Friday, October 14th, 2011 at 9:00 am  |  171 responses

Dennis Rodman Wants NBA Players to ‘Bow Down’ to Owners


by Marcel Mutoni / @marcel_mutoni

Dennis Rodman was around during the last NBA lockout in 1999, and as far as he’s concerned, the owners accepted defeat at the time, and gave the players “everything” they wanted.

The Worm’s advice to today’s locked out NBA players is to “bow down” to team owners in the latest labor fight. Rodman recognizes that it’s the owners’ fault for foolishly signing certain players to the deals that they do, but the players should agree to play ball a little bit here.

His reasoning? Most NBA players haven’t done anything to earn the money.

Rodman made his comments at a racehorsing event in Canada, and the Toronto Sun has the quotes:

As is his custom, the flamboyant Rodman didn’t leave quietly suggesting to reporters, when asked about the current NBA lockout, that NBA players should just take whatever the owners offer and get back to work. “I just think that … the players should bow down,” Rodman said. “They should bow down. In 1999 we (were locked out) and we missed half the season. The owners bowed down then. They gave the players everything. I think the players should do the same thing for the owners because today most of these teams are losing money. It’s not the players’ fault. It’s the owners’ fault. I think they should give a little bit and move on.”

Rodman insists he’s not taking the owners’ side in all of this but it’s apparent he doesn’t believe today’s NBA player deserves the kind of money he is getting. “I don’t think they work that hard because most of the players don’t give a damn about the game. They want the money. I’m not taking the owners’ side, I just think the players should look at themselves. ‘OK, I’m making $16-million or $17-million a year but what have I accomplished?’ Most of the players haven’t accomplished anything. That’s what you have to look at.”

I’d argue that most reasonable NBA fans realize that the League’s owners are trying to give players a raw deal in this labor fight — regardless of who may or may not “deserve” the money they’re currently getting paid.

Ideally, neither side would have to bow down in order to get a deal done. But there’s nothing ideal about the current labor situation in the NBA.

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  • CubicleWorker

    NBK do you mind informing us of which “huge tax breaks” the owners get?

  • dcom

    i think its commons sense..if the players are guaranteed 57% then the onus is on the owner to keep the other expenses down to ensure profit. players may drive up other costs beside wages but they sure as hell dont approve them. basically its on the owners for not being able to manage there their business

  • seriousblack

    The NBA provides the greatest exposure, not the only exposure. The business of pro basketball isn’t exclusive to the NBA , so your point doesn’t hold water. The players can still play in other leagues. They’d obviously make less money but they could still receive some exposure so there is no way they league could be entitled to that money. The same doesn’t hold true for the owners. They literally would have no product whatsoever without the players. At the end of the day, they are making money off of these guys’ individual images and names. Merchandise and tv revenue is directly tied to the players. There has never and will never be a time where the owners weren’t making more money than the players. Do you really believe Kobe Bryant has made more money off of his name and image than Jerry Buss? Fair is fair and the owners don’t want what’s fair.

  • http://slamonline.com Allenp

    Good to year Cubicle.
    I understand profits and losses quite well.
    What I know is that the public and players have never been allowed to see total revenues and expenditures from each team. All we have been given is leaguewide figures and claims of losses.
    You and others have taken those claims as fact. I have not. Instead what I have provided is a complete picture of how much revenue owners receive. Basically 50 percent of all revenue right now with the current deal. Until we know the expenses no one knows whether they are making money or losing money as a collective and strangely the league had refused to make this figures public.
    You are one quoting loss figures as if they are fact because a man employed by one of the parties in this dispute says they are. That is beyond asinine and naive. It is mind numbing.

  • JP Newton

    Can’t we all just get along ….

  • andy

    @cubicle worker
    assuming you own the team and it is running as a loss you can claim that loss against your tax repayment.
    if the tax you have to pay is x and the loss on the team is y the tax you pay is x – y.
    then they can also claim depreciation on the assets they own like scoreboards and other facilities.
    @nbk if contracts are shorter in length it gives players more opportunity to re negotiate. if you are good you will get paid.. period.
    there are really no good guys in this situation just bad and worse

  • JP Newton

    @andy agreed wholeheartedly. @cubicle worker owners also claim losses on players when they do not perform. its called a Roster Depreciation Allowance.
    http://deadspin.com/5816870/exclusive-how-and-why-an-nba-team-makes-a-7-million-profit-look-like-a-28-million-loss

  • zach

    What’s so bad about wanting to be paid fairly? The owners already make more off of the players than the players make off of themselves. Now they want to make even more because they badly mismanaged their own funds. The owner made bad decisions and lost money. Why should the players have to subsidize the owner’s mistakes?

