. The 1946 Cleveland Browns replaced the Cleveland Rams in the city after Rams owner Daniel Reeves took his franchise to Los Angeles. The Cleveland Rams started life in the second American Football League in 1936 and joined the NFL in 1937. The franchise moved to Anaheim in 1980 and to St. Louis in 1995.
.
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
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Why Carmelo Anthony could join the New Jersey Nets
TUESDAY, 21 DECEMBER 2010 11:53
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/why-carmelo-anthony-could-join-the-new-jersey-nets
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
SAMANA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC — One of the more intriguing aspects of giving lectures on cruise ships centers round the people who come to the talks. Over the past four years, a former Congressman, a New Jersey judge, a person who helped design the financing for the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum (he got free tickets to the Oakland Raiders first home game at the facility in 1966), an investigator in Marilyn Monroe's death in 1962, a member of the cast of the Broadway play Momma Mia and others have wandered in and listened to talks about the business and politics of sports.
Last week, during a business of sports talk, a massage therapist for an NBA was in the audience. She was on her vacation while her team played at home — she was not needed that week although she will be spending New Year's Eve on the road with her team. She also said after the speech was done something that everyone connected with the National Basketball Association knows, she will be temporarily or possibly permanent out of a job starting July 1, 2011.
The National Basketball Association owners are locking out their main employees — the players, unless the owners and players come to a new collective bargaining agreement and that seems highly unlikely by July 1 — and there will be collateral damage to non-playing personnel. Some will be furloughed and some will be fired. There will be no need for them until a new agreement is negotiated.
The NBA owners, like their National Football League peers, want to change the fiscal picture of the league. NBA Commissioner David Stern claims that his league owners are losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually and wants to reallocate revenues given to the players. The present formula gives 57 percent of NBA revenues but owners want to significantly cut players funding by a third from $2.1 billion in salaries and benefits by $700 million or so. Stern would like to see all of his 30 owners turn a profit and moving funds from the players to the owners pocket is his goal.
Carmelo Anthony may be the most impacted by the NBA's want to cut salaries. The Denver Nuggets star player is an unrestricted free agent after the season and could be the biggest loser in the CBA talks. If there is a hard salary cap in place after the owners and players reach a new deal, Carmelo Anthony could lose more than $25 or 30 million on his next contract if he does not resign with Stan Kroenke's Nuggets. Anthony could be traded and the New Jersey Nets are extremely interested in the Denver player but Anthony's best options are to either resign with Kroenke's team or force a trade and sign a contract extension with his new team.
The money that is presently available under the present CBA will not be there in 2011 and beyond. The owners want to shorten contracts and want cost certainty and that is a problem for Anthony and for others down the road like Chris Paul and Dwight Howard.
Anthony seems to be most interested in playing for the New York Knicks, if media reports are to be believed. Just how the Knicks (a franchise that has to be making huge profits: Madison Square Garden-Knicks-Rangers owners, the Dolan family, pay no New York City property taxes on top of the revenues generated by sell out crowds and the MSG cable TV network) will pay for Anthony if there is a hard salary cap and a new financial order is unknown.
The NBA will be the third major sports league in North America in the queue in the CBA derby. Major League Soccer, which is a much smaller entity, was first up in contract negotiations earlier this year. MLS players got more money and many now have guaranteed contracts but there is no free agency for the players. MLS players have global options though if they are good enough. MLS Commissioner Don Garber claimed that just two MLS teams were profitable in 2009, Seattle and Toronto. A good number of MLS owners have properties in the NFL, NBA and NHL. But the MLS talks should not be considered the bellwether indicator of what will happen in 2011 because it is not in the same category of the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.
In 2004, the NHL was the first up in the CBA talks. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and his 30 owners decided to pursue a hard line stance and locked out the players until the owners got some sort of cost certainty. Bettman, who was the "father" of the NBA salary cap (a major component of the 1983 collective bargaining agreement), ended up getting a salary cap in the NHL. Bettman also gave his former boss Stern and Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and his owners leverage in their talks with the players association in 2005. NBA players watched the NHL lockout unfolded and found out that the owners were determined to get what they wanted even if it meant shutting down the industry for an undetermined amount of time.
