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2011 Toronto Raptors/NBA/Labour Negotiations Spectacular

cw said:
This claim about the owners being guaranteed to make money was made with the NHL CBA in 2005. In 2011 according to Forbes guesses, 17 NHL teams lost money. In 2010, 16 NHL teams lost money. It's not a very good guarantee, is it.

Wow, you have and I say this with all politeness possible, a very complicated relationship with how much stock you put in Forbes and their system of "guessing".

cw said:
That's not all about bad markets and bad decisions. It's more about being pretty close to the line - close to a break even structure in many of those cases. All GMs sign some bad deals - it is a part of the cost of doing business in sports. A few do stupid deals but it's a small % in the overall labor expense.

Well, no, let's be real. A big chunk of those losses has to do with the primary, gaping hole in logic that the NHL negotiated their CBA on the basis of, namely that the revenues generated by the Toronto Maple Leafs should be contractually linked to the payroll of the Nashville Predators. If revenues aren't evenly split but the salary structure imagines they very nearly are then you're going to have winners and losers.

But it's disingenuous, not that acts as much as a disincentive to owners anyways, to base a leaguewide position on half the owners losing money if the CBA is also going to apply just as much to the other half. How did the league do as a whole?

cw said:
The fact that the NHL is at 57% and the NBA and NFL labor has dropped to 50% or so along with those bottom lines reflects that the NHL is probably too high and that all three have found this to be an equitable type of formula for their collective bargaining result.

Leaving aside that the idea that those CBA negotiations resulted in something equitable simply on the basis that they were reached, I'd remind you this is still the NBA thread.

cw said:
Further, these "bad" markets is where business go to grow their business. A business grows or dies. To go into a new market can take many years (probably a generation) before the business stabilizes in this type of venture.

Again, this is the NBA thread. You're replying to a post about the NBA. The NBA's movements in recent years have been terrible. Going from Vancouver to Memphis, Seattle to Oklahoma City, Charlotte to New Orleans and then expanding back into the failed market of Charlotte.

Say what you will about the NHL's strategy but the NHL put teams in big markets like Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas and so on. We can argue about the wisdom of those of hockey markets but, as someone who's never been as harsh a critic as some of Bettman's strategy, I've always acknowledged that they were at least making a play for eyeballs.

In the NBA almost all of their moves have been out of larger markets, some with very good fanbases, and into smaller markets. Vancouver is better for the growth of the NBA than Memphis. Seattle is a more appealing marketplace than Oklahoma City. Not surprisingly, there's not a team the NBA didn't move in the last 15 years that wasn't one of the franchises this latest CBA needed to be "tinkered" towards.
 
Saint Nik said:
cw said:
This claim about the owners being guaranteed to make money was made with the NHL CBA in 2005. In 2011 according to Forbes guesses, 17 NHL teams lost money. In 2010, 16 NHL teams lost money. It's not a very good guarantee, is it.

Wow, you have and I say this with all politeness possible, a very complicated relationship with how much stock you put in Forbes and their system of "guessing".

Step up and provide another better source. Sorry we don't have Levitt's numbers for you to attempt to disparage this time around (until of course, they were proven to be correct).

What we do have is reports in the media on various teams - particularly ones financially struggling and they do very roughly tie out with Forbes to indicate a bunch of the NHL owners are not making money. Again, your 2005 claim of the NHL CBA being a guarantee for owners to make money didn't pan out over the test of time.
 
L K said:
Sarge said:
Deebo said:
Raptors sign Magloire, or agreed to terms, I guess they can't sign until friday.

Stop-gap until next year... Should make a bunch of fans happy.

Not me.  He's a guy who refused Team Canada every year they came to him, and a guy who became an "all star" because of weak field.  Never really been a fan and a guy who is "Canadian" doesn't really show much home-town pride.  I'm not all that interested, nor do  I care.  He's a guy who is going to sit behind Bargnani, Davis, Johnson in the rotation getting 10-15 minutes a night at maximum.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not expecting much or anything and as far as the whole Team Canada thing goes, yeah, I completely forgot about all of that. I guess I just don't care about it as much as others but I completely understand where the bitterness comes from. 
 
cw said:
Step up and provide another better source.

