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Always nice to see a guy (KG) who has probably made $200 million in salary alone tell a group of guys he is willing to take an $18 million hit when you have a lot of players who could play 10 years and not make $18 million.
Man I hope my guys ( the NBA players) stick to their guns. Seems they have a nice war chest to tide them over. I don't care if it costs 2 seasons. I want to see them get paid-n-full. Kool is with you fellas all the way.
Let's look at a few comments from players on this subject:
Chris Paul:
Kevin Durant:"We've all been trying to prepare for this for a few years," Paul said at a charity event on Friday. "Guys have been aware that this was a possibility. Guys should be fine."
http://basketball.realgm.com/wiretap...out_Since_2007
“We're going to stand up for what we have to do, no matter how long it's going to take,” Durant told The Associated Press after the conclusion of his two-day youth basketball camp.
“No matter how long the lockout's going to take, we're going to stand up. We're not going to give in.”
Antwan Jamison:
Kevin Garnett:"I think in '98-99, we didn't think it would be a long, drawn out process," Jamison said after speaking to children at a school in his hometown. "Just the unity, the guys understanding what we're facing and what we're up against is totally different than what it was when I first got into the league.
"You've got the LeBron Jameses and the Dwyane Wades and all those guys who are really taking a stand and being a face of this movement," Jamison said. "I think back then we really didn't have the superstars that were together as the superstars are now. I think it's making a difference."
Read more: http://basketball.realgm.com/wiretap...#ixzz1Qxj6v3HL
D Fisher: The Union PresidentKevin Garnett delivered an inspired sermon in the NBA players union meeting a week ago, declaring his willingness to sit out the season and forfeit $18.8 million in salary
D Wade ( on looking for a new job)To all our players:" You have my word that I will do all I can to find a fair resolution. Nothing less.
Damien Wilkens:I'm available for all bar and bat mitzvah and weddings..but my specialty is balloon animals..
Charlie Villanueva:Anyone needs their cars washed, look no further. Will wash for food!
Agent Zero:Maaaaan I just got locked out my house too. Not a good night!!! What else could go wrong?
Lamar Odom:Well I've been thru a lockout..I was lockout 50 games last year sooo this is not gonna be anything new to me...lol
more to come.....Feeling a lot better 2day, how's everyone doing?
Always nice to see a guy (KG) who has probably made $200 million in salary alone tell a group of guys he is willing to take an $18 million hit when you have a lot of players who could play 10 years and not make $18 million.
almost irrelevant point.. ironically KG's original contract started all this mess...but again it was the owners fault. and if guys want to make what K.G's made then just be good as K.G that's all...
dont you just hate it when you have the KG vs THREADS or where he should belong on the all time lists, ppl dont mention while his failure to win was due to his stupid contract, but happy to blame his team mates and concentrate on h is stats....almost irrelevant point.. ironically KG's original contract started all this mess...but again it was the owners fault. and if guys want to make what K.G's made then just be good as K.G that's all...
Good thing Latrell Sprewell isn't relying on an NBA paycheck to feed his kids.
Kevin Garnett: do you really think the players will hold out? That they were prepared for this? I mean seriously?
Arenas' line was pretty funny. LOL.
Are you ing serious? This has go to be as naive a side to take as I've ever seen. There's no doubt, NO DOUBT that the owners are idiots for paying what they have in the past. It's also very hard to blame the players for going after the money if the owners were stupid enough to pay it. But that's exactly it right there. Are you telling me that the players have absolutely no responsibility whatsoever for their part in creating this mess?
You can't tell me that they weren't laughing all the way to the bank after every paycheck. I know I would be! But at the same time, in the back of my mind I'm not so naive to realize that it couldn't last forever, especially in this economy. Are NBA players so stupid to think that the massive, MASSIVE wave of money coming their way was going to last forever? The average NBA salary is over 4 million a year, more than any other professional sport average in the world! They're going to have to give up money pay, and a LOT of it! It's very simple. As ty as it may seem that the players are gonna have to "give in" to the terrible greedy billionaire owners, it's gonna happen. I mean, really, how ty will it be for 18 million dollar a year KG to take a paycut down to 10 million a year. Oh damn, poor Kevin, that just breaks my ing heart!
