Agree that this is a difference. Not sure whether this difference will make a lengthy lockout and an ending that has the players getting massacred less likely. Yeah, like they have uniforms and everything. The local team plays in the same place as the Bulls and last season had very similar home attendance #s...both teams led their leagues in attendance. Oh yeah, while there aren't as many hockey fans, those bitten by the bug tend to become addicted.
Well, the Hawks accidentally were defending Stanley Cup champs, no? I'm pretty sure the NBA involves a few $billion, while the NHL is significantly smaller. Heck, the NBA wasn't a big money game all that long ago... I think Clyde Drexler had a top salary of $1.8M in his career. Today he'd be MAX.
I'll give you this much, Denny...you know your hockey. NBA national broadcast rights are $930MM annually, or around $31MM per team. The NHL's national TV (don't know about radio) is $200MM, or about $6.7MM per team. So yeah, that's a big difference. In fact, if you added $24MM revenue to all NHL teams, their revenue profile would be pretty much the same as the NBA. In the NHL, team revenues range from something called the Phoenix Coyotes at $67MM to the Maple Leafs (as I recall they play in Toronto) at $187MM (only 2 NBA teams have a higher revenue #). Frankly, I was surprised by how high the NHL's revenue numbers are. Oh, and by the way, I'm still looking for a reason(s) to believe that the NBA lockout won't run a parallel course to the '04-'05 NHL lockout. I don't see the extra NBA national TV money as a difference maker.
By the way, what was attendance like across the league in the NHL, back then? This is gonna piss me off if they cancel this upcoming season. On the other hand, one less addiction to struggle with.
Well, there is more money in the NBA, and there are also fewer players. Looks like 20 players on a hockey roster. To me, the NBA is much more star-driven than NFL. I can definetely see the stars playing a year in Europe and starting there own league if the owners try to screw with them too much.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytime...ss/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter Excellent article from Nate Silver (538 fame and baseball stat fame) Talks about the differences in conditions prior to the lost NHL season and the current nba lockout.
Thanks, Jay...good read. Agree with most everything Silver said. One concerning thing he points out is that several NBA owners also own NHL teams. If you ask NHL owners about the lost season, they're likely to tell you that while it hurt at the time, in the long run it was the smartest thing they ever did. I ran across this Bill Simmons (I'm a big fan) article written shortly after the current NHL CBA was signed. Though it's written with Simmons typical sense of humor, NBA players who believe that their league's owners have borrowed the NHL owners' '04-'05 playbook would probably find it sort of sobering.
I've never watched a WNBA game and don't know why anyone would. Couldn't find any "Forbes-like" financials. However, I saw that average attendance is 8,000/game (Chicago Sky is dead last with under 4,300). With a (hard) team salary cap of $852,000, they can't be losing much money.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/11/AR2006071100988.html A Matter Of Value Instead Of Profit As the WNBA prepares to play its All-Star Game tonight, the biggest accomplishment the 10-year-old league can celebrate is that it's still around -- thanks largely to its financial angel and chief advocate, the NBA. Average WNBA attendance is down from the league's first season in 1997, television ratings are sluggish and most of its 14 teams still lose money, requiring annual infusions of $12 million or so from the NBA. While NBA Commissioner David Stern says the league is on track to turn a small profit next year, he also emphasizes that the WNBA's value as an ambassador that draws new fans -- especially women -- to the sport is worth the financial losses it has incurred over its first decade. "We have a good strategic reason to support the WNBA, which is the growth of viewership and fans for basketball," Stern said.
The original WNBA franchises were owned by the NBA owners. 11 of the teams still are owned by NBA owners. It's hard to sympathize with them crying "poor" when they've sunk so much money into the WNBA for over a decade (and no team has shown a profit?).
The WNBA article was from 2006, but from what I can read, not much has changed, though one team finally made a profit. Apparently, they give a lot of those 8,000/game tickets away. Denny, you have my complete support in shutting down the WNBA.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=6743381 Though the NBA says it lost $340 million in 2009-10, a New York Times blog post Tuesday titled "Calling Foul on NBA's Claims of Financial Distress" called the league "fundamentally a healthy and profitable business" with an estimated operating income of $183 million that season. Union spokesman Dan Wasserman said the NBA projected a decline in revenues that season but they actually rose, so the final losses should have been much less than the league said. "In 2009-10, the NBA repeatedly offered projections that league revenues would decline as much as 5 percent, or $180 million, while also projecting losses of $370 million. Revenues were actually up in '09-10 and the revenue projections were off by as much as $200 million. Yet, the loss figures were only adjusted by $30 million. So yes, we feel there is more than adequate basis for questioning their projections and financials," Wasserman said. Because of the projected losses, the league forecast a steep drop in the salary cap for the 2010-11 season, saying it could fall as low as $50.4 million. Instead, it was set at $58 million after the higher-than-expected revenues following a seven-game finals between the Lakers and Celtics allowed the league to finish slightly up.
Ran across this on RealGM. Among other things, this disputes the 2010 Forbes numbers I've been using in many of my posts and articles. The Forbes numbers I used were estimates and always positioned as such on their site. Ironically, I felt the Forbes estimates were sufficient to justify the lockout. The problem I have is with the article is that it doesn't really dispute its information as much as say that they're estimates (which we knew). Rather than saying how accurate or inaccurate those estimates are, they quickly jump to their own numbers which include interest expense, depreciation and amortization. When you include these expenses, some of which don't affect cash flow, the NBA is clearly a bloody mess. My takeaway from this is that, whether the players, media and fans want to include the interest and non-cash flow expenses, the NBA is hanging its hat on them. When included, they paint a fairly desperate situation which warrants desperate measures...like letting a season die desperate. Could just be bluster, but if this is how the NBA owners see it, the players are screwed (they can either fold early or get NHL-ed) and the fans are screwed (if the players choose to make a firm stand, we'll miss a season or more). Let me be very clear. You can dispute the NBA's audited #s all you want. You can cast any aspersions you want to on the owners motivation. It's all good. However, we all need to take a reality check. If you get your kicks out of railing against perceived injustices, I hope this provides an adequate substitute for lost NBA games. My sense is that the NBA owners aren't bluffing...they're going to get what they want...whatever it takes.
Amortization and interest expense do affect cash flow. Maybe in 30 years, the bulls need a new stadium, and the amortization is the yearly cost of paying for it.
I love how ESPN calls it a NYTimes Blog Post. Nate Silver wrote it, whom I think most people would consider the most trusted person with sports numbers. ESPN can't let that go, though.
This is a great question that is certainly worth exploring. One difference between the NHL and NBA lockouts is that the NHL lockout occurred before the credit meltdown of 2008. Most of this thread has centered upon the basketball related debt of franchises, but the non-basketball debts seem like a much bigger deal. ESPN recently reported that George Shinn borrowed one hundred million dollars against the Hornets, he couldn't meet his obligations, and that's the reason the NBA now "owns" the franchise. This was a shocker to me. Who on earth would lend 100 million to the Hornets? How exorbitant were the interest rates? How did Shinn ever expect to pay that back? And you have to wonder how the NBA takeover is structured: Does the lender still really own own the team, and is the NBA just running it until a new CBA is in place and a suitable buyer group is found? Regardless, I can't imagine that the Hornets are the only franchise with a debt problem. I would anticipate that the most significant threat to Sacramento and a number of other franchises is not the CBA but non-basketball-related debt. If this assumption is correct, many owners are hurting, and there isn't cheap financing available -- even to the NBA itself -- then the owners in the NBA labor dispute cannot hold out like the NHL owners in 2005. They'll be forced to the table just like the players, or risk losing their franchises.