I'd be happy to make the effort, provided I was interested in kicking around whether or not various individual NHL teams are profitable. But I'm pretty sure I didn't make any statements regarding that, certainly none with the certainty of "Ha ha, told you so", and so I'm pretty sure it's not incumbent on me to provide numbers here.

cw said:
Sorry we don't have Levitt's numbers for you to attempt to disparage this time around (until of course, they were proven to be correct).

I'd love to get into the way back machine and have that six year old debate again but I think I'm scheduled to try and save Lincoln.

cw said:
What we do have is reports in the media on various teams - particularly ones financially struggling and they do very roughly tie out with Forbes to indicate a bunch of the NHL owners are not making money. Again, your 2005 claim of the NHL CBA being a guarantee for owners to make money didn't pan out over the test of time.

Well, I suppose I'd point out that I pretty definitively didn't state that the 2005 CBA would result in guaranteed profitability for each and every team. In fact I'm pretty sure that during the lockout I said that what the owners wanted would mean trouble for some teams because of the uneven split in revenues while tying their salary commitments to things that had nothing to do with them. Which has kind of been born out and shows, to my mind at least, that along with the lowering of ticket prices and such the Owner's claims about what this deal would do for small market teams was not true.

But again, I'm not super inclined to reopen that and especially not here in this thread about the NBA. I was just pointing out that those same Forbes' numbers failed your smell test so definitively back then and these days seem enough for you to definitively make claims about team's finances. So was there a radical shift in Forbes' methodology that allows this confidence or are we just using them the way a drunk uses a lamp post?
 
Saint Nik said:
cw said:
That's not all about bad markets and bad decisions. It's more about being pretty close to the line - close to a break even structure in many of those cases. All GMs sign some bad deals - it is a part of the cost of doing business in sports. A few do stupid deals but it's a small % in the overall labor expense.

Well, no, let's be real. A big chunk of those losses has to do with the primary, gaping hole in logic that the NHL negotiated their CBA on the basis of, namely that the revenues generated by the Toronto Maple Leafs should be contractually linked to the payroll of the Nashville Predators. If revenues aren't evenly split but the salary structure imagines they very nearly are then you're going to have winners and losers.

But it's disingenuous, not that acts as much as a disincentive to owners anyways, to base a leaguewide position on half the owners losing money if the CBA is also going to apply just as much to the other half. How did the league do as a whole?

Some of those losses do relate to the disparity in  teams revenues. No question about it. And at the time of the 2005 CBA, I said as much. They didn't do enough revenue sharing for all parties to be happy. However, going from a situation where there was no revenue sharing to the place they got to, was a substantial step in the right direction.

Under this new CBA, I think they have to do more.

However, when the total operating income is only 4.1% of revenues for the league, that is far too fine a line in my opinion. The league shouldn't be a charity run by the owners for the players benefit.

The NBA operating income as a league was 4.8% of revenues and 17 teams also lost money according to Forbes guesses. Very similar results across the league as the NHL with similar operating income.

The NFL's operating income as a league was 11.7% of revenues (much larger) and only 2 teams lost money.

So a bunch of these team losses has to do with the overall operating income as a percentage of revenue relationship. 4% is cutting it too fine.

The new NBA deal, after all the acrimony and haggling, should result in that league making 10.7% operating income - which will help clean up a bunch of their bottom line problems.

The NHL will probably follow suit roughly along those lines. Kick in a little more revenue sharing and they will substantially reduce teams in the losses column without making gaudy profits overall.
 
cw said:
However, when the total operating income is only 4.1% of revenues for the league, that is far too fine a line in my opinion. The league shouldn't be a charity run by the owners for the players benefit.

Again, the Gladwell articles and the Pegula quote. Trying to pretend that a Pro sports league is a business like any other only when it comes time to negotiate a CBA is the issue here.

A lot of pro sports owners crying poor are like a guy complaining that he's broke because he bought a Ferrari so he could impress girls.

cw said:
The NFL's operating income as a league was 11.7% of revenues (much larger) and only 2 teams lost money.

And with those very good conditions did the NFL owners have an acrimony free CBA process? Or did they opt out of that profitable deal, lock the players out and demand reductions in wages?

So, yeah, I guess I don't buy that the Leagues' positions are tied to their circumstances when they tend to do the same thing regardless.
 
Saint Nik said:
cw said:
Step up and provide another better source.

I'd be happy to make the effort, provided I was interested in kicking around whether or not various individual NHL teams are profitable. But I'm pretty sure I didn't make any statements regarding that, certainly none with the certainty of "Ha ha, told you so", and so I'm pretty sure it's not incumbent on me to provide numbers here.

cw said:
Sorry we don't have Levitt's numbers for you to attempt to disparage this time around (until of course, they were proven to be correct).

