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10-17-2011, 03:02 PM
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7058...all-league
Editor's note: We're less than four weeks away from the start of the NBA season that's not starting. Die-hard basketball fans Kang and Simmons are a little frustrated â so much so that they decided to exchange e-mails all day about a hypothetical renegade pro hoops league that will never happen. Here's what transpired.
KANG: This NBA lockout has me thinking about Marx and Engels and a bunch of stuff I should have learned in college about labor power and alienation and how the worker should have control over his own economic fate. Specifically, I'm remembering a part of Ken Burns' Baseball documentary, in which George Will says that baseball is the one instance where a worker-driven system makes sense. To paraphrase, he says that in the history of the game not one person has bought a ticket or turned on a television to watch an owner. As such, because the products are the players, the players should control the majority of the wealth.
And so, with no really positive news coming out of the labor meetings in New York, I was thinking about alternatives that would save our NBA stars from the indignity of playing in Europe.
Here's the basic idea for a player-owned league, which I would call "The Oracle."
SIMMONS: "The Oracle?" Nice name! It sounds like either a renegade professional basketball league, a new cable movie channel, an AMC drama or Dr. Dre's next comeback album. I'm in on The Oracle no matter what it ends up being.
KANG: Glad to see we're in agreement about the name! It also allows fans to make O's with their hands like they do for Oregon football.
First, we need a commissioner/bankroller. Larry Ellison has to be the man to spearhead this league. He's pissed because he got shut out in the Warriors sale (by the way, if you're looking for another reason to get angry at the owners, how about the fact that they wouldn't allow the third-richest man in America to be a part of their little club?). Oh, and he also spent $200 million to win an effing yachting competition. He wouldn't need too much more than that to start The Oracle, and if he somehow replaced the NBA with some weird proto-Communist version of professional basketball, it would be the greatest double-barreled middle finger to anything, ever.
SIMMONS: I like the way you're thinking here. To be fair, Ellison choked on the Warriors purchase â he lowballed them with his initial offer, then increased it at the last minute only when Joe Lacob and Peter Guber were closing with their $450 million bid. And the NBA blocked Ellison's Hornets play only because they knew he planned on breaking the team's New Orleans lease and moving it to San Jose. But this works for your commissioner/bankroller purposes: At this point, Ellison has probably convinced himself that the NBA is cockblocking him, even if that's not necessarily true. Who better to launch a spiteful renegade league? If not him, we'll find another billionaire with deep pockets, thin skin and a big ego. The bigger questions: Where would you put the teams? And how many?
KANG: I'm thinking eight teams in New York, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Boston, Las Vegas, and Seattle.
There are no basketball antitrust laws in place. NBA arenas can rent their spaces out to all sorts of things right now: concerts, monster truck rallies, gymnastics competitions, Globetrotters exhibitions, etc. Unless there's language in a contract that specifies, "In case of a lockout, you CANNOT host another basketball team," there shouldn't be a problem. And if there is, then screw it, they can just play in a college gym.
The team names would be sponsored. Like the Atlanta Waffle Houses or the Subaru Dealerships of Greater Seattle.
SIMMONS: The Atlanta Waffle Houses would have the greatest uniforms ever. Also, they would make me hungry. Constantly. You're smart to go with sponsored names, even if that ruins my idea to have teams called the Seattle Nirvana and the Baltimore Wire. But it's too risky to mess around with existing NBA cities/stadiums; because television/Internet revenue will be driving this league anyway, they should pick medium-size cities that don't have teams but could easily accommodate them. You're right about Las Vegas and Seattle. Two killer choices. I'm already welling up at the thought of pro hoops returning to Seattle. Seriously, get me some Kleenex. The first "**** you, Stern!" chant during the first quarter of their first home game will be one of the best sports moments of the year. Instead of Los Angeles, I would grab Anaheim as the token SoCal team â it's only 50 minutes from L.A., it has a solid stadium in place, and it wants pro hoops so desperately that it did everything short of building an avoid-bankruptcy-and-keep-your-team parachute for the Maloofs last spring (before the NBA blocked the move). The fourth West Coast team should be Vancouver since it's pushing so hard for an NBA team, although you could also talk me into San Jose for the Silicon Valley money.
And Kansas City is a no-brainer as the fifth team: It has a state-of-the-art NBA arena, and it's also on suicide watch right now with the Chiefs and Royals. Nobody needs this league more than Kansas City. You're right, Seattle needs it more. My bad.
