Lingering Items--Laboring Edition

For those who hate the business side of professional sports, the news that the NBA owners are spoiling for a lockout as much as the NFL owners did probably isn’t all that welcome.

The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of this month and for now the players and the owners are getting nowhere fast. There are plenty of similarities between the NBA’s labor issues and those in the NFL, but central to it is the straw that always stirs the drink: money. Would you expect it to be about anything else?

According to a recent article about the negotiations from the Associated Press, the NBA owners are claiming losses for this season at $300 million and an anticipation of 22 of its 30 teams losing money. That’s pretty dramatic if true.

The players don’t necessarily agree with that assessment because they say that television ratings have increased along with ticket prices and merchandise sales. They don’t have any more access to the owners’ books than the NFL players and thus can only speculate on how much the league might be losing. As an aside, why isn’t anyone complaining that NBA owners won’t open their books?

In any event, like their brethren in the NFL, NBA players seem to understand that the economy has changed, at least for their fans, and are willing to make some compromises but it’s the scope of those compromises that are the sticking point. Again, would you expect it to be anything different?

The lynchpin to these negotiations is likewise similar to that in the NFL: the owners’ desire to get better cost certainty. In the NBA the chosen vehicle is the revision of their currently byzantine salary cap into a more straightforward version. But since it’s the NBA where exceptions dwarf nearly every rule, don’t be misled into thinking that it’s a hard cap the owners want in the same way that the NFL has a hard cap. That would be too radical of a change and, frankly, would make too much sense.

If you listen to the players, who claim they’re united just like any labor group claims unity among its troops, they’re willing to give some money back presumably in the hope of having a larger pie to divide down the road. The owners have scoffed, yes scoffed, at what they call the modest moves of the players to this point, but so much of that is just posturing anyway.

Still there is less than a week before the contract expires and while much can happen between now and then, in all likelihood not much will happen. This is the owners’ first real chance since the economy cratered to address their issues and they won’t let go of that opportunity lightly.

In other words, don’t be surprised when the NBA owners do lock out the players, possibly as early as July 1. Like the NFL’s lockout, it probably doesn’t mean much with the season months away but it means enough to label the situation serious, assuming you care whether there is another NBA season ever.

What’s far less certain is whether the NBA players will pursue a litigation strategy. It’s mostly been a failure for the NFL players in that it hasn’t given them the perceived leverage they thought they would have, but that doesn’t mean the NBA players are any brighter than their counterparts in the NFL.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if DeMaurice Smith is the worst head of a professional sports union then Billy Hunter, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, is a close second.

What makes Smith inept is his abject lack of experience. He’s a litigator by training and brought that mentality to the NFL players, hence the massive amount of litigation taking place that has bogged down negotiations. What makes Hunter inept is just a general lack of competence and gravitas.

But in fairness to Hunter, he probably understands that David Stern controls the NBA with an iron fist to the point that Hunter would never be willing or able to effectively challenge that authority anyway. Stern is more Kenesaw Mountain Landis and less Roger Goodell and as long as Stern’s in place the players are only going to get as far in these negotiations as he’ll let them.

Whatever union president Derek Fisher’s claims of unity among the players may be, they’ll never effectively challenge Stern’s control or break his will to shape the game as he sees fit.

You don’t have to be fully versed in tea leaf reading to conclude that unless the players knuckle under between now and June 30th, Stern will lock out the players. The only question is whether the players will be as pig-headed as their counterparts in the NHL and let a full season pass until they figure out that for however popular their sport might be in China, in the United States whatever fan uprising might occur will be drowned out by the otherwise massive fan indifference.

**

As for a sport the fans really do care about, football, the good news is that the owners and the players are finally negotiating in earnest. For the most part the posturing that inevitably arises at contract expiration time has given way to the realities that whatever else the courts could do for either of them, the one thing they can’t do is the one thing they need the most: a new labor contract.

The lack of real substantive news coming out of these negotiations is actually a very positive sign. The less the principals talk publicly the more likely it is that they are getting things done behind the scenes.

