Get a grip on yourselves, people. Pull yourselves together. For the second time in five years, we’re making a pathetic spectacle of ourselves in front of the entire nation, and for what? So the NBA will like us, look favorably on us, allow us to cover their business operating deficits, placate their obnoxious owners and coddle their over-paid felon-athletes? Let’s take a step back for a moment and consider the sheer absurdity of this situation as if we were watching it from the outside.
The NBA is the only business in America whose leaders have the audacity to demand massive public subsidies in an obnoxious manner in the hometown papers of those they are extorting.
NBA Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik mocked the leaders of this city when he chided them on the front page of a local paper for a tiny detail of an arena deal.
“I don’t know what those people are trying to accomplish,” Granik said about the Charlotte city council. “It doesn’t look like anything is happening there that is likely to keep the team in Charlotte. To come out and announce they’ll build an arena only if there’s new ownership, I don’t see how that helps with the Board of Governors.”
I’d like to remind Granik that the deal which included that ownership clause was one in which city taxpayers and city businesses in the middle of a recession will pay 100 percent of the bill so team owners can have the arena they want. It was the leaders of the NBA cartel, not the city, who demanded that local owners be found who were willing to pay $200 million to buy a team valued at $130 million.
Obviously, Granik was trying to save face with the league’s other owners, who were probably concerned that they, too, might be forced to sell if league leaders trapped them in a market where they couldn’t make a profit without a new arena. But the kicker is that Granik cared more about the impression he was making on other team owners than the impression he was making on the people of Charlotte or their leadership, i.e., the people paying the bill.
That’s a lot of brass for a business that had to bring its star performer out of retirement to fill the arenas it demanded cities build. That’s a lot of brass for a business that’s generating declining television ratings. And it’s a lot of brass for a business that can’t even quantify the positive economic impact — if any — it has in the markets it occupies.
For the moment, and I think that moment is rapidly coming to an end, the NBA is still powerful. But it is no longer financially powerful. The power it still retains is purely psychological. It’s a mirage and a smoke screen based on threats of some potential, unquantifiable economic loss — no, not even economic loss, but economic shame — its departure might confer upon a city. And that’s it. That’s all there is to the NBA anymore. And when the public gets tired of their shenanigans and the taxpayer subsidies dry up, the NBA will fall apart. Mark my words.
The irony of this New Orleans situation, and a few others like it in recent years, is the absurd backwards economics of the NBA. The Hornets say they can’t make money in this market without a new arena, right? So, as other teams have done in the past, they’re going fix the situation by moving the team to a smaller television market with a smaller fan base that has less disposable income as a long-term strategy for solving the problem? Even with a new arena, that makes no sense. It won’t last. And neither will the NBA if its long-term business plan continues to depend on massive public subsidies doled out by markets too small to sustain teams.
The truth about the NBA is that it has done a lousy job marketing and regularly reinventing its product, critical skills for any entertainment-based business in the era of short attention spans. After seeing the obnoxious way its leaders conducted themselves on our turf last week — and they’re as bad as Ray and George if you ask me — you can see why their business operation is such a poorly planned, sloppily executed excuse for what was once a great American pastime. College basketball does a better job with less money. That’s why people watch it.
The only thing propping this league up are supposed leaders like city council members Patrick Cannon, Lynn Wheeler, Joe White, James Mitchell, Nancy Carter and John Tabor, folks who promised constituents to varying degrees that they wouldn’t go forward with an arena that is paid for with property tax money when they ran for office, then stabbed the voters in the back. In the end, it’s folks like these across the country — leaders who’ve allowed the NBA to publicly humiliate them in their own local newspapers — who have in fact weakened the NBA and put cities across the country in the predicament we now face. The league has become too spoiled to do the hard work of surviving in a dog-eat-dog world. Yet instead of getting angry, instead of growing a spine, what did many of these council members do after the NBA chided them in front of the very constituents they betrayed? They jump to fix their alleged transgressions, to pacify the wretched schleps who run professional basketball. Have they no pride?
Charlotte’s leaders may be too dim-witted to realize that the NBA is mocking them on their own turf, but they’re still our leaders, and when the NBA humiliates them, when it makes a fool of our city, then it makes a fool of all of us.
Stay here? The NBA should be so lucky. *
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2002.
