Let’s Democratize the NBA. Why Not, Who Cares?

The NBA, MLB, and the NFL are monopolies. Even our president knows that. The fact that fans rarely ever question this is a bit of head-scratcher, though. Maybe it’s because from the fan’s perspective, each of these leagues are different branches of, say, the Sports Sector, and aren’t seen as completely different sectors themselves. Or maybe they just don’t care because sports is entertainment that exists outside of the real world and shouldn’t be scrutinized in a way that’s similar to how we look at Amazon. But why shouldn’t we? Sports teams are institutions that are entirely dependent on high public morale and, more often than not, public money. So, given the nature of how sports teams are operated, why don’t fans have more say here?

What’s slowly becoming more understood among sports fans everywhere, it’s impossible to deny the real world effect these institutions have on their communities. Sure, they do some bare-minimum photo-oppy charity drives, but I’m not talking about that. As a New Yorker, the example I always bang over everyone’s head is how Knicks owner James Dolan’s unrivaled dickheadedness is the sole reason for the Port Authority being a complete nightmare for commuters on a daily basis.

Dolan is by no means an outlier of a case when it comes to owners causing harm to the community in such a way. For decades, owners have used local governments as their personal piggy banks to build new state of-the-art arenas that are often overly-ambitious regarding how much revenue is capable of being drawn in considering where the team plays. Not only do they overestimate how many people are ever going to come to these games, they overcharge for low-quality concessions, and are slabbed with way too many bells and whistles in order to lure the well-off clientele in their particular area. paired with players salaries, the overall upkeep costs of these arenas is what lead to most teams operating on pretty razor-thin profit margins.

There are two very simple and unfortunate realities that ensures a sports team will be financially successful: they’re either good, or in a big enough market where it doesn’t matter whether they’re good or not. Only about 7 teams fall into that latter category, with four of them residing in two cities, New York and Los Angeles, duh. The others play in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. I’m not including San Francisco because it’s impossible to predict whether a city built on tech and venture capitalism will have much of an interest in paying huge prices on a bad team once Stephen Curry is past his prime, or this iteration of the Warriors simply blows up. I would have put Oakland on this list, but hey, sometimes you just have to betray your true fan base for money.

The first way I mentioned for a team to be financially lucrative is complicated for various different reasons. A team’s success often depends on whether or not they have a superstar on their team. There are very few of those. For instance, right now, we are experiencing arguably the greatest talent boom we’ve ever had in the history of the NBA. Despite that, there are still only about 3, maybe 5 players who could conceivably turn a team into a championship contender. There are then an additional 5–10 players that could make just about any team a competitor in the playoffs. After those guys, everyone becomes disposable to varying degrees.

Over the past few years, these ever-so-valuable 15 (or fewer) players have explored different ways to leverage their respective talents to broker better deals for themselves. Most of these players have started choosing optimal contract flexibility to maximize their earning potential, big markets so they could explore different business opportunities, and teams that are already equipped with a talented roster. This has driven a lot of people fucking nuts.

As I’ve written before, people have been wont to deem this the Era of Player Movement, even though every era has been the Era of Player Movement. Former journeyman forward Paul Shirley literally wrote a book about this type of experience years ago. Players get traded, signed, cut, and disposed of all the time.

What people who hate this new reality really mean is superstar movement (or perhaps a better phrase for this would be superstar flexibility). However, even if they were to clarify this point, it would still be turning a blind eye to the fact that all-time greats such as Moses Malone, Shaq, Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were all on multiple teams during each of their peaks as players. A mediocre argument that doesn’t look at each of these unique situations can be made that not even superstar movement itself is an entirely new thing. Either way, by conflating the idea that every player is now liberated to just come and go through organizations as they please, they are giving owners considerable leverage in future negotiations from a narrative standpoint.

But back to the main point here: it’s very hard to even get a player like the ones I’m talking about on a team’s roster to begin with. This is what’s led to the doubling down on a trend even more disturbing that players have literally nothing to do with: tanking. Teams left and right are now throwing away entire years of contention in order to build a team through the NBA Draft, a crap-shoot of a process that rewards teams for incompetence by letting the ones with the most losses choose the most talented young prospects without a semblance of competitive recruitment throughout the process.