The average fan, even the average fan who’s in a labor union, probably doesn’t fully appreciate the complexity that is the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement. Much of that complication comes from the provisions dealing with the division of revenue, but the contract is also so much more than that.

The other thing the average fan may not realize is that although the re-slicing of the financial pie is a major issue, there is a laundry list of other items the parties are working their way through, including retiree health care, injury pay and the like. These take time as well.

But the real complication stems from the nuclear approach the union took to these negotiations. It’s not just about reaching a new labor contract. It’s also about resolving the pending lawsuits, particularly the underlying class action lawsuit that was filed.

Without going into the rather mundane details of class action law, the resolution of that lawsuit is subject to both the approval of the court and the prospective class members. Then there is the not so small matter of the union re-certifying as the collective bargaining representative for the players. Although the NFLPA is calling itself a trade union and its attempt at decertification has been disputed by the owners, ultimately this issue needs to get resolved and the union needs to re-form as part of what will surely be a global settlement. Without the re-certification, the negotiated collective bargaining agreement cannot technically be approved by the players.

In short, the parties could reach a deal on the new contract but the process of approving it and living by it could take months to work through. That doesn’t mean that the lockout would need to remain in effect until that happens. But rest assured that unless the owners have very good assurances that everything will get resolved they will be reluctant to open the doors.

It seems like a very good chance that a tentative agreement will be in place in the next few weeks. Whether that means football will ultimately start on time is hard to say. But if it forces a delay in the season, the NFL probably won’t complain anyway. With the way they run the league, nothing would please them more than to play up until the day that baseball’s spring training starts in mid February.

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A few quick words about Travis Hafner and the Indians.

As frustrating as the Indians recent slump has been, what’s more frustrating is that their highest paid player literally cannot play a position other than designated hitter. For a team that has trouble generating offense, the fact that Hafner is irrelevant for the 9 games in National League cities is a cause for real concern.

Basically the Indians go into this stretch fielding a team with 7 legitimate bats, given that the pitcher will have to hit as well. Everyone saw how moribund the Indians’ offense looked when Hafner was on the DL. The likelihood now is that it will be worse for this stretch in large part because it’s as if Hafner is back on the DL.

It’s nice to see that Hafner has regained most of his batting eye after walking through the desert the last few years. But it’s not so nice that the Indians are paying the kind of money they are paying Hafner and have to endure similar stretches of their schedule when he simply can’t play.

Nine games may not seem like a lot given a 162 game schedule, but going 2-7 instead of 5-4 against the National League could very easily be the difference between making and not making the playoffs.

**

With all the frenzy surrounding the Cavaliers’ just completed draft, this week’s question to ponder arises: How many of those fans either praising or bitching about the Cavs’ picks can honestly say they’ve seen Kyrie Irving or Tristan Thompson play enough to have an informed opinion?

Hamsters on a Wheel

Every time I take a week off from the confined world that is Cleveland sports, I expect to come back to a changed landscape. Instead it’s a world that moves with all the speed of a Judge Parker or Mary Worth story line. In this town you could literally go weeks without much news and you’d come back and nothing much will have changed.

The Cleveland Browns continued to make baby steps on their 10+ year journey through the NFL desert. The Cleveland Indians are getting ready to kick off their spring training and as usual there are more questions than answers.

But one thing did change, though not my feelings about it. The Cleveland Cavaliers won a game. They beat the Los Angeles Clippers in a game with a tenth of the stakes and 100 times the drama of the Cavaliers-Celtics playoff series last spring. I happened to be in the Los Angeles area and in a bar watching the end of that game. When J.J. Hickson blocked the shot at the end of regulation virtually none of the locals seemed to much care whether or not it was goal tending, mainly because they were far more invested in their cocktails than the outcome of the game.

After it was all over and the worst losing streak in professional sports was over, the few locals who even bothered to offer an opinion merely said “typical Clippers,” which is exactly how I felt when the Cavaliers then lost to the Washington Wizards a few nights later.