It's really simple: if a business is managed poorly, there's a good chance that it will fail. If it does, regardless of whether the employees caused it or not, the employees will feel the pain. They may just lose their job. It happens. The owners want their business to be profitable for all owners and all players(and it should be!), so they're making the changes they feel necessary so that they all can make money too. It's a win win for everyone if they can get it done so that they can all make money. It's a lose lose for us, the fans. And that's what's disgusting.
The NBA, and major professional sports in general, has become a s of it's former self. It's disgusting, really. It is personal for some fans, the ones that hold their particular sport close to their heart, to see these owners and players on said sport. Right now my sport of choice is the UFC and MMA. It will go to one day, because that's what we do as people, turn everything good into . But right now it's still a beautiful thing. The owners and managers (the Fer ta Bros. and Dana White) give the fans exactly what they want, no fights are spared, and a huge number of the fighters are still humble! They love their sport and they don't feel like it's their right to be there. It is a privilege and an honor. You'll hear that after many of the fights: they actually thank Dana and the Fer ta bros. for the chance they were given. That's what any and every professional sport should be to it's employees and members. It's not a right.
This lockout is bull , and it's both sides fault. Quit being naive.
Kobe should have been preparing for something else.
tee,hee
Wow, the anything is possible video. That really takes me back...
Shouldn't it be the highest for team sports? There are only five players on the floor and a guy like LeBron is an integral part of every single play in the game for 40 out of 48 minutes. By contrast an NFL player plays on one side of the ball and with 10 other teammates at a time. It's not like baseball where a dominant starting pitcher goes every 5th day or your cleanup guy bats roughly 1/9th of the time. The NBA has the smallest rosters and thus team success depends more on each individual player than in other major sports. With fewer roster spots you'd expect each player to make more, all other things being equal.
That depends, really. The major professional sports have morphed into a full fledged business. It really doesn't have as much to do with how many people are on the floor or part each person plays on the floor. It has everything to do with the amount of money that the sport can bring in. The point I was trying to make is that the players make more than enough. They are extremely well paid, better than any other sport on average. But if owners are losing money and players are not, something needs to be fixed, seeing as how it is a business.Shouldn't it be the highest for team sports?
And I hate this reverence for the past argument I hear on every topic in existence. Half the league was snorting coke in the 80s, and any western conference fan of a team other than the Lakers watched a lot of really bad basketball. In the 70s teams used to just run down the floor and shoot the ball ASAP instead of running screens or posting the bigman. No way it was better in the 60s when you had one team with half the talent in the league (no exaggeration). And the 90s you had Jordan making $25-$30 million and Ewing pulling $20 million (in 90s dollars btw), so your argument doesn't apply there.
Again, missing the point. You're complaining about your personal tastes in the 60's and 70's, cokeheads in the 80's. I'm talking about MONEY and BUSINESS, the reasons why, let's reference the big 3 (bball, football, baseball) are s s of themselves. I'll go into the nineties in a minute. Many of the big name players, the faces of the leagues, could give a less about you and me. Money is number one! Not the fan. This was culminated by one of the faces of the NBA, Lebron James, taking a big steamy on, not just his fans, but HIS people in Ohio when he left the way he did to start the season, his home state. Then to end the season with the "People gotta wake up and go back to their lives" comments? C'mon man. He's become the scapegoat for the thing that so many fans hate about the sports they love today. Paychecks before the fans. That greed is rampant in professional sports. That's what I'm getting at with the s thing. It's getting worse now than it has ever been. We, you and me, the fans are the biggest deal. Without us there is no NBA, NFL. Right now it seems like the players will let their greed take precedence over the owners and league making money.And I hate this reverence for the past argument I hear on every topic in existence. Half the league was snorting coke in the 80s, and any western conference fan of a team other than the Lakers watched a lot of really bad basketball. In the 70s teams used to just run down the floor and shoot the ball ASAP instead of running screens or posting the bigman. No way it was better in the 60s when you had one team with half the talent in the league (no exaggeration). And the 90s you had Jordan making $25-$30 million and Ewing pulling $20 million (in 90s dollars btw), so your argument doesn't apply there.
