Other People’s Words: Matt Moore Responds

After publishing The System, Not Stupid Contracts, Creates Wasted Payroll yesterday, I was fortunate enough to have it featured on several great NBA sites.  However, Matt Moore at HP had a bit of a problem with it:

The owners aren’t upset because they woke up one day and were all “Holy crap, we’re giving the players too much money! This offends me on an ideological level! I daresay we should stage a lockout simply so that this group of human beings will not earn so much! RABBLE RABBLE.” No, they’re upset because they’re losing money. That’s all this is about. “Wah, I bought a sports team and it’s losing money and I don’t like that. Wah.” The end. Instead of seeking out alternative options, rethinking their business model, fixing their revenue sharing, or bucking up and living with the reality of the capitalist system that has provided them with so much worldly wealth, they decided “Hey, let’s punish the players! We have leverage and they’re typically stupid as a union! (Not as much as the NFL’s, but still!)” and locked out the players. If you can’t think of a way to fix your problems, blame someone else and then extort what you want from them. The American Way.

My point here is that if the revenue covered their losses, we wouldn’t have this problem. Well, we’d have one, because everyone is greedy, but not as big of one. But the owners simultaneously managed to ratchet up their non-player-salary-costs and not generate enough revenue to fail to cover the 57% they hand over to the players. And that’s genuinely effected by their decisions.

Matt and I view this situation from very different backgrounds.  You should see both.

Head on over to Hardwood Paroxysms to read the rest, and make sure you bookmark the site.  Besides Matt, they’ve got plenty of other great writers like Jovan Buha, Danny Chau, Scott Leedy, Sean Highkin, and Curtis Harris.

Matt’s a handsome devil, isn’t he?