That’s the kind of bi-coastal fan loyalty I’m sure the NBA marketing executives dream of as they scratch themselves with bemusement as to why their league is careening toward irrelevance even as its popularity soars overseas.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that the NBA, like the NFL, was facing its own labor problems on the horizon and that it probably represented the best opportunity for Commissioner David Stern to fix what ails his league. It doesn’t look promising.

In a profile of Stern published in the L.A. Times this past weekend, Stern was mostly dismissive of any suggestion that more and more owners are hawkish on fundamentally changing the league’s business model given that Forbes magazine estimates that more than half of all NBA teams lost money last year.

That’s probably posturing in the name of unity on Stern’s part but if NBA owners are hawkish only about re-dividing the league’s revenue pie without first taking on the league’s more fundamental problems, then all they will have accomplished is a way to grab more money from a pool that will eventually contract before it expands.

There is a fundamental difference between the dispute the NFL is having with its union and the conversation the NBA is having with its. The NFL has a business model that mostly works. The NBA does not. NFL owners want to re-cut a growing pie as a way of compensating themselves for the huge investments they make so that the league can thrive. Their requests aren’t unreasonable.

NBA owners, led by Donald Sterling of the Clippers, are focused similarly on re-cutting the pie but lack the underpinnings of a business that can continue to grow those revenues, at least organically. Put it this way, in the NFL virtually every team without the name “Cleveland” in its title can and has made the Super Bowl. In the NBA, the Finals are reserved for a select few teams while the rest of the league twiddles its thumbs, seemingly content on drafting off the revenues generated by others. Meanwhile the fans in those cities are sold the false premise of possibility.

Maybe it’s that those running the NBA don’t see their league on a downward spiral at all, which means that the league will once again have to hit rock bottom, as it did about 25-30 years ago when drugs and money dominated the storyline and fan interest waned accordingly, before working its way back into the collective conscience.

But until that happens, in this corner of the world and in most other corners of the NBA world nothing much will change. The Cavaliers and teams like them will spin their wheels for the better part of the next decade simply because the NBA runs counter to logic. It has the least number of players on its rosters of any professional sport and yet is the most difficult of all in which to build a champion.

The reason it runs in this direction has everything to do with its expansive playoff system and its byzantine salary structure. These combine to punish teams into mediocrity while the very few teams lucky enough to have a top player fall into their laps eventually find themselves at the top of the league.

When it comes to the playoffs, only the truly bad teams miss out each season and hence enter the NBA’s draft lottery. And yet these bottom feeders are actually the lucky ones. They at least have a chance at one of the first picks and the opportunity to perhaps get the next superstar around which to build. The teams stuck in the bottom seeds of the playoff system year after year end up having far more difficult time getting up to the next level.

As a good friend pointed out to me, consider the Cavaliers when Mike Fratello was the head coach. He was defensive-minded and a rather decent coach, actually. Not great, certainly, but credible. The problem was that as a coach his teams were just good enough to sneak into the playoffs each year but never really good enough to be a threat to win it all. All this did was hurt the Cavaliers’ drafting status each year, keeping them in the same place, like a hamster running on a wheel.

There’s certainly an argument there that the problem all along in Cleveland was ownership and front office related and that might have some merit except for the fact that this same kind of story plays out in city after city around the NBA.

Let’s stick with Fratello for a moment. He became the Hawks’ head coach in 1983 and lasted through the 1989-1990 season. In 7 of his 9 seasons, the Hawks made the playoffs. Usually that would be cause for rejoice except it really wasn’t. The Hawks, like the Cavaliers under Fratello, were always just good enough to get into the playoffs but never advanced very far. All that did was kept them from the draft lottery most years, which meant it kept them away from the best players in the draft.

Now this all could be an indictment of Fratello except its not. Lenny Wilkins, a Hall of Fame coach, came in and repeated the pattern for much the same reasons. They Hawks had some good players but never great players. Eventually those that they had got old or went elsewhere and left the Hawks’ roster looking pretty much like the Cavaliers’ roster does today. From 1999 through the 2007 season, the Hawks missed the playoffs.

Having a better draft status has eventually led the Hawks back to respectability, if respectability is defined by making the playoffs but not getting very deep into them. That could turn around this season, but I doubt it, which means that the Hawks aren’t likely to hang another championship banner any time soon to go along with the one they won in 1958!