I'd love to get into the way back machine and have that six year old debate again but I think I'm scheduled to try and save Lincoln.

cw said:
What we do have is reports in the media on various teams - particularly ones financially struggling and they do very roughly tie out with Forbes to indicate a bunch of the NHL owners are not making money. Again, your 2005 claim of the NHL CBA being a guarantee for owners to make money didn't pan out over the test of time.

Well, I suppose I'd point out that I pretty definitively didn't state that the 2005 CBA would result in guaranteed profitability for each and every team. In fact I'm pretty sure that during the lockout I said that what the owners wanted would mean trouble for some teams because of the uneven split in revenues while tying their salary commitments to things that had nothing to do with them. Which has kind of been born out and shows, to my mind at least, that along with the lowering of ticket prices and such the Owner's claims about what this deal would do for small market teams was not true.

But again, I'm not super inclined to reopen that and especially not here in this thread about the NBA. I was just pointing out that those same Forbes' numbers failed your smell test so definitively back then and these days seem enough for you to definitively make claims about team's finances. So was there a radical shift in Forbes' methodology that allows this confidence or are we just using them the way a drunk uses a lamp post?

In 2005, Forbes guesses were off by roughly about $100 million across the league vs Levitt. It was a contentious issue that Goodenow tried to cash in on. In part, Goodenow cost his players about $1.5 billion in salary for a season bickering over $300 mil - their 50% or so cut of $100 million revenue per year dispute over 6 years - that was going to get resolved by a third party auditor anyway.

I've stipulated that Forbes guesses from the outset above. It's the only quick public benchmark we have of how the league is doing because we don't have Levitt to provide audits.

The trend with Forbes from back in 2005 is that they have overstated the results. Reality and Levitt has shown the situation to be worse than Forbes stated. As Forbes have not changed their methods substantially, I think the numbers are adequate for the purposes above because they're closer to a best case scenario for the league. A bunch of teams lost money - even according to Forbes.

If you've got something more credible than that to present and show that NHL teams are making more money than Forbes claims, step up and shows us.
 
cw said:
In 2005, Forbes guesses were off by roughly about $100 million across the league vs Levitt. It was a contentious issue that Goodenow tried to cash in on. In part, Goodenow cost his players about $1.5 billion in salary for a season bickering over $300 mil - their 50% or so cut of $100 million revenue per year dispute over 6 years - that was going to get resolved by a third party auditor anyway.

No, cw, I'm sorry. We are not getting the band back together. Yes, we had some great times and some terrific hits but that's over. Sure I'll always look back fondly at the 2005 lockout threads but it wasn't even necessarily our apex. Arguably, the Balsillie-Bettman-Phoenix album was our stronger work together.

But we've moved on. You're into that heavier injuries and concussions stuff now and I'm experimenting with "Grabo should have played despite his wife's pregnancy" soundscapes.

cw said:
I've stipulated that Forbes guesses from the outset above. It's the only quick public benchmark we have of how the league is doing because we don't have Levitt to provide audits.

Ok, then we don't really know if the guarantee in 2005 that I did not make came to be or not. I'm glad we cleared that up.

cw said:
If you've got something more credible than that to present and show that NHL teams are making more money than Forbes claims, step up and shows us.

Again, if I'm making that claim, you're justified in requesting that supporting evidence. But I'm not. I asked you about the league as a whole.
 
Saint Nik said:
cw said:
In 2005, Forbes guesses were off by roughly about $100 million across the league vs Levitt. It was a contentious issue that Goodenow tried to cash in on. In part, Goodenow cost his players about $1.5 billion in salary for a season bickering over $300 mil - their 50% or so cut of $100 million revenue per year dispute over 6 years - that was going to get resolved by a third party auditor anyway.

No, cw, I'm sorry. We are not getting the band back together. Yes, we had some great times and some terrific hits but that's over. Sure I'll always look back fondly at the 2005 lockout threads but it wasn't even necessarily our apex. Arguably, the Balsillie-Bettman-Phoenix album was our stronger work together.

But we've moved on. You're into that heavier injuries and concussions stuff now and I'm experimenting with "Grabo should have played despite his wife's pregnancy" soundscapes.

cw said:
I've stipulated that Forbes guesses from the outset above. It's the only quick public benchmark we have of how the league is doing because we don't have Levitt to provide audits.