The NBA and Major League Baseball got new collective bargaining agreements following the NHL lockout with minimal problems. The NBA players didn't want to risk losing millions of dollars in 2005 and decided not to go to the mat with the owners.
The National Football League collective bargaining agreement is done in March. NFL owners want to cut players salaries by 18 percent and reduce the players' take of the revenue from 59 to 48 percent. The lockout won't have any impact on games until August, which means that the NBA owners and players will probably go into a lockout on July 1 and not much will happen in the NBA talks until "crunch" time in the NFL which is when training camp opens in late July and game action in August. So the NBA players will not have the NHL example like they did in 2005 and will not be able to see how far the NFL owners will dig in until regular season games are impacted and that happens in September. The NFL free agent season, possibly the NFL Draft, organized training activities and mini camps will be gone but the league will not miss any games until pre-season.
The NFL has hired Bob Batterman as an attorney in the talks with the players. Batterman represented the NHL in the 2004 collective bargaining talks and help lead the league through the lockout as a legal representative.
People around the leagues will deny the chain reaction theory but there are too many overlaps and sharing of information. Kroenke owns the NFL's ST. Louis Rams, the NBA Nuggets, the NHL's Colorado Avalanche, the MLS Colorado Rapids and the Denver based Altitude regional cable TV sports network. There are significant partnerships in arenas and regional cable TV networks. All players associations also share information.
Sports Illustrated reported last summer that the Walt Disney Company's ESPN and Time Warner's Turner Sports will continue paying rights fees (which is roughly $900 million in 2011-2012) to NBA owners whether the league plays or not. The Walt Disney Company's ESPN will also pay NFL owners a rights fee even if there are no games played in 2011.
Congress needs to step in and ask why consumers (all basic expanded tier subscribers which is about 95 million people who pay the cable bills) are underwriting an NFL and NBA owners lockout and if new House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican majority are going to have an open door and listen to the American people, they should schedule hearings immediately on the issue. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should be the same. The NFL lockout will be funded by News Corp's Rupert Murdoch (FOX), GE's Jeffrey Immelt (NBC), CBS' Sumner Redstone, Disney's Robert Iger and DirecTV. Regional sports cable TV network operators who in some instances are team owners as well (MSG's Dolan, Comcast's Brian Roberts-Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers as well as a partner in regional set ups in Washington, Sacramento, Chicago and Boston to name a few cities) will still collect subscribers fees and not show a product because of the lockout.
Cable TV consumers never received rebates for games lost to the 1994-95 Baseball strike, the 1994-95 and the 2004-05 NHL lockouts and the 1998-99 NBA lockout. Boehner and Reid should be asking questions about cable TV's role in abetting labor stoppages in sports because hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer dollars are being used to give owners leverage in the bargaining.
A massage therapist will be looking for other work starting July 1, Carmelo Anthony may or may not be with the New Jersey Nets this year and consumers will fund sports lockouts. The captains of industry and make no mistake sports owners are captains of industry and are among the most powerful people walking the earth have decided that they have paid out enough money to athletes — for the time being. The whole sports industry is out of whack in the United States and globally but an NFL lockout or an NBA lockout will do nothing except transfer money from the players to the owners although players will still be handsomely compensated on the major league level, whether it is in football, basketball, hockey and baseball for their services. The lockouts won't bring down ticket prices or reduce cable TV costs associated with sports. The owners want a bigger slice of the sports economic pie and that is why the players will be sidelined and there will be some collateral damage like the massage therapist losing her job on at least a temporary basis and the others who work on a per diem basis at games who will be impacted.
