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I think these are things that people fail to take into account how businesses that have been affected but have not shown the sgins will begin to show them and how no one or very few escape a downturn in the economy:
Welcome to the No Benjamins Association
excerpts:
The economic downturn has turned the NBA into a league of dollars, not sense.
Welcome to the No Benjamins Association
excerpts:
I skipped my annual NBA All-Star Weekend column because I was frantically trying to finish my book. At least that's how I rationalized it. I need to finish this book. I have a deadline. I can't afford to spend that writing time on anything else. But after reflecting for a few days, I came to a sobering conclusion: The book was a convenient excuse. I could have found time to pump out that column. I just didn't want to hand it in. See, it wouldn't have been a typical All-Star Weekend account for me. It would have been about money. You might remember me writing that the NBA was the No Balls Association two years ago. Now it's the No Benjamins Association. Nobody is rolling in Benjamins anymore. Everyone is scared. Money hangs over everything.
That's what I ended up discussing for four solid days in Phoenix. Hands down, it was the most depressing All-Star Weekend I've ever attended. Celebrities were scarce. The parties weren't as good or plentiful. Even the number of groupies seemed lower than usual. It's not as if everyone was drinking Natural Light and eating Hamburger Helper, but still, when you're celebrating a weekend with the No Benjamins Association, you know it. We should have been talking about Kevin Durant's coming-out party, a potentially delicious see-if-you-can-top-this battle between Kobe and LeBron at the game (never happened), whether H-O-R-S-E worked, who might emerge in a wide-open playoff race, even whether the Nate Robinson and Dwight Howard dunk contest "battle" was too contrived … only everything kept coming back to that dark cloud of money...
This season? We talked about money. Constantly. We didn't even know about the line of credit on the horizon; that didn't leak until the Monday after the All-Star Game. (On Thursday, we learned that 12 teams will accept the league's offer to borrow $200 million from JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, with between $13 million and $20 million available to each team. I found this ironic after learning in Phoenix that David Stern and Jerry Colangelo blew a jaw-dropping $100 million on the entire Redeem Team process from beginning to end. My how times have changed.) We knew about layoffs of employees within the league and various franchises. We knew various local and national sponsors were bailing, most notably car companies and major banks (two staples for the NBA). We knew certain franchises were losing significant wads of money and reacting accordingly. (Details are still trickling out. For instance, after the trade deadline, The Sacramento Bee reported the Kings would have lost $25 million had they not dumped Brad Miller's salary and bought out Mikki Moore, and the newspaper's Kings blog reported team employees were no longer allowed to work overtime or eat dinner in the media room.) Even trade talk -- normally a staple of any All-Star Weekend -- revolved more around themes such as, "They have to cut payroll," "They can't take on any money right now" and "They're too terrified of the tax to do anything."
You know who was mentioned in more "Where do you think he's going?" scenarios than anyone besides Amare Stoudemire? Raef LaFrentz's Expiring Contract. That thing got mentioned so many times it could have hired a PR staff and an agent. Here's the kicker: Raef can't play. He's a basketball invalid. He has been injured since something like 1973. Portland's insurance company repays the Blazers 80 percent of his salary, making him a cap figure and little else. In the No Benjamins Association, that makes him a freaking commodity. Teams wanted to dump clearly superior players on Portland at the deadline just to get Raef's insurance money...
Which brings us to the Lockout That Hasn't Happened Yet. Unless the players' association agrees to major concessions by the summer of 2011 -- highly doubtful because that would involve applying common sense -- the owners will happily lock out players as soon as the current CBA expires, then play the same devious waiting game from the summer of 1998. David Stern will grow another scruffy beard. The owners will plant their feet in the sand, grab the tug-of-war rope and dig in. Only this time, they KNOW they will win. See, we learned a dirty little secret in the last lockout: An inordinate number of NBA players live paycheck to paycheck. Yes, even the guys making eight figures a year. You can play high-stakes poker with them … and you will win.