Ok, then we don't really know if the guarantee in 2005 that I did not make came to be or not. I'm glad we cleared that up.

cw said:
If you've got something more credible than that to present and show that NHL teams are making more money than Forbes claims, step up and shows us.

Again, if I'm making that claim, you're justified in requesting that supporting evidence. But I'm not. I asked you about the league as a whole.

I think you're just playing games here.

As the owners are involved as one of the two key parties in their CBA, I think whether their individual teams make or lose money is the key significant concern to them with respect to this supposed "guarantee" you accuse them of obtaining from the CBA. Because what money their team makes or doesn't make is the only money they see or don't see.

The league as a whole is very, very close to the sum of it's parts. That was revealed in the media during the prior CBA haggling, is reflected in the current CBA and was substantiated by evidence included in the Phoenix bankruptcy docket. Tallying Forbes is the best quick guess we've got at the league as a whole. The vast majority of the revenues are reflected by team revenues because those revenues include their portion of things like broadcasting and merchandising dispersed from the league to the individual teams.

The NHL Constitution is titled "Constitution of the National Hockey League (An Unincorporated Association Not For Profit)". As what goes on is subject to a third party auditor, there's not a bunch of money hiding at the NHL office. It stands to reason as the owners want their annual cut of the money the league collects.

How many of the 17 NHL owners Forbes guesses  lost money last year are excited and jubilant when Gary reports the league overall made 4%?
 
cw said:
As the owners are involved as one of the two key parties in their CBA, I think whether their individual teams make or lose money is the key significant concern to them with respect to this supposed "guarantee" you accuse them of obtaining from the CBA. Because what money their team makes or doesn't make is the only money they see or don't see.

What guarantee did I accuse them of obtaining? You know I love you cw but there are times you're so tunnel visioned on what you're saying that what other people say to you seems to not even be within your orbit.

cw said:
The league as a whole is very, very close to the sum of it's parts. That was revealed in the media during the prior CBA haggling, is reflected in the current CBA and was substantiated by evidence included in the Phoenix bankruptcy docket. Tallying Forbes is the best quick guess we've got at the league as a whole. The vast majority of the revenues are reflected by team revenues because those revenues include their portion of things like broadcasting and merchandising dispersed from the league to the individual teams.

But, of course, it doesn't account for everything. It doesn't account for things like what these franchises can position their ownership into in terms of side businesses or real-estate investments. Something that was always ignored by you and Leavitt and was always the ridiculous, gaping lie that the NHL refused to acknowledge.

But, again, this would be terrific fodder for discussion if I was particularly interested in rehashing the 2005 CBA debates which, again, I'm not.

cw said:
The NHL Constitution is titled "Constitution of the National Hockey League (An Unincorporated Association Not For Profit)". As what goes on is subject to a third party auditor, there's not a bunch of money hiding at the NHL office. It stands to reason as the owners want their annual cut of the money the league collects.

How many of the 17 NHL owners Forbes guesses  lost money last year are excited and jubilant when Gary reports the league overall made 4%?

Not many, I guess. I'm guessing a lot of people who own businesses that lose money aren't thrilled. The issue, as always and at the root here, is that you seem to think that because a business loses money that it needs to be addressed by means of renegotiating a CBA that all sides agreed to as a fair framework for everyone to make money. A system with no losers possible.I think that if NHL owners hear that they only made 4% as a league they might start to think "Hey, what can we do to improve things" as opposed to "What can we get other people to give us so we can continue to be this lazy and stupid but still earn the exact amount of money we want".

Every loss is a fault of the CBA. Never mind that owners announce at press conferences that they're not interested in making money with their hockey teams. Never mind that they knowingly buy into teams in sketchy markets, regardless of how good it looks 20 or 30 or 40 years from now for the league's perspective. Is someone twisting their arms into giving Kovalchuk deals? Or untested young players 60 or 70 million dollars? Burying guys making 7 million dollars in the minors? No. They sign these deals and then immediately get to work figuring out how they can get their hockey teams to win. Not to make money, to win. Then, the teams that lose money cry and whine like little kids who didn't get everything they wanted on christmas because in the midst of their acting like girls on My Sweet Sixteen they somehow lost money in the process.

