The NBA is not my favorite sport. In no particular order, I prefer the following sporting events to the NBA - MLB, NFL, Golf Majors, College Football, International Football (soccer), Association Football (soocer), the Olympics (both Winter and Summer), Tennis Majors, March Madness, and NCAA La Crosse. Just kidding on last one.
Even in my teens, when the Sonics were good and the Mariners and Seahawks sucked (See 1992 Seahawks Team for a laugh), I was more into the Mariners and Seahawks. It isn't like I am unfamilar with Derek McKey and Michael Cage, but I could rattle off a long list of Seattle athletes I like better than Gary Payton, Shawn Kemp, and Jim McIlvane.
As to why I do not like the NBA that is another story for another day, needless to say whether the Sonics return to Seattle or not isn't really something I am all jazzed about (For the record, 10 years in SoCal and I'm not about the Lakers and Clippers). Honestly, I do not care that much.
The Seattle ownership group has offered a ridiculous amount of money to the Maloof family. In a perfect market, the Maloofs would sell the team in a heartbeat for this amount of money. It is literally a deal they cannot refuse. Further, and unless the Sacramento group matches the offer all the other league owners benefit. If a team in Seattle is worth $625 million, a team in Los Angeles, even a shitty one like the Clippers is worth at least $1 billion. (I shudder to think what the Yankees or Cowboys would be worth in this market). In essence this offer probably makes every other ownership group in the United States and Canada wealthier.
So this begs the question as to why the NBA would block a sale which makes them wealthier in an instant? I do not know the answer. One possible answer is the NBA is creating a bidding war, hoping the offers will get higher and higher, perhaps increasing the value of their teams even more. I think that the former is a side benefit. The real answer is control.
Unlike most businesses, an owner of a North American sports franchise cannot move the team unilaterally. The players they employ are acquired via a draft. They monopolize the venues they play in (and don't pay for). An owner cannot sell a franchise to whoever they want. And even better, these leagues have largely figured out how to have our Universities pick up the tab for player development (mainly football, but all sports draft a lot of college player - this is completely unheard of in Europe in all sports).
One doesn't need to be on Harvard Law Review (University of San Diego, non law review is sufficient) to figure out this seems like an anti-trust problem.
Wow, that was a long introduction, but I'm going to try to make some legal sense of the whole situation in a few parts. Our discourse is sports law starts over 90 years ago in a Supreme Court opninion by the great Oliver Wendell Holmes. It is probably the worst SCOTUS opinion this side of Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson.
The opinion is Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National of Professional Baseball Clubs et. al.
The jist of the opinion was professional baseball was not interstate commerce so it was exempt from anti-trust laws. In 1919 (three years before this opinion), there was an famous "trade" of a certain player between a team in New York and a team in Massachusetts. This sale was for $125,000, not even chump change now, let alone in 1919. And at that time, teams played against each other against teams in other states, and even played in something called the World Series. The players got paid. The Philadelphia A's won three World Series between 1910-1914. However, their owner the immortal Connie Mack decided his players were too expensive, and decided to re-build with a younger team. Does that sound familar? Marlins fans can take solace that Mack after 15 years built another dynasty and the A's appeared in consecutively in the 1929, 1930, and 1931 World Series winning it twice.
Long story short - Professional sports is interstate commerce.
Next, we are going to skip ahead a few years to Jim McIlvane's best friend, free agency.
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