You literally could go almost franchise by franchise and find similar stories. It’s quite fascinating, actually, how often the pattern repeats.

If the playoff system is the reason number 1 why teams can’t rebuild then the salary structure is reason 1A. It has more loopholes than the federal tax code and works as both a shield and sword. For teams like the Lakers, the Celtics, the Heat and even the San Antonio Spurs, it seems to stretch in almost unimaginable ways so that they can yield a roster that other teams could never afford. For others it is the sword the superstar wields to cut his departing franchise back down to size.

Why the NBA chooses to work in this fashion is hard to say. The owners aren’t exactly a group of visionaries, which is another thing that separates them from their brethren in the NFL.

I suspect that the NBA will take on its union just as the NFL will and that there will be a lockout in both sports. But when the dust settles, I fully expect the NFL to be in better shape while the NBA will still be fundamentally unsound and worse off for the fight. For the locals, that means that eventually if the Browns management can find a level of competence that nearly every other franchise has found, it will get to the Super Bowl. For the Cavaliers, the NBA Finals will remain a theory only just as it has for virtually the entire existence of the franchise.

The Way the Stern Wind Blows

The Cleveland Cavaliers continue to reach lower and lower lows and yet everyone associated with it, players, management, fans, are all collectively Charlie Sheen: unable to admit that there is no place left to go because rock bottom has long since been reached.

But even if they could, it probably wouldn’t matter anyway. Whereas knowing when you’ve bottomed out with the bottle may be the first step toward recovering, knowing when you’ve bottomed out in the NBA is irrelevant. The deck is stacked against you institutionally and short of a fortuitous ping pong ball or a warm weather climate with a vibrant night life, NBA riches will remain elusive.

The Cavs may not win again this season and that’s the least snarky comment that can be made about this team right now. This team had its courage, its will, its fight removed a few months back when LeBron James visited the Q and took with him all that remained of the Cavs team he once helped take to the NBA finals.

But even without that dispiriting loss, the only place the Cavs were going was to the lottery anyway. What then to do with the rest of the basketball season? Is it time for an insurrection? Is it time to reconsider our thoughts on the relatively bankrupt operations that the Browns and the Indians have become in light of how the Cavs are operating at the moment? Or should we just do what we do in Cleveland and bend over, take another swat to the ass from Niedermeyer and then say “thank you, sir, may have another?”

Honestly, is there really anything else to do? If we want to go down the usual Elisabeth Kubler-Ross steps of the grieving process, we’re long past denial. The franchise as fans knew it from the last 7 years is indeed dead. Dozens of mind-numbing double digit losses this season have driven that point home.

That takes us to the blame portion of the program. But where to start or, more appropriately, where to focus? There’s no real reason to blame Silent Dan Gilbert, the Cavaliers owner, who mostly expresses his thoughts these days in 140 characters or less via Twitter. Gilbert understandably went all in on James so it’s not a surprise the Cavs would have regressed. You play no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em and put everything at stake hoping to draw to an inside straight, it’s going to cost you more times than not. Casinos are built on suckers who play those odds.

Besides, Gilbert’s sin at the moment stems from his lack of leadership during the biggest crisis facing the franchise, not the fact that he made the bet that everyone asked him to make. Move on.

There’s also no real reason to blame head coach Byron Scott, although he’s been nothing short of a disaster as a head coach. His coaching is random. He admitted to testing his players during a crucial moment in a recent game the Cavs were competitive in late with a play they hadn’t run since training camp. No one knew what the heck he was talking about. Not surprisingly, that infuriated the mercurial Scott without him ever realizing how bizarre his rant actually made him sound.

Still, Phil Jackson couldn’t make this Cavs team competitive apparently, not with all the middling talent on this roster. Injured or healthy, nothing much would change its fortunes in the short term. Again, move on.

