Unlike NFL Labor Situation, NBA Seems To Be 'Genuinely' Losing Money
CHICAGO (WSCR) Several months into the NFL Lockout, fans are pretty familiar with the issues at hand. But as the expiration of the NBA's collective bargaining agreement approaches, fans are going to have to get used a different climate for negotiations.
"It will be a little different," Eldon Ham, The Score's Legal Expert, said on the Boers and Bernstein Show. "Because [the NBA] does seem to genuinely be losing money. And at a time when they seems to be a good point in terms of popularity: Television, interest in the league, a number of venues selling out, but there are a lot of weak sister venues too. And they may have diluted that thing a little too much.
"The hard part with sports is that, in a lot of ways, these business aren't run like real businesses. It's almost like conspicuous consumption when you get billionaires together. You know, they want to wear the team on their sleeve, so they pay for the right to do that. But then when you add up the invested capital and the dollars returned on that invested capital, sometimes it's very little, sometimes it's zero and sometimes it's negative. And so it's kind of hard to keep shoving the square peg into the round hole with these things.
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"I do think that David Stern will have a handle on this. Hes a savvy guy, he's been down these wars before and he has largely prevailed. One time, with a brilliant plan of initially offering players percentage of total revenues. Both leagues now do that sort of thing, but that's an innovation from David Stern years ago."
