One of the challenges of having the ability (and obligation) to write about something you have cared about your entire life is analyzing situations that are both depressing and frustrating. Coalescing the debacle of the current labor situation fits that bill. Instead of focusing on the nuts and bolts of the arguments on either side, the tactics taken by the players, or making a wild projection of when we will finally see NBA basketball, this seems like the time to talk about a related and increasingly important component of all this: the owners’ apparent desired vision for the future of the league.

“The goal here is to make a profit”

A month ago, David Aldridge interviewed David Stern on NBA-TV. On the first question of that interview, the words above composed part of the answer to a question about the concessions the players had put on the table at that point, which have been dwarfed by moves in the month since the interview. While the desire for owners to make a profit (as they would in any other one of their ventures) makes sense on its face, the way this works in practice flies in the face of the best interests of basketball and its fans. In a piece on Grantland published in August, Malcolm Gladwell compared owning a sports team to owning art. Like Stern’s comment, this makes sense on its face since there is a “psychic benefit” to owning either.

While right on the more superficial elements, what Gladwell missed is that while art is a very personal and often private financial commitment, owning a professional sports team effectively serves as the most public expenditure a wealthy person can make.

There clearly is a “psychic benefit” to owning a team, yet that benefit proves closer to owning a flashy car than having a nice piece of art hanging in one’s house- a meaningful portion of the enormous financial expense is the flash and everyone else seeing you enjoy it. Anyone who questions this should watch certain owners both during and after games or listen to sports talk pretty much any time. 

The Sterling Problem

Interestingly, the other big problem with the owner’s endgame here is a parallel with art ownership: acquisition and transfer. The NBA’s single biggest problem at the moment is not the labor stalemate, fan frustration, or the economy: it is bad owners, locations, or both.

Take the Los Angeles Clippers. That franchise is a goldmine in the right hands. Heck, they don’t even need to be the “right hands”- just someone that other than Donald Sterling. His frugality and general terribleness as an owner has and will continue to hamstring a team that carries just about every other advantage an NBA team can have in the form of a premium location, a great salary situation, and young, marketable talent. With an even semi-competent owner, the Clippers are in the discussion for LeBron James and Dwight Howard and potentially still have a shot at winning the lottery and getting Kyrie Irving. While the Clippers are profitable for their owner, they could be making the league money rather than being a Florida Marlins-esque leech on the system. Unfortunately, just like an art collector having the freedom to keep a Cézanne in their basement, Sterling gets to keep his team while David Stern and the other owners do nothing about it.

Sarver and New Orleans

Two other related problems show themselves in their own ways. The Phoenix Suns have been gutted by an owner who appears unable or unwilling to understand that selling draft picks (otherwise known as the only players in the NBA who consistently outperform their contracts) has neither a financial nor practical basis. Of course, Robert Sarver gets to keep his team and be a piece in the labor talks, reportedly saying the he had not been able to “get the return on buying the Suns that he had hoped” 

Yes, that man gets a team and a voice that shapes this CBA. The other issue is one of location, as teams like the New Orleans Hornets suffer from being in a city that simply cannot support hosting an NBA team at this time. Keeping teams in bad locations and/or allowing ownership bad for the league to persist hurts the bottom line and could be eminently more correctable than going after a hard cap or more than 50% of BRI. Any structure that prioritizes reliable profitability should also necessarily provide protections for both players and the fans that the Sterlings and Sarvers of the league cannot persist simply because they bought their teams and do not want to sell since it will systematically select for people like that to purchase teams if they are reliably profitable.

The NBA is not the NFL

The biggest lingering issue with the owners position thus far is that the league they seem intent on building does not make sense for what the NBA should be. The media loves talking about “helmet envy,” the very real phenomenon where players in the NFL get jealous of the individual fame athletes in other sports can garner. Ironically, the owners in other sports get NFL envy because of the incredible financial reality they have been able to create. After all, splitting the gargantuan NFL pie so that players and owners could be satisfied proved much easier work than the NBA.

The fundamental problem that the NBA has is that it cannot get the pieces that make the NFL a financial juggernaut even in the current economy. The biggest misconception centers around parity. In a sport where each team only plays eight home games in the regular season, parity means that your team might be in the mix any given year which has helped season ticket sales in many situations. Naturally, this makes other owners (or even the same owners in other leagues) seek to replicate this success. What they do not seem to understand is that structural parity in the NBA will actually hurt season ticket sales because of the length of the season and its structure.

The NFL is an event sport because every single game is a big deal. Having only eight regular season home games traditionally no closer than seven days apart and typically on Sundays lends itself to the kind of investment that fans can make for either pro or college football teams.  However, the combination of a long season (more games, games at less convenient times/intervals) coupled with the fact that so many pro basketball teams make the playoffs means that parity could actually hurt many teams since it fundamentally changes a fan’s interaction with the team.

NBA teams can build by improving their brand like their college counterparts or by developing a team that fans can get behind like Oklahoma City and Dallas currently and the San Antonio before them. Any market that cannot support a team worthy of it should not have a franchise in the first place. Any market that will not support a team but can should get a league that looks closely at their ownership situation. It really should not be that complicated.

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All in all, while blame for the current boondoggle must go all around, the idle period should be a perfect time for David Stern and the other owners to articulate their vision for the NBA moving forward and how players, fans, and the league as a whole will be better off if they get their way.