From there, you need two East Coast teams: I'd go with Baltimore OR Pittsburgh (can't have both), then Hartford (midway point between New York and Boston, plus it still has its renovated 16k-seat arena from its Whalers days). And for the eighth team, do we need to go South or could we add another Western team? Let's see, Austin, Jacksonville, Tampa or Nashville ⦠(Thinking.) Screw it, let's go with the 'Burgh. My final picks: Seattle, Las Vegas, Vancouver, Anaheim (West); Baltimore, Hartford, Kansas City and Pittsburgh (East). And yes, I know Kansas City isn't technically "East." I'm well aware. Thanks for pointing this out. I got it. By the way, don't put it past Ellison to stick one of the eight teams in Malibu â he already owns half of Carbon Beach. Maybe the SoCal team could play at Pepperdine right down the street. If Pepperdine could handle a couple dozen Battle of the Network Stars shows once upon a time, I'm pretty sure it could handle "The Oracle."
KANG: Kansas City does have that arena and might draw some of the Jayhawk crowd, especially if you stocked the team with KU alums. I'm in on that. Vancouver's interesting because of Steve Nash's potential involvement, but I don't know if you want to put two of eight teams in the Pacific Northwest. San Jose works â it'll make commissioner Ellison happy, draw in the hoops-crazy population of the Bay Area, and bring forth an entire new type of celebrity. Instead of seeing Penny Marshall at Clipper games, you could see Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Meg Whitman whenever the San Jose Cisco Wireless Routers were in action.
SIMMONS: Good call. I'm excited to see those San Jose courtside seats go for $375,000 per game. That could pay for the league right there. How would the "Player Draft" go? This is crucial â we need a format that would produce at least seven different mock drafts by Chad Ford.
KANG: Here's my vision: Eight entrepreneurial stars would "buy" franchises from Ellison and serve as captains. And then, in a huge pay-per-view event, those eight captains would pick their teams.
SIMMONS: Whoa!!!!!! Snake fashion?
KANG: Snake fashion.
SIMMONS: And pay-per-view?
KANG: Pay-per-view.
SIMMONS: I'm giddy.
KANG: Every player who wants to play in The Oracle would be required to be in attendance for the draft. The captains would take home the largest portion of any money the team made, obviously, but they'd also be taking on risk. The other players would be paid at the player/owner's discretion. But can you imagine how many awesome stories would come out of contract negotiations alone?
SIMMONS: I like the thought of Kobe Bryant negotiating with really anybody. That alone is reason to do this league. The only potential stumbling block: How would they decide the eight captains? On paper, the captains SHOULD be Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose and Dirk Nowitzki, since those are the eight best players in the league. But how do we trust that Wade wouldn't make all of LeBron's decisions for him like he did in the summer of 2010? And do you really think stars like Deron Williams, Carmelo Anthony and Amar'e Stoudemire are signing off on NOT being captains? No way. Too many egos.
Here's the move: What if we went with co-captains for the eight teams, with the rule that current NBA teammates cannot be Oracle co-captains. (Sorry, Wade and LeBron.) I like these pairings: Nowitzki and Nash (cue up Peaches & Herb!); Carmelo and Deron Williams (a possible 2012-13 Knicks preview); Russell Westbrook and Kevin Love (an emotional reunion of their eight months at UCLA pretending to be students); Blake Griffin and Chris Paul (let the alley-oops begin!); Rose and Amar'e Stoudemire (high screens galore); Durant and Zach Randolph (the new "Odd Couple"); Wade and Dwight Howard (your favorites â we need a "front-runner" team that will convince everyone to pick them, then eventually let everyone down, a la the 2011 Red Sox, Heat and Eagles); and Kobe and LeBron (how fascinating would that be?). Kang, find a flaw with this plan. You can't.
Editor's note: We're less than four weeks away from the start of the NBA season that's not starting. Die-hard basketball fans Kang and Simmons are a little frustrated â so much so that they decided to exchange e-mails all day about a hypothetical renegade pro hoops league that will never happen. Here's what transpired.
KANG: This NBA lockout has me thinking about Marx and Engels and a bunch of stuff I should have learned in college about labor power and alienation and how the worker should have control over his own economic fate. Specifically, I'm remembering a part of Ken Burns' Baseball documentary, in which George Will says that baseball is the one instance where a worker-driven system makes sense. To paraphrase, he says that in the history of the game not one person has bought a ticket or turned on a television to watch an owner. As such, because the products are the players, the players should control the majority of the wealth.
And so, with no really positive news coming out of the labor meetings in New York, I was thinking about alternatives that would save our NBA stars from the indignity of playing in Europe.