  • CubicleWorker

    You guys realize that I’m a recent university graduate in accounting working for the largest accounting firm in the world right? @andy, I’m in Canada so I don’t know what the exact figures are for the US but say you lose $10M/year and the tax rate is 33%, if you had income from other sources you would then save $3.3M in taxes paid. $10M-$3.3M still equals $6.7M loss. @allenp, jpnewton et al. I read a couple months ago that the league HAS showed the PU financials for individual teams, that’s where everybody got the “roster depreciation allowance” which goes hand in hand with your argument that “the players make the league, are the product” etc.
    @seriousblack, nobody has ever disputed that Jerry Buss isn’t making coin each year. Don’t rationalize your entire argument around an outlier. I’ve even stated at the top of this thread that players can go to Europe… for 20% of the NBA pay and worse living conditions.

    Finally, with the exception of a handful of players is the NBA really made up of individuals?? Are the 4th-15th players of each line up basically interchangeable? The NBA is the product people pay for, DWade/LBJ, Kobe etc etc are a part of it but the NBA can still thrive without those names. The NBA can especially thrive without anybody not in the top 20.

  • CubicleWorker

    Zach, picture if you moved into a new house and signed a one year lease. After a year you realize that you can’t afford to live in that house anymore, you’d have to move to a less expensive one or negotiate a deal with the landlords to decrease the rent. That’s basically a very, very basic version of what’s happening here… except for picture the landlord (the players) only really have one tenant (the NBA) that can afford the rent (picture the house as the league). At the same time you (the owners) really like the house (the league/players etc) and don’t really want to move. Both sides need each other and its a matter of finding a compromise. At some point though the rent becomes too expensive and it’s not economically feasible to live at that house.

  • golakeshow

    Dennis Rodman needs a f@#king Penis. Players FTW

  • http://Slamonline.com nbk

    CubicleWorker your missing the core of the issue altogether, the Owners get to review the business they are buying into, the company has grown since they bought in (despite what has happened in the economy around them). When you make a bad decision, like start a business, and it doesn’t work, do you go back to the people you agreed to pay money and say “hey I know I said I could afford this, but I can’t, and no, I can’t tell you why, but you have to believe me when I say, you have to do your job for less money” this isn’t real estate, there was no NBA related market crash that depreciated the market. Did some owners overpay? Yes they did, should the players get punished for it? I guess that is the difference between our opinions. I hold people responsible for their terrible decisions, while you think punishing someone else, patting the owners on the bum, say “try again, but this time we will restrict player rights to keep you from knocking yourself down again” is the right course of action. Because we need to protect the filthy rich, from the just rich. The American Way

  • seriousblack

    Cubicleworker: Accountant or not, you’re wrong on this one. “The NBA is the product people pay for, DWade/LBJ, Kobe etc etc are a part of it but the NBA can still thrive without those names. The NBA can especially thrive without anybody not in the top 20.” Me using an individual’s name wasn’t cue for you to start arguing a point nobody was trying to make. I wasn’t just talking about superstars. When I said the league cannot survive without the players I meant ALL players. That’s the bottom line. I used Kobe as an example of a player, not just representing “superstars”. Players have options, no matter how limited they are. The owners make ALL of their NBA money off of the images of the members of the union. The players may prefer/want the NBA as a source of basketball income, but the league NEEDS the players to even exist. Period. The players have a right to fair compensation since the whole damn business is based on them, superstars and benchwarmers alike. That’s what you don’t get… Btw, your analogy to zach made zero sense. The relationships between the two pairs of subjects you’re comparing have to actually be the same in order for the analogy to work. For example: college:professor as hospital:doctor; puppy:dog as cub:bear. Tenants:landlords as NBA owners:NBA players? I don’t think so. Plus your analogy wasn’t even plausible. What tenant would be bold enough to ask the landlord to lower the rent at all, let alone after they signed a lease? You’re reaching in your effort to defend irresponsible, greedy billionaires.

  • http://twitter.com/BeezKneezy LA Huey

    My point about the owners getting money from renting their arenas for concerts and the like was lost on some. While I don’t think that revenue should be included in the BRI they split with the players, I think it’s dishonest if they do not factor that into whether or not their NBA business was profitable or not. The fact is most of these guys wouldn’t have their arena if it wasn’t for the fact they had owned NBA team. I feel like what the owners are demanding is far more than fair. I feel like a 53-47 split (in the players favor), reduction of contract length by 1-2 years, leaving the team-by-team cap as is, leaving the luxury tax as is, and lowering the MLE by about 25% should be fair to both sides.