American sports will be battered in 2011 but the people will come back in droves and watch games after the lockouts are done. They always do.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
TUESDAY, 21 DECEMBER 2010 11:53
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/why-carmelo-anthony-could-join-the-new-jersey-nets
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
SAMANA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC — One of the more intriguing aspects of giving lectures on cruise ships centers round the people who come to the talks. Over the past four years, a former Congressman, a New Jersey judge, a person who helped design the financing for the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum (he got free tickets to the Oakland Raiders first home game at the facility in 1966), an investigator in Marilyn Monroe's death in 1962, a member of the cast of the Broadway play Momma Mia and others have wandered in and listened to talks about the business and politics of sports.
Last week, during a business of sports talk, a massage therapist for an NBA was in the audience. She was on her vacation while her team played at home — she was not needed that week although she will be spending New Year's Eve on the road with her team. She also said after the speech was done something that everyone connected with the National Basketball Association knows, she will be temporarily or possibly permanent out of a job starting July 1, 2011.
The National Basketball Association owners are locking out their main employees — the players, unless the owners and players come to a new collective bargaining agreement and that seems highly unlikely by July 1 — and there will be collateral damage to non-playing personnel. Some will be furloughed and some will be fired. There will be no need for them until a new agreement is negotiated.
The NBA owners, like their National Football League peers, want to change the fiscal picture of the league. NBA Commissioner David Stern claims that his league owners are losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually and wants to reallocate revenues given to the players. The present formula gives 57 percent of NBA revenues but owners want to significantly cut players funding by a third from $2.1 billion in salaries and benefits by $700 million or so. Stern would like to see all of his 30 owners turn a profit and moving funds from the players to the owners pocket is his goal.
Carmelo Anthony may be the most impacted by the NBA's want to cut salaries. The Denver Nuggets star player is an unrestricted free agent after the season and could be the biggest loser in the CBA talks. If there is a hard salary cap in place after the owners and players reach a new deal, Carmelo Anthony could lose more than $25 or 30 million on his next contract if he does not resign with Stan Kroenke's Nuggets. Anthony could be traded and the New Jersey Nets are extremely interested in the Denver player but Anthony's best options are to either resign with Kroenke's team or force a trade and sign a contract extension with his new team.
The money that is presently available under the present CBA will not be there in 2011 and beyond. The owners want to shorten contracts and want cost certainty and that is a problem for Anthony and for others down the road like Chris Paul and Dwight Howard.
Anthony seems to be most interested in playing for the New York Knicks, if media reports are to be believed. Just how the Knicks (a franchise that has to be making huge profits: Madison Square Garden-Knicks-Rangers owners, the Dolan family, pay no New York City property taxes on top of the revenues generated by sell out crowds and the MSG cable TV network) will pay for Anthony if there is a hard salary cap and a new financial order is unknown.
The NBA will be the third major sports league in North America in the queue in the CBA derby. Major League Soccer, which is a much smaller entity, was first up in contract negotiations earlier this year. MLS players got more money and many now have guaranteed contracts but there is no free agency for the players. MLS players have global options though if they are good enough. MLS Commissioner Don Garber claimed that just two MLS teams were profitable in 2009, Seattle and Toronto. A good number of MLS owners have properties in the NFL, NBA and NHL. But the MLS talks should not be considered the bellwether indicator of what will happen in 2011 because it is not in the same category of the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.
In 2004, the NHL was the first up in the CBA talks. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and his 30 owners decided to pursue a hard line stance and locked out the players until the owners got some sort of cost certainty. Bettman, who was the "father" of the NBA salary cap (a major component of the 1983 collective bargaining agreement), ended up getting a salary cap in the NHL. Bettman also gave his former boss Stern and Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and his owners leverage in their talks with the players association in 2005. NBA players watched the NHL lockout unfolded and found out that the owners were determined to get what they wanted even if it meant shutting down the industry for an undetermined amount of time.
The NBA and Major League Baseball got new collective bargaining agreements following the NHL lockout with minimal problems. The NBA players didn't want to risk losing millions of dollars in 2005 and decided not to go to the mat with the owners.