But is the answer ever "Next few years, we'll tighten our belts and make better decisions""? Nope. Wage rollbacks. It has to be addressed with the CBA. Never mind what the labour stoppages they initiate do to the sport as a whole, never mind that there doesn't seem to be any sort of CBA that players can agree to that doesn't result in owners immediately ignoring the joke that they're a single entity in favour of making decisions immediately for themselves, whether ego or pocketbook is their motivation.

They want all the advantages of being a single entity but none of the drawbacks. They want all of the advantages of a system of cost control but they don't want to live up to the terms by which the players agreed to it.

And, again, they win because they have all the leverage. These guys are billionaires who stay fat regardless of whether their hockey teams operate which is precisely the reason that as soon as a CBA is resolved they stop pretending that they're running businesses.
 
Saint Nik said:
cw said:
As the owners are involved as one of the two key parties in their CBA, I think whether their individual teams make or lose money is the key significant concern to them with respect to this supposed "guarantee" you accuse them of obtaining from the CBA. Because what money their team makes or doesn't make is the only money they see or don't see.

What guarantee did I accuse them of obtaining? You know I love you cw but there are times you're so tunnel visioned on what you're saying that what other people say to you seems to not even be within your orbit.

Did you not post this?
Saint Nik said:
That to me was the central issue here and is the reigning issue in sports labour negotiations. The issue isn't whether the systems that exist make it impossible for teams to be profitable but rather whether or not the systems that exist make it so that profitability is guaranteed.

That was a concern of yours in 2005 as it is today.
 
cw said:
Did you not post this?
Saint Nik said:
That to me was the central issue here and is the reigning issue in sports labour negotiations. The issue isn't whether the systems that exist make it impossible for teams to be profitable but rather whether or not the systems that exist make it so that profitability is guaranteed.

Ok, but in that post do you see a single, solitary mention of the NHL? Or the deal the NHL signed in 2005?
 
Saint Nik said:
cw said:
Did you not post this?
Saint Nik said:
That to me was the central issue here and is the reigning issue in sports labour negotiations. The issue isn't whether the systems that exist make it impossible for teams to be profitable but rather whether or not the systems that exist make it so that profitability is guaranteed.

Ok, but in that post do you see a single, solitary mention of the NHL? Or the deal the NHL signed in 2005?

Does the NHL CBA not fall with  "sports labour negotiations"?

And this position you're taking with the NBA CBA is a position you took in 2005 with the NHL CBA - the notion that the NHL CBA was providing a guarantee for the owners to make a profit.

The first post in this thread that you started this discussion with said:
Saint Nik said:
I tried to make these arguments during the NHL lockout but, well, I'm no Malcolm Gladwell.

The NHL is raised several times in the discussion that followed.
 
cw said:
Does the NHL CBA not fall with  "sports labour negotiations"?

You mean the one in the future? No. The upcoming CBA negotiations do not apply to the statement I'm making there about the present. They may. But I don't know that yet.

cw said:
And this position you're taking with the NBA CBA is a position you took in 2005 with the NHL CBA - the notion that the NHL CBA was providing a guarantee for the owners to make a profit.

Again, that's not true. I emphatically did not say that the 2005 CBA would guarantee that all NHL owners would individually make a profit. I said the opposite.

cw said:
The first post in this thread that you started this discussion with said:
Saint Nik said:
I tried to make these arguments during the NHL lockout but, well, I'm no Malcolm Gladwell.

Yeah, the specific arguments made in those particular pieces about the motives sports owners often have in the running of their franchises. That's not what you're addressing.
 
Saint Nik said:
cw said:
The league as a whole is very, very close to the sum of it's parts. That was revealed in the media during the prior CBA haggling, is reflected in the current CBA and was substantiated by evidence included in the Phoenix bankruptcy docket. Tallying Forbes is the best quick guess we've got at the league as a whole. The vast majority of the revenues are reflected by team revenues because those revenues include their portion of things like broadcasting and merchandising dispersed from the league to the individual teams.

But, of course, it doesn't account for everything. It doesn't account for things like what these franchises can position their ownership into in terms of side businesses or real-estate investments. Something that was always ignored by you and Leavitt and was always the ridiculous, gaping lie that the NHL refused to acknowledge.

But, again, this would be terrific fodder for discussion if I was particularly interested in rehashing the 2005 CBA debates which, again, I'm not.

