if somehow I were placed in an ultimate power position ruling over the league there would be major changes all with the goal of improving the product. Off the top of my head I'd shorten the season to around 60 games (3 games vs each conference rival, 1 vs the other), hard cap the player salaries with major bonuses going to them for achieving team goals (making the playoffs & advancing), share revenues among teams, technical fouls would also count as personal fouls, & remove a row or two of courtside seating + install a padded barrier to encourage more aggressive play (diving for loose balls). Of course the star system of officiating would be abolished and mocked as the pathetic charade that it is. btw... I blame Stern/the owners for the situation today. It all starts at the top. STOMP
I like your proposed changes. We will have to agree to disagree on who is at fault. Ed O nailed it for me. It's certainly on the owners for creating this, but they also have the right to fix it.
I blame the players for this mess in the first place, and I blame the owners for not getting it sorted out. At this point I'm with Nash:
I can't help but feel like you've got this completely ass backward: 1. It's the owners in the first place who lavished stupid contracts on players that weren't worth it for years, showing an utter inability to curb their impulses and 2. The players haven't seemed to grasp just how easy they've had it with their fully guaranteed contracts and enormous salaries (relative to most other professional athletes) given the amount of revenue their sport actually generates.
the owners locked out the players, if they hadnt, we would be watching basketball they are too dumb to stop themselves from spending insane money on marginal players, somehow that is the players fault for saying "ok"? the owners have every right to try and pay less money, in fact, they have every opportunity to do so are the players beeing "greedy" for trying to stick to the old system? sure...would anyone else here see themselves as "greedy" if they didnt want to take a pay cut?...hrmmm.... all in all i blame the few greedy big market owners for not sharing local revenue, if they did, all teams would turn a nice profit at or around the lux tax line
although, it isnt really fair to compare the system to the NFLs, national NBA tv contracts do not televise every game of every team, so profit sharing is muddier...i think baseball is a better example, big market teams have an inherent advantage, but if there was a cap, even a soft one, it would make it harder for teams to push their payrolls high enough to make themselves prohibitively better
The owners capitulated- no hard salary cap, no non guaranteed contracts, no amnesty buy outs... all they want is to even out the revenues so they can stop losing money. They players came with a flat out demand the owners give in more so. There's nothing else the owners can do.
Oh my, that's not true at all ... if you don't believe the owners have planned (and wanted) a lost season for the the last couple of years you haven't really been paying attention. FWIW, the luxury tax system they proposed was a defacto hard-cap. Bottom line, they don't want a robust revenue sharing system, they probably have 4 too many teams and they screwed up massively over the last ten years with their inability to manage their budgets and now they want to take it all back from the players under the guise of "restructuring" and "fairness" -- they've essentially reneged on their contracts with the players by wiping out hundreds of millions in salaries that won't have to be paid this year.
It seems to me the owners really didn't like what the Knicks and Heat did under the past CBA and they really don't want to see anything like it again.
No it's not. The wealthier owners abuse it. You know that. If they had a true hard cap many issues go away for everyone.
Real men don't blame anyone for anything. That would be sissy. We just walk around pissed off at the world.
The fans are to blame. If fans were not willing to pay absurd ticket prices, buy jerseys and other crap for wildly inflated prices, pay a day's wages for a hot dog, then none of this would be a problem. barfo
How true. My boss tells me that to take his 3 sons to a game and have a hot dog/soda costs him over $100.
I don't think the salaries are out of whack competed to NFL or MLB... It's about the BRI split. If it's 50-50 and the revenues are $4B, then the players rightly should get $4B / 452 each. More or less.
Charles Barkley nailed it! The gist of what he said basically was what LeBron and Carmelo did last year is going to kill the NBA. I blame the 2003 draft class.
The problem I see with blaming the owners for bad contracts is that some owners don't care about bad contracts. So if you want to compete against the Mark Cubans and Paul Allens of the world, you have to overspending for medicore talent (if you don't they will) . . . or you can take the Donald Sterling approach and not offer bad contracts and accept that you will not be competitive in the NBA. Terrible position to be in for small market teams with owners who want to make a profit.
