Per Tommy Craggs yesterday, why you should be suspicious of any NBA owner's money-loss claims. It's not to say that teams are not, in fact, losing money, but that they have both the incentives and tools to say they aren't, no matter what the reality is.
As I wrote yesterday, I live within par 5 distance of the Nets' new arena. If I walk a block I can see it. I can't imagine all the nonsense happening for a money-losing business, unless that business was a loss leader... and even then, as Craggs notes, that value would never appear on an NBA balance sheet.
Of course, every sports franchise could act as a loss leader, losing money at the gate but recouping it with cable deals, skybox deals, retail deals, etc. Even in what seems like the extremely unlikely event that franchises are actually losing money at the gate, there's no real excuse to be losing money on the rest of the stuff. If so, that would be bad management, not a systematic problem with how players are compensated. The size and number of bad contracts in the NBA isn't the fault of the players, but the owners want you to think it is.
There should be no distinction between the NFL and NBA lockouts. While the NFL lockout is widely seen as a oligarchic power grab by the owners (who, to their credit, are just That Rich enough not to care how they're perceived), the NBA has sympathizers like Bill Simmons, who tells of seeing red ink-stained NBA ledgers and tells ghost stories of future people who trade the NBA game experience for the one in their own home. As Charles Pierce notes, you doubt that it's this gloomy NBA vision the globe-hopping Stern is pitching in China.
The difference between the NFL and NBA lockouts is just a matter of price, like the old Winston Churchill joke. Rich people don't stay rich by accident.
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