The National Football League collective bargaining agreement is done in March. NFL owners want to cut players salaries by 18 percent and reduce the players' take of the revenue from 59 to 48 percent. The lockout won't have any impact on games until August, which means that the NBA owners and players will probably go into a lockout on July 1 and not much will happen in the NBA talks until "crunch" time in the NFL which is when training camp opens in late July and game action in August. So the NBA players will not have the NHL example like they did in 2005 and will not be able to see how far the NFL owners will dig in until regular season games are impacted and that happens in September. The NFL free agent season, possibly the NFL Draft, organized training activities and mini camps will be gone but the league will not miss any games until pre-season.
The NFL has hired Bob Batterman as an attorney in the talks with the players. Batterman represented the NHL in the 2004 collective bargaining talks and help lead the league through the lockout as a legal representative.
People around the leagues will deny the chain reaction theory but there are too many overlaps and sharing of information. Kroenke owns the NFL's ST. Louis Rams, the NBA Nuggets, the NHL's Colorado Avalanche, the MLS Colorado Rapids and the Denver based Altitude regional cable TV sports network. There are significant partnerships in arenas and regional cable TV networks. All players associations also share information.
Sports Illustrated reported last summer that the Walt Disney Company's ESPN and Time Warner's Turner Sports will continue paying rights fees (which is roughly $900 million in 2011-2012) to NBA owners whether the league plays or not. The Walt Disney Company's ESPN will also pay NFL owners a rights fee even if there are no games played in 2011.
Congress needs to step in and ask why consumers (all basic expanded tier subscribers which is about 95 million people who pay the cable bills) are underwriting an NFL and NBA owners lockout and if new House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican majority are going to have an open door and listen to the American people, they should schedule hearings immediately on the issue. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should be the same. The NFL lockout will be funded by News Corp's Rupert Murdoch (FOX), GE's Jeffrey Immelt (NBC), CBS' Sumner Redstone, Disney's Robert Iger and DirecTV. Regional sports cable TV network operators who in some instances are team owners as well (MSG's Dolan, Comcast's Brian Roberts-Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers as well as a partner in regional set ups in Washington, Sacramento, Chicago and Boston to name a few cities) will still collect subscribers fees and not show a product because of the lockout.
Cable TV consumers never received rebates for games lost to the 1994-95 Baseball strike, the 1994-95 and the 2004-05 NHL lockouts and the 1998-99 NBA lockout. Boehner and Reid should be asking questions about cable TV's role in abetting labor stoppages in sports because hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer dollars are being used to give owners leverage in the bargaining.
A massage therapist will be looking for other work starting July 1, Carmelo Anthony may or may not be with the New Jersey Nets this year and consumers will fund sports lockouts. The captains of industry and make no mistake sports owners are captains of industry and are among the most powerful people walking the earth have decided that they have paid out enough money to athletes — for the time being. The whole sports industry is out of whack in the United States and globally but an NFL lockout or an NBA lockout will do nothing except transfer money from the players to the owners although players will still be handsomely compensated on the major league level, whether it is in football, basketball, hockey and baseball for their services. The lockouts won't bring down ticket prices or reduce cable TV costs associated with sports. The owners want a bigger slice of the sports economic pie and that is why the players will be sidelined and there will be some collateral damage like the massage therapist losing her job on at least a temporary basis and the others who work on a per diem basis at games who will be impacted.
American sports will be battered in 2011 but the people will come back in droves and watch games after the lockouts are done. They always do.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Monday, October 25, 2010
NBA Preview: Labor woes are coming
SUNDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2010 19:51
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nba-preview-labor-woes-are-coming
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern has sent Billy Hunter the Executive Director of the National Basketball Players Association a happy New Year note. The note included something about the league needing to cut player costs somewhere around $700 to $800 million and that the league's 30 teams combined would lose $340-350 million in 2010-11 and something has to be done and that would start by players giving back items earned in collective bargaining.
The NBA no longer wants to give the players 57 percent of the revenues.
Of course not every team is going to lose an average of ten million dollars a season. The New York Knickerbockers franchise, despite putting a poor product on the court, sells out every game and the Dolan family owns the franchise, the building (they pay no New York City property taxes despite owning a good chunk of Manhattan real estate) and, of course, the Dolans have the Madison Square Garden TV network and Cablevision. There is no way without creative accounting the Knicks franchise is losing money given the team's revenue stream availability.
