The NBA is not losing money

The NBA has decided to fight back against friend-of-the-blog Nate Silver and Tommy Craggs with an aggressive PR campaign.

But if you look at what the NBA is saying, it's not much.

Example:

In the NBA's response to Silver's initial article, NBA spokesman Tim Frank writes, in response to Silver's claim that some NBA revenue can be moved off-book, that "All revenues included in "Basketball Related Income ("BRI") and reported in our financial statements have been audited by an accounting firm jointly engaged by the players' union and the league. They include basketball revenues reported on related entities' books." So they numbers are kosher? Well, no. In an ESPN article by Larry Coon, Billy Hunter calls out NBA accounting practices, saying it "depends on what accounting procedure is used."

David Stern wants to you think the NBA and the Players' Union agree on the way they do math. He also wants you not to question his claims of money loss, so he's repeating his number over and over: the league lost $340 million last year. Just remember that this doesn't pass the smell test, from the fact that the league calls Forbes' independent accounting of NBA revenues wrong without releasing its own data to the fact that the league prides itself on having released the most financial information in sports labor dispute history. You know it what it deserves for that? A gold star.

What the NBA is doing is using the fact that we don't know exactly how rich its owners are and playing it off the fact we know exactly how rich the players are. They want PR support because we can tell you exactly how much LeBron is making, but not how much Micky Arison is worth. It's easy for us to say LeBron should take a pay cut, because all he does is play basketball, right? And what's the difference between $16 million and $14 million, really? It's doing this because these are the numbers we have and love to play with. But it's the old Chris Rock bit about being rich vs. being wealthy. We know how much money LeBron James has because he's rich, and we don't know how much Micky Arison has because he's wealthy, and that's the way the wealthy guy likes it. It gives you less to take away from him.

These people aren't wealthy by accident, and they don't stay wealthy by accident, and they aren't losing money just because they say they are. They're perching ridiculous demands atop the fact that they happen to lord over a compelling sport, and are hoping that having a good PR team will close the gap between what they're asking for and something sane. Just as shooting threes often doesn't make LeBron a good three-position shooter, repeating your position doesn't make it right. The NBA didn't lose money because it says it did. In fact, its insistence that it did signals the exact opposite.