And as far as Jordan making that kind of money. I'm not the Chicago Bulls accountant, but I would imagine that MJ made the Bulls and the NBA money hand over fist when he was getting paid like that. He was helping the league and owners make money, create hype, draw interest, and was worth every penny. The Knicks and Pat Ewing were the same way for New York in the 90's. Big time money draw, the Knicks/Bulls battles were awesome.
The NBA makes a bit more than half the money the NFL makes with roster sizes a little less than a quarter of the NFL. The NBA makes 2/3 of what MLB makes with a roster size just under half what an MLB team carries (active). Shouldn't it stand to reason that NBA players are paid more on average then?
Your nostalgia is extremely naive. Are you telling me baseball wasn't a full fledged business when Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees? Basketball wasn't a business when Dr. J was sold to the Nets and Gervin to the Spurs? The stuff you're saying reeks of the revisionist history that paints the 1950s as a Leave it to Beaver episode.
Read my post again. I didn't say that, for example, the NFL should average more money per player. The stat was just used to illustrate that NBA players are well paid, but if the league is losing money, then there's a good chance that they are being overpaid. I'm not arguing the fact that all parties involved in the league should or shouldn't be paid based on what their business (the NBA) makes. They should! But they shouldn't be overpaid.The NBA makes a bit more than half the money the NFL makes with roster sizes a little less than a quarter of the NFL. The NBA makes 2/3 of what MLB makes with a roster size just under half what an MLB team carries (active). Shouldn't it stand to reason that NBA players are paid more on average then?
That's the beauty of being a fan. The customer is always right! It's not naivety, and it's certainly not a lame ass episode of the Beav. I never liked that show. It's getting worse! My perception as a fan is that it's getting worse! And if the league keeps heading that way they lose me as a customer. Is that good for the league? The greed part of it, the heroes of the league ting on their fans. The arrogance. It's not as simple as either it's there or it's not. That's not what I'm saying, my posts should be pretty clear. The faces of the league when I was growing up, my heroes, weren't perfect, but they weren't as bad as the current crop. I'm sure the next crop will get worse, and then the next after that. Humans are by nature greedy and selfish, always have been and always will be. But doesn't seem like it's worse now in the major sports than it's ever been before?Your nostalgia is extremely naive. Are you telling me baseball wasn't a full fledged business when Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees? Basketball wasn't a business when Dr. J was sold to the Nets and Gervin to the Spurs? The stuff you're saying reeks of the revisionist history that paints the 1950s as a Leave it to Beaver episode.
And then you have the owners. They'll do anything to win! Look at the Oden contract offer. Utterly ridiculous! They are enablers. They let their league get out of control by fanning the flames and throwing money around while some of their teams lost money.
and by the way, there is nothing naive in the idea that the fans/customers are what makes any business. Without them, there is no business. It's pretty simple. You on your customers, you have no business.
This is why the players are gonna win out. They are completely unified to get everything they want, while the owners will eventually disagree if they havent already. God knows Jerry Buss isn't gonna give 1/10th of a about a hard salary cap the way Sarver will.
The current crop is worse than the heroes you grew up with? LOL, what era?
* Micheal Jordan had a huge gambling problem.
* Pete Rose bet on baseball.
* Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's arrogance makes LeBron look like David Robinson. You want to talk about players ting on fans, you should see the sour look on Kareem's face anytime a fan tries to talk to him.
* Karl Malone fathered a kid with a 13 year-old and left it.
* George Gervin sniffed more coke than Tony Montana.
* Mickey Mantle was a spectacular drunk.
* Ty Cobb once beat the out of a cripple in the stands.
* The White Sox threw the world series.