Tanking has become a very strange science. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When the Philadelphia 76ers did it, they wound up with Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, two incredible All-Star talents who look to be franchise cornerstones for years to come. Orlando began this process about 7 years ago and there’s still nobody on their roster even remotely close to the talent level of Embiid or Simmons. That’s because this strategy is so frustratingly luck-based. Even Philadelphia, the team that became the poster child for this strategy, was unbelievably lucky during their tanking phase.

The year they drafted Embiid, the 76ers had the 3rd selection in the draft. They desperately wanted Andrew Wiggins, a hyper-athletic wing who many believed could blossom into a lockdown defender and 20 point scorer. Instead, they got Embiid, an otherworldly talented big man with injury problems being his main caveat.

By the time it was their time to pick, Wiggins was gone, as was Jabari Parker, another player they really liked, and they had no choice but to draft Embiid. He wound up missing his first two years entirely because of injuries. The team continued to be an automatic losing machine in his absence, which actually helped because they were then able to eventually get the #1 pick the year Simmons declared for the draft. Embiid has seemingly recovered since this early onslaught of injuries in what’s one of the most improbable occurrences in league history that nobody really talks about for some reason. With these two as their stars, the 76ers are not championship contenders, and Philly fans now see that brutal era of losses as a rough patch that was ultimately worth it.

Let’s recap all of that for a second: in the best-case scenario for tanking, the 76ers reluctantly took the player who turned out to be the best one in that draft by a mile despite actually wanting the other two. He was then so incredibly injury-plagued for the first part of his career that they continued to be bad enough to get high draft picks, but ever since, he’s made a recovery of unprecedented proportions. I’m sorry, but maybe this isn’t the wisest road for teams to walk down.

Usually, tanking enrages the fanbase, but there are also a few examples of them being galvanized by the situation because they believe the strategy will work, like with the 76ers. But because the lottery is a literal lottery, these teams are sacrificing multiple years on a less-than-20-percent chance at getting the most talented recruit in any given year. And even then, that recruit might not pan out for whatever reason. Teams like the 76ers, Lakers, and Knicks have been able to pull it off without much worry because of their markets. But for organizations like the Phoenix Suns, them not being good has left an impact on the team’s profit margins and the local economy as well.

The Suns haven’t been in the playoffs for 9 years, and consistently rank in the bottom of league attendance stats, yet they just received 150 million dollars from the local government to build a new arena. This is not new. Cities continually provide subsidies to these teams despite its historically negligible impact. Hucksters who support these measures insist that this will be a boon for local entrepreneurs who want to open up a restaurant or a bar near the arena and get that sweet, sweet trickle-down dollar. While this argument has proven to be wrong as hell, even if there was some merit to it, what happens to those local businesses when their team sucks for years and nobody’s going to the games?

To be clear, team success is inherently fickle. Tanking, however, guarantees there won’t be any success for quite some time. If a chooses to tank in a small market, they’ll feel those effects, unlike the big 7 that can weather such a storm for obvious reasons. Some teams are beginning to hedge on the inevitability of losing, though. By becoming property owners.

In a recent article for ESPN, Kevin Arnovitz broke down exactly how teams across the league are now buying up property all over town and using it to supplement the costs of running the franchise altogether. The reasoning behind this is simple: even when a team is struggling and going through their tanking phase, it’ll still be making money through other investments.

This part is confusing and annoying, but ultimately makes sense. A very obvious question to ask here is that the people who own teams are already billionaires and can purchase this land on their own while simply losing a few million dollars in operational costs for a vanity project; so why don’t they?

Here’s my long winded guess: Arnovitz makes no mention of this in his piece, but these purchases are most likely being done by way of each NBA team being their own Limited Liability Company (LLC), meaning that legally, they are entities completely separate from their owner. This way, by having the Golden State Warriors purchase land instead of Joe Lacob, the team’s owner, it actually comes off way better. Instead of a billionaire hedge-fund guy grubbing up all the land for himself, it’s now seen as the local sports team becoming more entrenched in the community.

What Arnovitz does mention in his piece is, while planning its move from Oakland to San Francisco, the Golden State Warriors purchased the property surrounding their soon-to-be-new arena and built corporate office buildings for tech giants like Uber to rent out. Because, in a rare display of civic due diligence, San Francisco refused to give the Warriors a dime for this move. This meant that Lacob and the rest of his front office had to get creative in terms of how they’ll make their money back on this multi-billion dollar investment.

