Just in case your stuck in a cave with no cable or Internet, tonight…18 points & 5 assists for the Knicks PG
Knicks lead the Lakers 49-41 at the half.
Final stat line - 38 points, 4 rebounds, 7 assists, 2 steals on 13-23 shooting for the night in a NYK victory over the Lakers.
Damn.
Life isn’t easy (@_TommyTom2) has shared a Tweet with you:
“Life’s like Facebook, People will like your problems & comment on it, but no 1s gonna solve them.. Cause everyone’s busy updating their own.” —http://twitter.com/iEatLames/status/132468550509146112
Steven Lebron and I discuss the lockout and ponder about the possibilities. It’s looking cloudy with a chance of the sky falling.
Lockout
Breaking news: the NBA lockout has overstayed its welcome.
After years of posturing, the two sides finally started to make progress in negotiations in recent weeks — progress as defined by the need for a mediator to get the two sides in a room, endless public posturing, ultimatums that are issued then rescinded, threats of decertification and players going on Twitter to discuss the merits of a clause that’s not even in the current proposal.
For fans like myself, the novelty of following the negotiations and getting my hopes up every week has worn off. The two sides have repeatedly used their press conference as a platform to deliver skewed messages to the fans, the media and to the opposing side. There’s been so many layers of rhetoric that it seems only what was said last matters — if even that.
So if we are to believe that, the last word came from the owners last week, with commissioner David Stern declaring that we are finished negotiating. So today, the player representatives for all 30 teams are expected to meet to review the league’s latest proposal. Should they decide to reject or vote down the proposal, well, as they would have you believe: armageddon is ahead.
With the threat of a cancelled season looming and becoming more realistic by the day, to understand the potential impact of this to local economies, I had an exchange with Suga Shane, author of the insightfulNBA Economics 101 columns at NBA Off-Season.
In discussing the overall impact of the lockout, Shane’s theory on the topic is two-fold, “With concern for the employees, I really feel for a lot of these folks but most should still have a job regardless of the NBA season. After all, arenas do more than just host basketball games, which take up 41 games plus playoffs. Most teams don’t even practice in their arenas due to the opportunity cost of leasing out that time to another event and simply building an off-site gym. Last I checked, there is about 320 days of non-NBA dates that the arena still has even if there was a basketball season. They still need employees for these dates. So while it is horrible that these folks will probably have their hours and pay slashed and perhaps some will face layoffs, it’s not as drastic as some think.”
As for the overall impact on local economies: “Local economies might see a boost rather than a loss and here’s why: The NBA takes millions of dollars from consumers and funnels it to a relatively tiny number of individuals. Based on basketball-related income (“BRI”), the average NBA team takes in somewhere between $100-130 million in revenue a season. Last season, the NBA had a total of 21,302,573 people attend games. That’s about 17,000 per game at an average price of about $47 a ticket. That’s about $1 billion dollars in just revenues generated by ticket sales.
“This doesn’t include concession stand sales, parking, and merchandise sold in and around the arena. A huge part of BRI is local money. All of this money gets split up by approximately 500-600 individuals. Sure, NBA teams have employees other than players and coaches, but most of these employees make chump change compared to the millions that players, coaches and owners take home. So in a way, they are an insignificant part of the equation.
“Americans, on the whole, are a spending society. Our entire economy and the philosophy it’s built on depends on consumer spending. With that in mind, I doubt NBA consumers are going to start saving their money if there’s no actual games to spend it on. They are going to find other activities to spend money on. So now, they fill the void by say: going to the movies and getting some ice cream. That should fill up the three hour entertainment void left by the league. You spend relatively the same amount of money but you spread that money out to more businesses and more individuals. And that’s the key to a consumer-based capitalist economy: more people possessing expendable income.”
As for the important week ahead: “The latest offer from the owners was more or less an ultimatum. We don’t know what the actual BRI split will be because both sides are being a little secretive about it but we do know some of the demands the owners have. The bottom teams which make up somewhere between 10-16 teams have taken over these negotiations. If their demands fulfill the expectations of those teams, we’re all in trouble. This means stringent demands from both the players and the upper echelon of NBA teams in terms of earners and spenders. They are demanding salary cuts in terms of monetary amounts and length. They want roll backs and amnesty on existing deals as well as steep luxury tax implementation and revenue sharing. Basically, these owners bought a Civic, entered it into a Ferrari race and are now demanding a ten-lap head start to bring competitive balance to the race. The alternative is that the NBA will lower their offer if this one isn’t accepted by the NBPA.
“The players’ association has to take the offer to their members for a vote so the actual terms of the deal don’t matter as much as the number of desperate players. Will there be more players willing to lose a season and decertify to get the deal they want based solely on pride? Or are there more players willing to bite the bullet and just play the season at this point as opposed to losing a season and a year’s worth of salary? The majority players make less than $2.5 million and even though the NBPA took measures to hold a percentage of salaries as well as defer some players salaries to help cover months of a lost season, I’m not sure if that’s enough.
“Right now, the NBA’s future is in the hands of bench players. Do they want to play or do they want to decertify. The actual terms of the deal don’t matter anymore.”
And so we wait as another artificial deadline lies ahead. The threats and posturing figures to intensify in the coming days. But the feel is that it’s going to take a while before basketball returns. I won’t be mad if I’m wrong.