Here's the basic idea for a player-owned league, which I would call "The Oracle."
SIMMONS: "The Oracle?" Nice name! It sounds like either a renegade professional basketball league, a new cable movie channel, an AMC drama or Dr. Dre's next comeback album. I'm in on The Oracle no matter what it ends up being.
KANG: Glad to see we're in agreement about the name! It also allows fans to make O's with their hands like they do for Oregon football.
First, we need a commissioner/bankroller. Larry Ellison has to be the man to spearhead this league. He's pissed because he got shut out in the Warriors sale (by the way, if you're looking for another reason to get angry at the owners, how about the fact that they wouldn't allow the third-richest man in America to be a part of their little club?). Oh, and he also spent $200 million to win an effing yachting competition. He wouldn't need too much more than that to start The Oracle, and if he somehow replaced the NBA with some weird proto-Communist version of professional basketball, it would be the greatest double-barreled middle finger to anything, ever.
SIMMONS: I like the way you're thinking here. To be fair, Ellison choked on the Warriors purchase â he lowballed them with his initial offer, then increased it at the last minute only when Joe Lacob and Peter Guber were closing with their $450 million bid. And the NBA blocked Ellison's Hornets play only because they knew he planned on breaking the team's New Orleans lease and moving it to San Jose. But this works for your commissioner/bankroller purposes: At this point, Ellison has probably convinced himself that the NBA is cockblocking him, even if that's not necessarily true. Who better to launch a spiteful renegade league? If not him, we'll find another billionaire with deep pockets, thin skin and a big ego. The bigger questions: Where would you put the teams? And how many?
KANG: I'm thinking eight teams in New York, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Boston, Las Vegas, and Seattle.
There are no basketball antitrust laws in place. NBA arenas can rent their spaces out to all sorts of things right now: concerts, monster truck rallies, gymnastics competitions, Globetrotters exhibitions, etc. Unless there's language in a contract that specifies, "In case of a lockout, you CANNOT host another basketball team," there shouldn't be a problem. And if there is, then screw it, they can just play in a college gym.
The team names would be sponsored. Like the Atlanta Waffle Houses or the Subaru Dealerships of Greater Seattle.
SIMMONS: The Atlanta Waffle Houses would have the greatest uniforms ever. Also, they would make me hungry. Constantly. You're smart to go with sponsored names, even if that ruins my idea to have teams called the Seattle Nirvana and the Baltimore Wire. But it's too risky to mess around with existing NBA cities/stadiums; because television/Internet revenue will be driving this league anyway, they should pick medium-size cities that don't have teams but could easily accommodate them. You're right about Las Vegas and Seattle. Two killer choices. I'm already welling up at the thought of pro hoops returning to Seattle. Seriously, get me some Kleenex. The first "**** you, Stern!" chant during the first quarter of their first home game will be one of the best sports moments of the year. Instead of Los Angeles, I would grab Anaheim as the token SoCal team â it's only 50 minutes from L.A., it has a solid stadium in place, and it wants pro hoops so desperately that it did everything short of building an avoid-bankruptcy-and-keep-your-team parachute for the Maloofs last spring (before the NBA blocked the move). The fourth West Coast team should be Vancouver since it's pushing so hard for an NBA team, although you could also talk me into San Jose for the Silicon Valley money.
And Kansas City is a no-brainer as the fifth team: It has a state-of-the-art NBA arena, and it's also on suicide watch right now with the Chiefs and Royals. Nobody needs this league more than Kansas City. You're right, Seattle needs it more. My bad.
From there, you need two East Coast teams: I'd go with Baltimore OR Pittsburgh (can't have both), then Hartford (midway point between New York and Boston, plus it still has its renovated 16k-seat arena from its Whalers days). And for the eighth team, do we need to go South or could we add another Western team? Let's see, Austin, Jacksonville, Tampa or Nashville ⦠(Thinking.) Screw it, let's go with the 'Burgh. My final picks: Seattle, Las Vegas, Vancouver, Anaheim (West); Baltimore, Hartford, Kansas City and Pittsburgh (East). And yes, I know Kansas City isn't technically "East." I'm well aware. Thanks for pointing this out. I got it. By the way, don't put it past Ellison to stick one of the eight teams in Malibu â he already owns half of Carbon Beach. Maybe the SoCal team could play at Pepperdine right down the street. If Pepperdine could handle a couple dozen Battle of the Network Stars shows once upon a time, I'm pretty sure it could handle "The Oracle."