Arnovitz also gives another, far more alarming example of NBA real estate investment; this time with the Sacramento Kings. They just received over 200 million dollars to build a luxury hotel and local retail shops, in spite of the fact that the team has not made the playoffs in 13 years and, up until this year, was the laughing stock of the league because all of their management blunders. This means that not only are NBA teams being rewarded for incompetence within the league they’re playing in, it’s also happening in the real world by way of local government.

The idea of a sports team being anything more than just a sports team in this capacity never crossed fans’ minds before. But the new reality here appears to be an additional step in the billionaire grift. It starts out the same as before: they buy the team, get the town’s government to pay for an over-the-top arena they never needed before, and then watch from the owners box with a smile on their face regardless of the outcome. Now, by diving headfirst into the world of being a landlord, they’re able to factor in the fun new wrinkle of tanking as an inevitability without having to worry about all the lost revenue it causes.

All this, and the fans have no say in the matter. How is this possible? Time and time again, these teams prove to be dependent on the public to make it possible for them to even be there. Yet, they are not held accountable in any way regarding team management. When it comes to who’s able to buy the team, or who’s appointed as the General Manager, the local fan base has absolutely have no significant input. Instead, the first decision is just a bidding war between rich egomaniacs with very little sports knowledge, and then the person who wins that decides everything else.

Owners have the final authority, but General Managers still hold considerable sway when it comes to the makeup of a team, too. They execute trades, signings, and they usually decide who the team selects in the draft. There are maybe five GMs right now that are actually exceptional at their jobs and pretty irreplaceable. The rest could be swapped out by a passionate fan with capable accounting and people skills, and there wouldn’t be much of a difference. Again, this is especially true given the current landscape of so much being dependent on the complete and utter randomness of evaluating talent in the NBA draft.

These people often have similar career arcs that could be pretty fucking frustrating to anyone who actually pays attention to this shit. Some rise through the ranks as scouts, or low-level front office people. Others are legacy kids who try to underplay just how much their father being the owner of the team helped their career because “they still worked their butts off to get here.” Either way, these people, despite their lack of exceptional skill, stay in the league’s orbit like bureaucratic leaches in somewhat similar fashion once they’re picked for an actual GM job.

For your run-of-the-mill GM, their usual life-cycle goes a little like this: within the first year or two, they either draft well or acquire someone good via trade or free agency. This buys them a few years of goodwill with both ownership and the fan base. They then inevitably regress to the mean in terms of talent evaluation and the team underachieves. Once the owner’s dissatisfied with the team not meeting expectations, the GM get fired. Eventually, after taking a lower-level front office job with another team, they wind up getting another crack at GM position elsewhere by a team only remembering the few good moves they made and not the 20 terrible ones, hoping they can recapture the initial magic.

To mention my New Yorkerness once more, my favorite example to bring up in this regard is Scott Layden. Fuck Scott Layden forever and always. For some context to how the curse of Scott Layden came about, in the ’80s, Layden’s daddy was the head coach of the Utah jazz. Through nothing but sheer skill and absolute meritocracy, Scotty got the job as an assistant coach. He’s been largely credited for drafting Karl Malone and John Stockton, the two best players in that franchise’s history despite it being highly irregular for assistant coaches to ever hold such sway in a draft room ever.

After hitting back-to-back on Hall of Famers like that, the Jazz did not select a single decent player in the draft for the rest of his tenure there. That amounts to over a decade of swings and misses. The draft highlights for the Jazz during this time were guys like Byron Russell, Shandon Anderson and Greg Ostertag, fringe rotation players who are remembered better as side characters in Michael Jordan posters. But still, they had two all-timers at their respective positions. This top heavy roster made its way to the playoffs for a billion straight years because of those two alone. And that’s really all people remembered about Layden.

These rose tinted glasses are what helped him land the job as General Manager of the Knicks, where he poured gasoline on the entire god damn organization and then lit a fucking match.