It wasn't "ignored" by me, Levitt nor any of the players unions. But, as the saying goes, "it's none of their business". Those are legally distinct business entities in their own right. The players negotiating a labor agreement with their employers don't work for them. Those separate entities can be bought and sold separately from the team. They are not required to be owned by a team for that team to be able to function in the league. They are a completely separate business decision for an owner.

Where there are NHL related revenues acquired by third party businesses owned by the team owners, the players are entitled to those revenues under the CBA right now.

If the IRS audits a NHL team, they audit the distinct business entity. If the NHLPA files a grievance against the NHL, they don't grieve some shopping mall the owner might own beside the rink. It's completely outside the legal relationship between employer and employees.

What do you do when one owner owns his building and another doesn't? It gets insane - not only to figure out dollars but to legally enforce because the players don't get to haggle leases or buy and sell buildings or shopping malls etc. It's how the whole business world works - legally and evey other which way. You're not ever going to overcome that with a collective bargaining agreement between an employer and a group of employees.

And the players do see some benefit. If one owner owns a NHL team and another owns a NBA team and they both share renting the same facility, there's a darn good chance that the rent for the arena they share is cheaper than if only one of them was in it. With the volume of fans for both teams coming to the arena, parking is probably cheaper for each set of fans than it would be if only one set of fans showed up because the two revenue streams absorb some of the fixed overheads and the concessions are also probably cheaper for the same reason. That reduces the unit cost of attending an event and increases the revenue from more fans showing up attracted by the cheaper cost. So the players on a particular team in that situation would see some overhead or expense absorption benefit or revenue increase benefit when looking at operating revenues to help set their % of the revenue pie in some of these situations where an owner owns the team, the building and some of the other teams in the building, for example.

A problem is that they could see some of those benefits if someone else owned some of the other entities so the owner that owned all of them would be penalized giving money to the NHLPA compared to the owner who didn't own all of the entities. That's just plain nuts.

If the players want in on that action, their union should open up their chequebook and invest in those business opportunities so they can take on the risks (ie the lawsuits & busines failures) along with the potential rewards like every other investor does. If they're unwilling to do that, then they can go to hell like anyone else who won't risk investing in a business while expecting a reward.

The league CBAs are collective bargaining agreements between employers and employees that definie the relationship between the employers and the employees. They are not joint ownership agreeements nor venture captial/business investment contracts. If they were, how does an owner like the NHLPA would be collectively bargain with themselves? They can't.

Steve Ellman took a bath on his Westgate investment in Glendale. How come the NHLPA didn't feel sorry for him and pitch in to help him out?  It had nothing to do with the Coyotes because he'd already sold them when he took his bath.

This is what I would describe as grossly overreaching. There is no required legal or direct accounting relationship between owning a shopping mall and owning a NHL team. Separate business entities have no place in collective bargaining agreements between employers and employees.

If the players unions want in on that action, they should drop collective bargaining and write some cheques to invest as owners so they take on the full risk of the investments along with the hope to obtain the proceeds of the rewards. Instead of revenue sharing as that would have to go to properly share the risk, the relationship would have to turn to profit sharing. And if it were to evolve that way, you'd have to figure out how much each player owned of the league when he got bought out, etc. Crazy stuff.
 
cw said:
It wasn't "ignored" by me, Levitt nor any of the players unions. But, as the saying goes, "it's none of their business". Those are legally distinct business entities in their own right. The players negotiating a labor agreement with their employers don't work for them. Those separate entities can be bought and sold separately from the team. They are not required to be owned by a team for that team to be able to function in the league. They are a completely separate business decision for an owner.

But the point is that it distorts the actual financial picture of the league. During the '05 lockout one of the clubs that was cited as one of the teams was the NY Rangers. A team with a storied history in the biggest market in North America had no business losing money. But James Dolan didn't care much about whether the Rangers lost five or ten million dollars because, to him, the Rangers value was as programming. That was where he made his real money. Likewise, and again I'd urge to read the Gladwell article on the Nets issue, Bruce Ratner didn't care much if the Nets were a bad investment or if they lost money because they were going to be the centre piece of a multi-billion dollar real estate development.

That's the issue. You can't run a business as if you don't care if it makes a profit and then, when it comes time for labour negotiations, pretend as if it weren't the case. You can't pretend that the Nets being profitable is a crucial and fundamental issue when it comes to the continued existence of the franchise and that it drove Bruce Ratner's decisions with regards to the operation of the team when it wasn't. The only way the New York Rangers can be profitable if, given the choice, they intentionally run at a loss is if profitability is guaranteed.