Quick tangent: You're asking yourself, "Wait, how can a dude making $8-10 million a year live paycheck to paycheck?" Easy. First, he's only banking 40 percent once the IRS and agents are done with him. Second, he's probably overpaying for multiple houses and luxury cars just to keep up with everyone else. Third, he's buying expensive clothes and dinners, chartering planes, buying expensive TVs, going to casinos, and paying for friends and family at every turn. Fourth, there's a decent chance he's supporting a bunch of people back home -- family and extended family -- and not just that, but he might have gotten roped into funding at least one dumb "investment" by a loser family member. ("Uncle Lenny, I thought you told me this nightclub couldn't miss?") Fifth, he is, um, "dating" frequently -- even if he's married -- and if you "date" frequently, mistakes might happen that lead to hospital bills and child support payments. (If you catch my drift.) And sixth, he's not adding these numbers up in his head because he's thinking, "I don't need to worry about money, I'm making $10 mil a year!" I know it sounds farfetched, but I've heard the Inexplicable Tale Of Financial Woe with NBA stars too many times to count … and that doesn't include stars such as Scottie Pippen who were screwed by their financial advisers. It's a long and inglorious list, and if you don't think we're headed for 15 "Real Sports" segments in the next decade with Bernie Goldberg catching up with Broke Former NBA Superstar X, you're kidding yourself. Remember the lessons of the '99 lockout -- the players HAD to come back. And it wasn't because they missed playing...
Looking at the next 15 months only, the consensus of people in the know was that multiple NBA franchises (guesses ranged from three to eight) will move cities, get sold to new owners or throw themselves on the mercy of the league...
So that's the climate for the No Benjamins Association right now: Murky, unpredictable and not so lucrative. And you wonder why I didn't want to write about All-Star Weekend. Looking at the big picture, the league won't struggle even 1/10th as much as the NHL in years to come -- of all the wildest predictions I heard in Phoenix, the craziest came from a connected executive who predicted that fifteen NHL teams would go under within the next two years (and was dead serious) -- and Major League Baseball is about to get creamed beyond belief. Other than the NFL, the NBA will emerge from this financial quagmire in the best shape of any professional sport; not just because its billion-dollar deals with Disney and Turner (inked fortuitously in the summer of 2007) run through the 2015-16 season but because the Lockout That Hasn't Happened Yet will ultimately solve every major league issue except its stupefyingly dreadful officiating.
That's what I ended up discussing for four solid days in Phoenix. Hands down, it was the most depressing All-Star Weekend I've ever attended. Celebrities were scarce. The parties weren't as good or plentiful. Even the number of groupies seemed lower than usual. It's not as if everyone was drinking Natural Light and eating Hamburger Helper, but still, when you're celebrating a weekend with the No Benjamins Association, you know it. We should have been talking about Kevin Durant's coming-out party, a potentially delicious see-if-you-can-top-this battle between Kobe and LeBron at the game (never happened), whether H-O-R-S-E worked, who might emerge in a wide-open playoff race, even whether the Nate Robinson and Dwight Howard dunk contest "battle" was too contrived … only everything kept coming back to that dark cloud of money...
This season? We talked about money. Constantly. We didn't even know about the line of credit on the horizon; that didn't leak until the Monday after the All-Star Game. (On Thursday, we learned that 12 teams will accept the league's offer to borrow $200 million from JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, with between $13 million and $20 million available to each team. I found this ironic after learning in Phoenix that David Stern and Jerry Colangelo blew a jaw-dropping $100 million on the entire Redeem Team process from beginning to end. My how times have changed.) We knew about layoffs of employees within the league and various franchises. We knew various local and national sponsors were bailing, most notably car companies and major banks (two staples for the NBA). We knew certain franchises were losing significant wads of money and reacting accordingly. (Details are still trickling out. For instance, after the trade deadline, The Sacramento Bee reported the Kings would have lost $25 million had they not dumped Brad Miller's salary and bought out Mikki Moore, and the newspaper's Kings blog reported team employees were no longer allowed to work overtime or eat dinner in the media room.) Even trade talk -- normally a staple of any All-Star Weekend -- revolved more around themes such as, "They have to cut payroll," "They can't take on any money right now" and "They're too terrified of the tax to do anything."
You know who was mentioned in more "Where do you think he's going?" scenarios than anyone besides Amare Stoudemire? Raef LaFrentz's Expiring Contract. That thing got mentioned so many times it could have hired a PR staff and an agent. Here's the kicker: Raef can't play. He's a basketball invalid. He has been injured since something like 1973. Portland's insurance company repays the Blazers 80 percent of his salary, making him a cap figure and little else. In the No Benjamins Association, that makes him a freaking commodity. Teams wanted to dump clearly superior players on Portland at the deadline just to get Raef's insurance money...