  • Jared

    help!

  • Waskito

    Guys, thanks for the enlightenment . For the last 20 years I am following NBA, I thought I was the expert in all aspect of nba. I knew where mj married Juanita ( a chapel in Vegas), his shoes number (13), that d Robinson, was a straight a student, and play saxophone. I Thomas conspire to not gave a young man named mj the ball in mj first all star, and of course how clumsy/ akward shawn Bradley was….etc. But with this lock out and all your comment, now I know about the league financial situational, the dynamic in it and why it is not easy to just split those hundreds million dollars between the related party, and everybody will be a happy person.
    Just hope the game will started soon, and I will see/hear another heat excuses for not winning the championship.

  • http://slamonline.com Allenp

    Not sure what your bonafides as an accountant mean to this discussion.
    But, again, YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH TEAMS ARE MAKING OR LOSING.
    None.
    Yet, you have argued for weeks that they are losing money. That doesn’t make sense. Your own basis for this claim is David Stern. Who works for the owners.
    The teams released audit reports to players. The players have disputed those figures and requested the RAW DATA on revenues and expenditures.
    More importantly, Stern has NEVER released that information to the public, citing the league’s privacy.
    My contention is that if the public had a better sense of how much each team spends on everything, people would be making more informed decisions on how much of the problem is player salary, and how much is poor management.
    After all, according to the revenue information released by the NBA, the League has shows an increase in revenues for the past 16 years, and that increase has been right about 4 percent annually.
    A 4 percent increase in revenue is very healthy for any business, particularly over the course of 16 years. Unless the League can provide information that shows a similar, or greater increase in expenses over the same period, it’s idiotic to assume that they are losing money.
    So tell me sir, why do you assume the League owners have been honest about their losses and the cause of those losses, despite the fact that they pushed for the current collective bargaining agreement in 1999 and only wanted to tweak it in 2005?
    Yes, the economy has tanked, but NBA REVENUES HAVE INCREASED! You can’t blame your struggles on the economy when your business is consistently making more money every single year. Not unless you show that your costs have skyrocketed, and then you need to show WHY since your biggest cost, player salaries, is a constant percentage of all revenues.
    That is common sense.

  • CubicleWorker

    4% revenue growth is extremely marginal for a business. Consider that inflation is around 4% annually too that means they’re expenses increase at the same rate as growth. I’m at work so I don’t have time to check the average player salary growth but if it’s larger than 4% that alone can explain increasing losses. In a post about a month ago (in the same thread where you copied/pasted items included in BRI) i detailed a list of expenses incurred when running a basketball team. The headline was Billy Hunter something. When you look at the list of expenses I outlined plus Roster Depreciation Allowance (the NBA’s version of the concept of amortization which is a standard business expense) it’s not hard to see why there isn’t much (if any) left over. Common sense can show you that the owners don’t pocket $2B/annum.

    Also any reports from the NBA would be audited by a big 4 auditing firm. An audit from one of those four companies ensures the reports are about as reliable as you can get. It’s not just what Stern says on a whim, independent professionals sign off their name about the reliability of these reports. That’s why I have more trust in what the owners are saying.

  • CubicleWorker

    Finally I dont think a 50/50 split of BRI with 4-5 year guarantee contract lengths represents players getting hosed…

  • https://plus.google.com/photos/106403650426394352312/albums/posts davidR
  • Dayne

    Most people seem to agree the problem is that the owners need to be more disciplined when offering contracts and stop overpaying. The players and the owners agree that this is a large part of the problem.

    The difference is that the owners want to do something about it, while the players do not.

    Oh, the players will ‘settle’ on a host of issues, offer concessions on contract length, etc., but they absolutely will not let the owners have is the one thing that would actually solve the problem: a hard salary cap.

    Look, human beings respond very strongly to incentive and disincentive, fear of loss, etc… Frankly, you could make the luxury tax $25 for every dollar over the cap, and teams would still pay up to land a top 5 star.

    And they would be right to do it. How often are these players available? Every six years or so? What bothers me as well is that the players seem OK with the same 4 or 5 franchises winning it all the time…because it means more money for them. They have no problem with a lack of competitive balance so long as they can get larger contracts and more money.

    The difference is that the owners want to do something about it, while the players do not. Oh, and in return for a hard cap, the owners would be REQUIRED to adopt meaningful revenue sharing, so small market teams and large ones have a more level playing field.

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