Layden started off his run as shitslinger extraordinaire by drafting human doormat Frederic Weis ahead of New York native and fan favorite Ron Artest. To be fair, Artest proved to be a headache with an erratic personality, but he was still one of the best perimeter defenders of his generation in addition to being a borderline MVP candidate for a couple of years. Weis, on the other hand, became Vince Carter’s personal nutsack resting spot and never played a single minute for an NBA team. Layden then traded a washed-up Patrick Ewing, a Knicks legend who should have retired with the team, for a washed-up Glen Rice and a bunch of other spare parts in a deal that pissed off just about every single Knick fan known to man. After about 10 more nightmare deals, Layden finally inflicted his magnum opus on the New York fanbase: signing Allan Houston, a good-not-great shooting guard, to a 6 year, 100 million dollar contract.

This number needs some context because in today’s market, this is the type of money an above average starter gets as a free agent. At the time, the salary cap was set at around 40 million dollars, which is less than half of what it currently is. So by giving Houston 16 million dollars a year, Layden effectively clogged up nearly half of the team’s salary cap paying for a guy who, at best, was a 3rd option on a championship team.

Now’s where I need to insist that if there weren’t a salary cap whatsoever, this deal wouldn’t have mattered and Houston deserves absolutely no ridicule for saying yes to an idiot offering him a big burlap sack with a dollar sign on it. Most of a GM’s job as it currently stands, however, is salary cap management. So if Layden couldn’t draft well, couldn’t make a smart trade to save his life, and had no comprehension of salary cap management, then what was he good for?

He was thankfully fired after a few years (only to allow an even more reprehensible era thanks to Isaiah Thomas), but instead of withering away into nothingness, Layden bounced around the league a bit and then inevitably got another front office job. This time, he’s with the Minnesota Timberwolves, a franchise that just finished licking their wounds from their last GM disaster in David Kahn. So far, one of the key moves Layden helped finalize is re-signing the aforementioned Andrew Wiggins — who did not live up to the hype he was given and instead turned out to be the modern day Allan Houston — to a $144 million extension.

Wolves fans should be apo-fucking-pleptic that this disastrous failson is able to even set foot into their god damn arena. But they have no choice but to watch their as their team misses the playoffs for the 14th time in 15 seasons. And it must be mentioned: Layden is not an exception. His well-connected brand of mediocrity runs amok throughout the front office of every team in every league aside from a very select few. Yet the job security for these people is incredibly strong, as they just bounce from franchise to franchise as soon as they’re done mucking up the one they’re currently on

What’s the point of all this exactly? I don’t know. At the very least, no city should give sports organizations another dime of public money ever again. Teams continue to find new and depressing ways to disappoint their fanbase, many of them having real world implications that shouldn’t be brushed off to the side. They cannot just be treated like a regular business in this regard because if an actual business were to operate like a sports team, with all the intentional failure and disregard for its customer base, it’s a near certainty that it would cease to exist in months. Also, as stated before, in addition to all the public money, the impact these teams have on local morale by design leads to teams forcing the local fan base to remain in a state of misery with no end in sight.

With all of this in mind, I believe it’s important that the fans have more legitimate say in these organizational decisions. Allowing them to decide who the next owner of the team would be the first step. Right now, all a billionaire has to do is make an offer and get the approval of other billionaires. They can run the team into the ground for the next decade and none of them would care too much (aside from the possible revenue share implications). Shouldn’t the fans be able to decide who gets to buy the team they’ve dedicated so much time and energy into by seeing what type of players they want to acquire, how they plan on handling their current roster, what their stance on taking public money, etc.?

The owners who are currently in place could be grandfathered in. But when they die, there’s no way the team should get passed down to their children. Families keeping a team has consistently proven to be a mess. Incompetent legacy kid who don’t know the first thing about running a team wind up completely embarrassing the organization. It’s how we wound up with James Dolan in the first place.

Fans should also have this same level of say in choosing the General Manager for similar reasons. Both of these people are put in charge of deciding the fate of something people throughout the country care deeply about and there’s zero accountability for any of them aside from the downpour of boos they receive from their luxury box seats during a home game. It’s complete bullshit. Give the people who spend god-knows-how-much money on these teams year after year the ability to vote these guys in.

As the Dolan situation highlights, vetting the ownership and managerial positions is so much more crucial than anyone would think. And because of all this nightmarish shit we’re seeing unfold before our very eyes, why shouldn’t fans be allowed to try stopping it? It’s time something is done to curb the power these teams have over the cities in which they play. Because as more and more hedge-fund people start realizing how great of a shell-company these teams can be, it’ll only get worse. So, what are we waiting for, folks? Democratize the NBA.