KANG: Kansas City does have that arena and might draw some of the Jayhawk crowd, especially if you stocked the team with KU alums. I'm in on that. Vancouver's interesting because of Steve Nash's potential involvement, but I don't know if you want to put two of eight teams in the Pacific Northwest. San Jose works â it'll make commissioner Ellison happy, draw in the hoops-crazy population of the Bay Area, and bring forth an entire new type of celebrity. Instead of seeing Penny Marshall at Clipper games, you could see Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Meg Whitman whenever the San Jose Cisco Wireless Routers were in action.
SIMMONS: Good call. I'm excited to see those San Jose courtside seats go for $375,000 per game. That could pay for the league right there. How would the "Player Draft" go? This is crucial â we need a format that would produce at least seven different mock drafts by Chad Ford.
KANG: Here's my vision: Eight entrepreneurial stars would "buy" franchises from Ellison and serve as captains. And then, in a huge pay-per-view event, those eight captains would pick their teams.
SIMMONS: Whoa!!!!!! Snake fashion?
KANG: Snake fashion.
SIMMONS: And pay-per-view?
KANG: Pay-per-view.
SIMMONS: I'm giddy.
KANG: Every player who wants to play in The Oracle would be required to be in attendance for the draft. The captains would take home the largest portion of any money the team made, obviously, but they'd also be taking on risk. The other players would be paid at the player/owner's discretion. But can you imagine how many awesome stories would come out of contract negotiations alone?
SIMMONS: I like the thought of Kobe Bryant negotiating with really anybody. That alone is reason to do this league. The only potential stumbling block: How would they decide the eight captains? On paper, the captains SHOULD be Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose and Dirk Nowitzki, since those are the eight best players in the league. But how do we trust that Wade wouldn't make all of LeBron's decisions for him like he did in the summer of 2010? And do you really think stars like Deron Williams, Carmelo Anthony and Amar'e Stoudemire are signing off on NOT being captains? No way. Too many egos.
Here's the move: What if we went with co-captains for the eight teams, with the rule that current NBA teammates cannot be Oracle co-captains. (Sorry, Wade and LeBron.) I like these pairings: Nowitzki and Nash (cue up Peaches & Herb!); Carmelo and Deron Williams (a possible 2012-13 Knicks preview); Russell Westbrook and Kevin Love (an emotional reunion of their eight months at UCLA pretending to be students); Blake Griffin and Chris Paul (let the alley-oops begin!); Rose and Amar'e Stoudemire (high screens galore); Durant and Zach Randolph (the new "Odd Couple"); Wade and Dwight Howard (your favorites â we need a "front-runner" team that will convince everyone to pick them, then eventually let everyone down, a la the 2011 Red Sox, Heat and Eagles); and Kobe and LeBron (how fascinating would that be?). Kang, find a flaw with this plan. You can't.
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10-17-2011, 07:19 PM
I know one thing this lockout has done, it's made me not watch the NBA anymore. I will never watch a regular season game again, and it's going to take alot for me to watch a playoff game. The regular season is boring enough, along with how the media goes crazy about every little thing, and this lockout...just makes me hate the NBA even more.
The NBA can't afford to lose many fans. The NFL could, but the NBA sure as hell can't.
The NBA can't afford to lose many fans. The NFL could, but the NBA sure as hell can't.
.
10-18-2011, 01:30 AM
^I'm with you Vundy!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
âRelax, all right? Donât try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, theyâre fascist. Throw some ground balls â itâs more democratic.â
Crash Davis
10-18-2011, 02:46 AM
Yeah man...I just feel these guys should put in alot more effort and keeping the season together. They have quite a bit of other, third-party people/businesses that depend on them too. Just do whatever it takes to get it done, ya know? If they've been trying harder, I've sure not seen it.
You can definitely tell a big difference in the NBA and NFL lockouts...people were ready to riot at about this time during the NFL lockout. I hardly see anything about the NBA on SportsCenter, lol. They've already canceled games and the season was supposed to start in less than two weeks! If the NFL had had to cancel a substantial amount of pre-season games, or God help us all if they would've had to cancel regular season games, we'd be seeing people killing themselves over it, haha.
^^^Thankfully, this did not happen.
You can definitely tell a big difference in the NBA and NFL lockouts...people were ready to riot at about this time during the NFL lockout. I hardly see anything about the NBA on SportsCenter, lol. They've already canceled games and the season was supposed to start in less than two weeks! If the NFL had had to cancel a substantial amount of pre-season games, or God help us all if they would've had to cancel regular season games, we'd be seeing people killing themselves over it, haha.
^^^Thankfully, this did not happen.
.
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