It's a clear case of billionaires trying to have their cake, eat it and then go in for pie. If you use a sports teams to generate profit in another business and your overall investment is profitable you can't then turn around and demand cuts in labour costs because otherwise your future involvement is in jeopardy. If I own a sports team and they lose five million dollars annually but because I own that sports team I make 50 million dollars annually elsewhere you seem to think that I should be able to cry poor about that five million dollars even if I clearly ran the team without regard to it.

And, just so we're clear and you don't come back with legal stuff, you can do a lot of the things I said you can't do, it just makes you a scumbag.
 
Here's a great quote from Dan Gilbert, Cavaliers owner, that's sourced in that second Gladwell piece

To me, NBA franchises are like pieces of art. There are only 30 of them. They aren't always on the market, especially a franchise that would have been such a natural fit. ? If you just looked at the Cavaliers in terms of revenues, profits and balance sheets ? and you paid this amount for it ? people would say 'You're insane! You're nuts.' But if you look at all the tentacles, the impact on our other venues, it makes tremendous sense.

Then, of course, Gilbert gets his butthole hurt by Lebron deciding he'd rather take less money in Miami than in Cleveland and all of a sudden the "system is broken" and the players need to make concessions for the business to be profitable.

The people at OWS didn't set enough fires.
 
Saint Nik said:
cw said:
Does the NHL CBA not fall with  "sports labour negotiations"?

You mean the one in the future? No. The upcoming CBA negotiations do not apply to the statement I'm making there about the present. They may. But I don't know that yet.

cw said:
And this position you're taking with the NBA CBA is a position you took in 2005 with the NHL CBA - the notion that the NHL CBA was providing a guarantee for the owners to make a profit.

Again, that's not true. I emphatically did not say that the 2005 CBA would guarantee that all NHL owners would individually make a profit. I said the opposite.

cw said:
The first post in this thread that you started this discussion with said:
Saint Nik said:
I tried to make these arguments during the NHL lockout but, well, I'm no Malcolm Gladwell.

Yeah, the specific arguments made in those particular pieces about the motives sports owners often have in the running of their franchises. That's not what you're addressing.

This was as central to your position in 2005 as it is today with the NBA CBA:
Saint Nik said:
That to me was the central issue here and is the reigning issue in sports labour negotiations. The issue isn't whether the systems that exist make it impossible for teams to be profitable but rather whether or not the systems that exist make it so that profitability is guaranteed.

Any CBA that deals with league payroll as a % of league revenue as the NHL, NBA and the NFL CBA deals do, has consistently aligned with your professed concept of guaranteed profit. Whether it's 51% or 57%, there simply isn't a big difference in the model concept - all that's different are the numbers. As for the new NHL CBA, you pointed out previously in this thread:
Saint Nik said:
I fully expect the NHL to get a similar reduction in what they pay the players despite the existing CBA basically being written on the back of the NHLPA's bloated corpse.

isn't likely to be a whole heck of a lot different than the others.

I could care less about the semantics. The notion of "profitability is guaranteed" has always been there with your collective bargaining positions for years as it is in this thread.
 
cw said:
Any CBA that deals with league payroll as a % of league revenue as the NHL, NBA and the NFL CBA deals do, has consistently aligned with your professed concept of guaranteed profit.

Well, that's just not true and it's especially not true on a team by team basis. I never, ever said in any sense that these deals would result in guaranteed profitability for every single team. What I've said is that leagues look at any loss as a failure within the CBA as opposed to their own management so the only CBA they'd be happy one is one with guaranteed profits.

The NHL, again, basically got to write the exact CBA they wanted, then set about doing whatever they could to act like idiots during it, and now will probably want to change the terms of it to be even more favourable to them. They have owners who say, at press conferences, that they don't care if they make money with their teams but think they're fully justified in seeking to address everyone's losses through labour negotiations.

cw said:
Saint Nik said:
I fully expect the NHL to get a similar reduction in what they pay the players despite the existing CBA basically being written on the back of the NHLPA's bloated corpse.

Again, no mention whatsoever about guaranteed profits. But it's becoming pretty clear that you have some weird ax to grind here as opposed to actually reading the things I'm saying.

This isn't an issue of semantics. You're inventing wholesale the idea that I said the exact opposite of what I said in 2005.
 

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