Also on the table is a threat by Stern aimed right across the bow of Billy Hunter's ship. The elimination of financially wobbly franchises. The best guess is that those markets could be Memphis and Charlotte. The contraction of the league would mean fewer jobs for players. Left unsaid in the possibility of lopping off teams is what happens with the leases between the franchises that didn't make it into the future and the municipalities which built the arenas and gave away the house to the owner of the local franchise that was set adrift.
"Easy Dave" is not someone who is to be taken lightly. He divided the players in the 1998-99 lockout pitting the lesser valued players against the Patrick Ewings, Charles Barkleys and other high salaried players and got a cap on top salaries.
This isn't the first time the NBA hierarchy has thought about dropping franchises. In the early days of the league, many teams dropped out every year. The last time a team folded was on November 27, 1954 when the Baltimore Bullets ownership gave up after 14 games.
It almost happened again in the early 1980s.
Despite the fact that Larry Bird was the star in Boston and Magic Johnson was winning titles in Los Angeles and a strong presence in Philadelphia where the old ABA star Julius Erving was winning a title, the NBA was at the crossroads in 1983. A good many franchises were losing money, the Collective Bargaining Agreement was up and the 23 team NBA could have been whittled to 16 with Cleveland, Denver, Indiana, Kansas City, San Diego and Utah losing an enormous amount of money. Some teams fell behind on their deferred payments to players, estimated to be between $80 million and $90 million, which nearly prompted a player's strike in 1982.
There were rumors that Denver and Utah were going to consolidate into one franchise and that other teams would move.
Starting in 1982, the players and owners met for nine months and completely rewrote the Collective Bargaining Agreement from its foundations. The league opened their books and let the players see what the profits and losses really were and a deal was brokered. The agreement came in March 1983.
"I think it just had a number of important consequences," said then NBA Deputy Commissioner Russell Granik who was part of the NBA management and negotiating team in 1982-83. "One, by having rolling around in that stuff, for the first time, I think that process in the nine months or the year of negotiations, was that the players for the first time got complete financial information. Everybody knew everything.
"That really, I think, sort of created a feeling of we are in this together as a partnership that maybe hadn't existed between the players and the league. I think that was a great boast. The other thing by having the salary cap and the revenue sharing system in place, we were able to go out and attract new ownership in places that up until then we were struggling."
Two franchises that were struggling were the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Indiana Pacers. All together the league might have been left with just 16 teams without the new bargaining agreement.
"I believe Gordon and George Gund at the time would not have purchased the Cleveland Cavaliers shortly thereafter except we had this deal. The same we got at that point Indiana was really struggling. Shortly after that we got Herb and Mel Simon purchased the team in Indiana. Both are still in the league (in 2001) many years later. Two of the strongest ownership groups we had. I think there were others that followed thereafter that probably would not have happened if we hadn't been able to say okay I think we got a system that's going to make sense.
"At the time we were very seriously and I think (NBPA Executive Director) Larry (Fleischer) and the players, you know your first reaction is they are bluffing, but again having been in the process and learn all the numbers, we were seriously thinking of at least right away folding two or three times, buying them back or merging them or something. I don't have any doubt but for that kind of deal that would have happened as well," said Granik.
The 1983 Collective Bargaining Agreement that put a salary cap in place is considered to be the turning point in the league's history by the owners and by the players. The 23-team league survived and both sides formed a working alliance, which would allow the league to grow. It also helped that two entities were about ready to join the league, Michael Jordan and Nike. The salary cap was the brainchild of a new lawyer that came on the scene named Gary Bettman. Bettman would become one of the three key people that would run the NBA in the mid-1980s and beyond. David Stern would be the boss, Russell Granik the number two guy followed by Bettman.
The Collective Bargaining was Commissioner Larry O'Brien's last major work for the NBA.