Which brings us to the Lockout That Hasn't Happened Yet. Unless the players' association agrees to major concessions by the summer of 2011 -- highly doubtful because that would involve applying common sense -- the owners will happily lock out players as soon as the current CBA expires, then play the same devious waiting game from the summer of 1998. David Stern will grow another scruffy beard. The owners will plant their feet in the sand, grab the tug-of-war rope and dig in. Only this time, they KNOW they will win. See, we learned a dirty little secret in the last lockout: An inordinate number of NBA players live paycheck to paycheck. Yes, even the guys making eight figures a year. You can play high-stakes poker with them … and you will win.
Quick tangent: You're asking yourself, "Wait, how can a dude making $8-10 million a year live paycheck to paycheck?" Easy. First, he's only banking 40 percent once the IRS and agents are done with him. Second, he's probably overpaying for multiple houses and luxury cars just to keep up with everyone else. Third, he's buying expensive clothes and dinners, chartering planes, buying expensive TVs, going to casinos, and paying for friends and family at every turn. Fourth, there's a decent chance he's supporting a bunch of people back home -- family and extended family -- and not just that, but he might have gotten roped into funding at least one dumb "investment" by a loser family member. ("Uncle Lenny, I thought you told me this nightclub couldn't miss?") Fifth, he is, um, "dating" frequently -- even if he's married -- and if you "date" frequently, mistakes might happen that lead to hospital bills and child support payments. (If you catch my drift.) And sixth, he's not adding these numbers up in his head because he's thinking, "I don't need to worry about money, I'm making $10 mil a year!" I know it sounds farfetched, but I've heard the Inexplicable Tale Of Financial Woe with NBA stars too many times to count … and that doesn't include stars such as Scottie Pippen who were screwed by their financial advisers. It's a long and inglorious list, and if you don't think we're headed for 15 "Real Sports" segments in the next decade with Bernie Goldberg catching up with Broke Former NBA Superstar X, you're kidding yourself. Remember the lessons of the '99 lockout -- the players HAD to come back. And it wasn't because they missed playing...
Looking at the next 15 months only, the consensus of people in the know was that multiple NBA franchises (guesses ranged from three to eight) will move cities, get sold to new owners or throw themselves on the mercy of the league...
So that's the climate for the No Benjamins Association right now: Murky, unpredictable and not so lucrative. And you wonder why I didn't want to write about All-Star Weekend. Looking at the big picture, the league won't struggle even 1/10th as much as the NHL in years to come -- of all the wildest predictions I heard in Phoenix, the craziest came from a connected executive who predicted that fifteen NHL teams would go under within the next two years (and was dead serious) -- and Major League Baseball is about to get creamed beyond belief. Other than the NFL, the NBA will emerge from this financial quagmire in the best shape of any professional sport; not just because its billion-dollar deals with Disney and Turner (inked fortuitously in the summer of 2007) run through the 2015-16 season but because the Lockout That Hasn't Happened Yet will ultimately solve every major league issue except its stupefyingly dreadful officiating.
The BlackBerry buzzed atop the cherrywood desk. Both belong to Pistons GM Joe Dumars, and as it was the day before the NBA trade deadline, the humming came roughly every 10 minutes, as proposed deals landed in his electronic mailbox.
Dumars read most of the messages silently before returning his attention to the TV on the wall or the board to his left that listed every NBA player's free agent status. But this time Dumars clicked the trackwheel to open the note. "Oh, wow," he said in quiet awe. It was a response undoubtedly echoed by every other GM and team president who opened the same e-mail.
The league office had sent the message, a warning to teams that the economic crunch currently squeezing the rest of the world had found its way to the Land Where Amazing Happens. Specifically, the note said that the league's projected revenue, which had been rising forever, had turned decidedly southward. Teams were already seeing defections in season ticket renewals and sponsorship deals, and as a result, the league was projecting its luxury-tax threshold next20season to dip to $69M. Dumars had expected the mark to hold at this season's $71.15M. But a decrease?...
Dumars read most of the messages silently before returning his attention to the TV on the wall or the board to his left that listed every NBA player's free agent status. But this time Dumars clicked the trackwheel to open the note. "Oh, wow," he said in quiet awe. It was a response undoubtedly echoed by every other GM and team president who opened the same e-mail.
The league office had sent the message, a warning to teams that the economic crunch currently squeezing the rest of the world had found its way to the Land Where Amazing Happens. Specifically, the note said that the league's projected revenue, which had been rising forever, had turned decidedly southward. Teams were already seeing defections in season ticket renewals and sponsorship deals, and as a result, the league was projecting its luxury-tax threshold next20season to dip to $69M. Dumars had expected the mark to hold at this season's $71.15M. But a decrease?...
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