Maclowery wrote:57% of revenue going to players seems so large. Is it that high in other sports as well? Not that I'm supporting billionaire owners. God, I have no idea who I want to support, or what I want to happen. The whole thing makes my head hurt.
Well, the players are providing the entire product that people are paying for.
Then by all means, the players should tell the owners to take a hike, and start their own league next year. I can't imagine what's stopping them, can you?
Roughly 95% of what's stopping them is the fact that NBA teams already have leases or contractual agreements with the best venues to play basketball in. I would absolutely love it if the players' association started putting out feelers to investors and available arenas and inched towards starting their own league. Politicians would almost certainly shut down anything to keep billionaires from sitting on publicly-financed arenas with nothing to put on in them, but the idea that the NBA is a brand that would survive the defection of the best basketball players in the world to another league is a farce. The owners have leverage because of their political pull.
cpebbles wrote:Roughly 95% of what's stopping them is the fact that NBA teams already have leases or contractual agreements with the best venues to play basketball in. I would absolutely love it if the players' association started putting out feelers to investors and available arenas and inched towards starting their own league.
How would investors be any different than current owners?
Maclowery wrote:57% of revenue going to players seems so large. Is it that high in other sports as well? Not that I'm supporting billionaire owners. God, I have no idea who I want to support, or what I want to happen. The whole thing makes my head hurt.
Well, the players are providing the entire product that people are paying for.
I'm never going to side with owners crying "Save us from ourselves." The salary cap in the NBA is already absolutely ridiculous, insuring that crap like the Heat's offseason continues because when a fifth of the league is getting paid the same max amount, why the hell not try to form the dream team? I haven't watched basketball since Jordan retired and I'm not going to watch the NBA either way, so I'm hoping the players hold firm until the successful owners force the lockout to stop and the unsuccessful owners have to rely on non-idiotic management instead of salary caps to save their teams.
I've never understood the part about % of revenue going to the players. How is it, for lack of a better term, allotted to the players? Do they get this money "in addition" to their salaries? Or does it simply go into their union? Or does it go into a "pool" that the salaries are actually drawn from? To sum up my questions, where does the players' revenue go?
cpebbles wrote:Roughly 95% of what's stopping them is the fact that NBA teams already have leases or contractual agreements with the best venues to play basketball in. I would absolutely love it if the players' association started putting out feelers to investors and available arenas and inched towards starting their own league.
How would investors be any different than current owners?
I have a feeling they could find investors who wouldn't throw a fit about making on average $10.6 million in profit per year (The most recent estimate of average team profitability not given by the owners themselves) off yearly revenues around $125 million. The league's claims about losing money are entirely based off non-player operating expenses, since the league was very profitable a few years ago with players making the exact same split of the revenue, and that is the area where teams manufacture losses to hide how much money they're really making.