O'Brien was in a sense a transitional commissioner. The NBA was a business under his predecessor Walter Kennedy, but under O'Brien it became a bigger business. O'Brien replaced Walter Kennedy in 1975 and guided the NBA in the league's "merger" with the ABA. O'Brien was the lead negotiator in two Collective Bargaining Agreements in 1976 and 1983. During O'Brien, gate receipts doubled and TV revenues increased by threefold. Still O'Brien was unable to financially stabilize the league and without the 1983 labor agreement which established a partnership with the Players Association and its Executive Director Larry Fleischer, the NBA might have contracted franchises.
Following the March 1983 deal, some franchises ended up in different cities. Donald Sterling moved the San Diego Clippers to Los Angeles following the 1983-84 season without the NBA's permission. The Kansas City Kings, a franchise that tried to regionalize itself in the 1970s by splitting home games between Kansas City and Omaha after leaving Cincinnati in 1972, went west to Sacramento in 1984-85. Utah attempted to solve some of its financial problems by playing a number of home games in Las Vegas.
Knicks and Nets patrons need to be careful in what they wish for. If either team gets Carmelo Anthony in a trade from Denver and the league has new salary restrictions, there is a real possibility that paying Anthony the max six year deal allowed under the present CBA could blow up a team's future payroll and that Melo could end up playing with Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo. The Miami Heat's Lebron James-Dwayne Wade-Chris Bosh trio could also be torn apart.
Stern's "Happy New Year's" greeting will send shock waves throughout the NBA world but it is just part of collective bargaining. The present CBA ends after this season and a lockout may come as early as July 1, 2011 right on the heels of an NFL owners' lockout of the players.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Business and Politics of Sports." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
SUNDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2010 19:51
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nba-preview-labor-woes-are-coming
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern has sent Billy Hunter the Executive Director of the National Basketball Players Association a happy New Year note. The note included something about the league needing to cut player costs somewhere around $700 to $800 million and that the league's 30 teams combined would lose $340-350 million in 2010-11 and something has to be done and that would start by players giving back items earned in collective bargaining.
The NBA no longer wants to give the players 57 percent of the revenues.
Of course not every team is going to lose an average of ten million dollars a season. The New York Knickerbockers franchise, despite putting a poor product on the court, sells out every game and the Dolan family owns the franchise, the building (they pay no New York City property taxes despite owning a good chunk of Manhattan real estate) and, of course, the Dolans have the Madison Square Garden TV network and Cablevision. There is no way without creative accounting the Knicks franchise is losing money given the team's revenue stream availability.
Also on the table is a threat by Stern aimed right across the bow of Billy Hunter's ship. The elimination of financially wobbly franchises. The best guess is that those markets could be Memphis and Charlotte. The contraction of the league would mean fewer jobs for players. Left unsaid in the possibility of lopping off teams is what happens with the leases between the franchises that didn't make it into the future and the municipalities which built the arenas and gave away the house to the owner of the local franchise that was set adrift.
"Easy Dave" is not someone who is to be taken lightly. He divided the players in the 1998-99 lockout pitting the lesser valued players against the Patrick Ewings, Charles Barkleys and other high salaried players and got a cap on top salaries.
This isn't the first time the NBA hierarchy has thought about dropping franchises. In the early days of the league, many teams dropped out every year. The last time a team folded was on November 27, 1954 when the Baltimore Bullets ownership gave up after 14 games.
It almost happened again in the early 1980s.
Despite the fact that Larry Bird was the star in Boston and Magic Johnson was winning titles in Los Angeles and a strong presence in Philadelphia where the old ABA star Julius Erving was winning a title, the NBA was at the crossroads in 1983. A good many franchises were losing money, the Collective Bargaining Agreement was up and the 23 team NBA could have been whittled to 16 with Cleveland, Denver, Indiana, Kansas City, San Diego and Utah losing an enormous amount of money. Some teams fell behind on their deferred payments to players, estimated to be between $80 million and $90 million, which nearly prompted a player's strike in 1982.
