NBA Owners Take Big Risk Playing Fans for Fools at LinesMaker

NBA Owners Take Big Risk Playing Fans for Fools

It would take some real fools to shut down their $ 4 bil­lion a year busi­ness in the mid­dle of the worst reces­sion in gen­er­a­tions because the more than $ 1 bil­lion over six years they just got back from the work­ers was not good enough.

How­ever, the NBA own­ers are not fools. They think you are.

The own­ers — and these lost games are on them far more than the play­ers — think that no mat­ter what, you’ll come back. Maybe right when the sea­son starts (some­thing many of us hard-core fans admit), maybe when the play­offs start, maybe in a year or two, but you’ll be back. You’ll come back fast and in large num­bers, dwarf­ing the more than $ 4 bil­lion in rev­enues the NBA got last season.

That is one a dan­ger­ous game they are playing.

If they get their way, the own­ers will get a larger share of that money you are going to spend. Make no mis­take, this about money. You can call it the “sys­tem” of what kind of salary cap or lux­ury tax struc­ture the league should have, but in the end it is about how much money goes into whose pocket.

Mon­day the first two weeks of the NBA sea­son were can­celed. We hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but most of the peo­ple I spoke with inside and around the league expected we would end up here. Every­body hoped against hope the com­mon sense would ride to the res­cue and the league wouldn’t shut its doors after a sea­son of unprece­dented momen­tum. But nobody is surprised.

We’re not going to have NBA bas­ket­ball until Nov. 15 at the ear­li­est, and pos­si­bly much later as both sides seem to be dig­ging in now for a long haul.

But the own­ers are play­ing a risky game. One that could dam­age their fran­chises and prod­uct more than they can imag­ine. More than they seem to understand.

This is about the own­ers — enough of them are push­ing for rad­i­cal changes to the league’s finan­cial struc­ture that lost games seemed inevitable from the start. They won the lock­out but want a route. Stern stood before the cam­eras and talked about how much the own­ers have given back — tak­ing salary roll­backs and a hard salary cap off the table. But those were never theirs to give. They were not things the own­ers had, they were things they wanted. The own­ers paid 57 per­cent of their earn­ings to the play­ers in the last labor deal and their first offer to the play­ers in the new talks was 39 per­cent. That was unrea­son­able. The 47 per­cent they are offer­ing now is as well. But they have the lever­age and they have hard­lin­ers, so they are not giv­ing more. Mean­while the play­ers are try­ing to stand firm at get­ting 53 percent.

The two sides were just a cou­ple per­cent­age points apart on BRI and couldn’t find a mid­dle ground. It’s stu­pid the two sides talked instead about the “sys­tem issues” of the salary cap and lux­ury tax Mon­day, but that is just the own­ers try­ing to get a deal that pro­tects them from them­selves and their fran­chises’ poor deci­sions. They know they will hand out more bad con­tracts and want the abil­ity to get out of them faster.

Mon­day night there was anger and the frus­tra­tion out on the Inter­net when Stern walked out of a posh New York hotel Mon­day night and said the first two weeks of the NBA sea­son are lost.

The own­ers — and the league’s play­ers — had bet­ter pray that anger sticks around for a while. If the lock­out drags out and that starts to turn to apa­thy, then the league is really in trouble.

Anger shows that the fans care. Love and hate are dif­fer­ent sides of the same coin. Pas­sion for the game, the play­ers, and their favorite fran­chises has fans shelling out big money and scream­ing at their tele­vi­sions for games in Feb­ru­ary. They want bas­ket­ball — few fans really care how the BRI is split or how regres­sive the lux­ury tax is. They just want their basketball.

But as this lock­out drags out that will start to change and the league will pay for it.

Hard­core fans will come back. But the longer this drags out the more money that casual fans spend on the NBA will find its way into other enter­tain­ment ven­tures. And those fans will be slow to come back.

The longer the NBA stays locked out the more apa­thy sets in among the fan base. And that is far worse for the league and rev­enues than any­thing. Hate of the Heat and LeBron James fueled record rat­ings last year, apa­thy kills that momentum.

And all that rev­enue the own­ers are fight­ing to get will evap­o­rate (within weeks), as the fans are slow to return.

It’s all foolish.

Related Posts:

• Steel­ers Take Wait-and-See Approach to Big Ben’s Ankle Injury
• Own­ers Unan­i­mously Approve Shahid Khan
• Tex­ans’ Phillips to Take Med­ical Leave of Absence; DC Will Return
• Can You Be MVP With­out Play­ing? in Manning’s Case, Maybe
• On Fire Baby Take Golden Rod at Churchill Downs

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•