Don't believe the hype. Athletes were arrogant and got in trouble before ESPN and the www too.
Good. The owners better give up if they want to see NBA again.
Do you know how huge of a prospect Oden was in high school and college? He was literally the best bigman since Kareem at the HS level. The only big between them I can remember who was considered anywhere close to as good at that age was Mourning. He was as can't miss a prospect as LeBron. $8 million seems steep, but that's a of an investment to just throw away when you can still keep him with only a one-year commitment. Besides, that qualifying offer is only that high because the owners wanted the security of being able to re-sign their draft picks without the responsibility of being forced to do it.
Fisher and Hunter need to put a gag order on the players. They ed up bigtime in '98; every time they opened their mouths it pissed fans off. Ewing talking about how he spent a lot of money was really destructive PR. Stern was smart enough to silence every owner about it, so you didn't have jackasses like Dan Gilbert embarrassing themselves to the whole nation. Cuban is another owner who could hurt the league if he's as free with everything as he is in the season, but I figure he's smart enough to not make the Ewing mistake.
The owners are the ones misrepresenting reality. Why won't they open their books let us see these loses. They lie that's why. This is perhaps the best and most valid argument in favor of the players on the NBA's true misrepresentation of what's going on.
Heavens bless Deadspin's Tommy Craggs and ESPN.com's Larry Coon for their skeptical reports on team finances Thursday. Deadspin acquired financial statements from the New Jersey Nets' late Katz and early Ratner eras; they'd already presented docs on the New Orleans Hornets that showed the NBA's funny way of doing math.
Coon broke down the statements in exemplary detail, explaining why the union doubts the league's stated losses, couched in every way it needs to be to avoid summary dismissal by Stern's office.The gist from both pieces: tax law allows sports franchise owners to write off player salaries as depreciable assets in addition to listing salaries as legit costs of doing business; basically, franchises deduct their payroll as expenses, then get an allowance for depreciation on the players being paid -- yes, depreciation on human beings -- which isn't an actual expense, but looks like one on the tax forms. Craggs, Coon and the players' union figure that knocks a decent chunk off of the league's stated losses.There's also the matter of the franchises counting their purchase cost (and debt financing) as an expense of the team, when that's plainly wrong in terms of convincing players why salary needs to be cut. "I can't afford to pay you because I spent so much to buy the rights to pay you and profit off of you." Sorry, that's not a legit case.
This is why owners deserve and maybe will receive no sympathy: it's a new world, with new voices and a much easier, broader way to share ideas and information. The Craggs and Coon pieces zipped around the basketball web on Thursday, opening plenty of eyes, even among those of us who have been paying attention all along. The league will be disrobed by a skeptical fan base that watched Wall Street burn Main Street to the ground and get away with it. We are a cynical people, we hate being lied to above all else (ask Anthony Weiner) and we're not going to gobble up the bulls--t that comes out of Secaucus.Whether a skeptical, unamused public matters is, of course, another question entirely. David Stern has not exactly made a career out of pleasing the league's fans. As Charles Pierce wrote on Thursday: "David Stern knows who pays his salary." They -- the team owners -- pay Stern to make their bulls--t believable; in their other businesses, they pay other people to do the same thing. In the old days, the NBA was a hustle: teams had to be creative to get fans in the gym and to pay young stars despite crummy TV revenue and iffy gate receipts ... every fan counted, every dollar counted.The NBA is still a hustle, but it's a hustle whose gargantuan size eclipses any individual fan, the fans as a collective or even Stern himself. The hustle isn't about goofy promotions or a 25-year contract for Magic Johnson.
It's about 29 rich men trying to maximize profits for the next several decades in an unregulated, feudal industry in which their opponents -- the players -- have massive potential P.R. problems. This lockout is a scheme, plain and simple, to make more money for the foreseeable future. (Not just money. More money.) Everything the league has done points to that reality. To get their way, these 29 rich men and their appointed emperor are holding their entire operation hostage. Again. Because they didn't make enough money for themselves last time they pulled this stunt.
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