There were rumors that Denver and Utah were going to consolidate into one franchise and that other teams would move.
Starting in 1982, the players and owners met for nine months and completely rewrote the Collective Bargaining Agreement from its foundations. The league opened their books and let the players see what the profits and losses really were and a deal was brokered. The agreement came in March 1983.
"I think it just had a number of important consequences," said then NBA Deputy Commissioner Russell Granik who was part of the NBA management and negotiating team in 1982-83. "One, by having rolling around in that stuff, for the first time, I think that process in the nine months or the year of negotiations, was that the players for the first time got complete financial information. Everybody knew everything.
"That really, I think, sort of created a feeling of we are in this together as a partnership that maybe hadn't existed between the players and the league. I think that was a great boast. The other thing by having the salary cap and the revenue sharing system in place, we were able to go out and attract new ownership in places that up until then we were struggling."
Two franchises that were struggling were the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Indiana Pacers. All together the league might have been left with just 16 teams without the new bargaining agreement.
"I believe Gordon and George Gund at the time would not have purchased the Cleveland Cavaliers shortly thereafter except we had this deal. The same we got at that point Indiana was really struggling. Shortly after that we got Herb and Mel Simon purchased the team in Indiana. Both are still in the league (in 2001) many years later. Two of the strongest ownership groups we had. I think there were others that followed thereafter that probably would not have happened if we hadn't been able to say okay I think we got a system that's going to make sense.
"At the time we were very seriously and I think (NBPA Executive Director) Larry (Fleischer) and the players, you know your first reaction is they are bluffing, but again having been in the process and learn all the numbers, we were seriously thinking of at least right away folding two or three times, buying them back or merging them or something. I don't have any doubt but for that kind of deal that would have happened as well," said Granik.
The 1983 Collective Bargaining Agreement that put a salary cap in place is considered to be the turning point in the league's history by the owners and by the players. The 23-team league survived and both sides formed a working alliance, which would allow the league to grow. It also helped that two entities were about ready to join the league, Michael Jordan and Nike. The salary cap was the brainchild of a new lawyer that came on the scene named Gary Bettman. Bettman would become one of the three key people that would run the NBA in the mid-1980s and beyond. David Stern would be the boss, Russell Granik the number two guy followed by Bettman.
The Collective Bargaining was Commissioner Larry O'Brien's last major work for the NBA.
O'Brien was in a sense a transitional commissioner. The NBA was a business under his predecessor Walter Kennedy, but under O'Brien it became a bigger business. O'Brien replaced Walter Kennedy in 1975 and guided the NBA in the league's "merger" with the ABA. O'Brien was the lead negotiator in two Collective Bargaining Agreements in 1976 and 1983. During O'Brien, gate receipts doubled and TV revenues increased by threefold. Still O'Brien was unable to financially stabilize the league and without the 1983 labor agreement which established a partnership with the Players Association and its Executive Director Larry Fleischer, the NBA might have contracted franchises.
Following the March 1983 deal, some franchises ended up in different cities. Donald Sterling moved the San Diego Clippers to Los Angeles following the 1983-84 season without the NBA's permission. The Kansas City Kings, a franchise that tried to regionalize itself in the 1970s by splitting home games between Kansas City and Omaha after leaving Cincinnati in 1972, went west to Sacramento in 1984-85. Utah attempted to solve some of its financial problems by playing a number of home games in Las Vegas.
Knicks and Nets patrons need to be careful in what they wish for. If either team gets Carmelo Anthony in a trade from Denver and the league has new salary restrictions, there is a real possibility that paying Anthony the max six year deal allowed under the present CBA could blow up a team's future payroll and that Melo could end up playing with Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo. The Miami Heat's Lebron James-Dwayne Wade-Chris Bosh trio could also be torn apart.
Stern's "Happy New Year's" greeting will send shock waves throughout the NBA world but it is just part of collective bargaining. The present CBA ends after this season and a lockout may come as early as July 1, 2011 right on the heels of an NFL owners' lockout of the players.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Business and Politics of Sports." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
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