If we’re going to stay mired in the blame game for now then let’s be fair and honest about where it really lies and that’s with the NBA and its benevolent dictator David Stern. It’s not that Stern let James pull the rug out from under the Cavs feet that’s the problem. He couldn’t have stopped it because it was already too late anyway. Rather the crux of the issue is that Stern, for all his grand visions for the future and the brand, couldn’t see the problems staring him in the face before it came to fruition to the detriment of Cleveland.

If there is one truism in running a for-profit enterprise it is this: you can never get yourself in a position where the inmates run the asylum. Any business of any sort that gets itself in a position where an individual’s presence or absence can send it into complete irrelevance overnight usually gets what it deserves in the end.

Scour the NBA at the moment and it’s very clear that Stern’s vision of the game has put the league in a position where the value of a franchise can plummet faster than the stock market after a terrorist attack. It’s really rather simple. The owners are the pawns and the players control all. It’s a Through-the Looking-Glass existence that puts the power in the hands of players (and their agents) to manipulate the lengths of their contracts in order to expire together at more desirable locations where the weather suits their fancy. You wouldn’t run the local deli this way but the NBA has allowed itself to turn basic business principles on its ear so that James, Wades and Boshes of the world can hold a franchise hostage as each of them did with their teams this summer and as Carmelo Anthony and Dwight Howard are doing now.

It’s the byproduct, really, of Stern’s view that the league prospers best when it has superstars to market. Perhaps it does if the goal is to sell jerseys to the Chinese, but as it’s playing out in real time it’s probably the worst business plan imaginable.

Maybe it’s fun to see billionaire owners squirm like pre-school girls eyeing a dead bird on the playground, but the reality is that by catering more to the egos of the superstars the NBA and Stern have left the owners, you know, the guys footing all the bills, holding the bag when those player egos naturally grow out of control.

The Cavs are a franchise that despite Gilbert’s hubris are not going to recover from this for years and then only when a superstar happens to fall into their laps again through the luck of the ping pong balls. How is Minnesota doing these days without Kevin Garnett? How about Indiana since the departure of Reggie Miller? How about Milwaukee, since, well, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar left? You get the point.

When the superstar escapes by whatever means from the team that was lucky enough to be in a position to draft him, the franchise just doesn’t recover until the next superstar comes along. It really is that simple.

Cleveland, if you want your future, it’s already been played out, a short plane ride away, in Chicago. In the 1997-98 season, the Chicago Bulls won 62 games and a NBA title. It was also Michael Jordan’s and Scottie Pippen’s last season with the team. It took the Bulls nearly four full seasons to win 62 more games total. They didn’t have a winning record until 7 years after Jordan left. In the 6 seasons after that they had only two winning seasons and three seasons where they finished a .500. Only since Derek Rose fell in their laps have the Bulls had a chance to start climbing from the abyss. Gee, it only took 12 years for that to happen.

If David Stern doesn’t see this as the issue holding back the NBA and make it the centerpiece of their upcoming negotiations, then he is in far deeper denial than is Gilbert about what it will take to rebuild the Cavs. Right now the players and the agents have pushed the league into a system that is working counter to the greater good of the league in favor of the greater good of a handful of players and a handful of franchises.

Either Stern takes this issue on now or abdicates it forever. It starts with a hard salary cap and a NFL-like way to put tags on certain players in order to keep them with their current teams. It ends with the notion that overnight no franchise can see its value plunge 35%, like the Cavs this season, just because one player leaves town. If that scenario remains viable, less and less owners will be willing to lay their money down.

To this point there hasn’t been much talk either way on what Stern really thinks. But if you’re watching in Cleveland, just know that the difference between losing for the next generation or so depends on which way the Stern wind decides to blow.

Lingering Items--Born In the USA Edition

As still another off-season Camp Mangini winds it way down, there is a real sense of déjà vu all over again about this Cleveland Browns team.

Let’s see, the Browns haven’t yet landed on a starter at quarterback. That’s got a familiar ring to it. A new offense is being installed. Been there, seen that. A few veterans aren’t happy with their contacts. Yawn. Wake me when something actually happens that’s different.

Actually, despite the painfully familiar tone to the Browns at the moment, there really are fundamental changes taking place underneath. Mangini, for all the paranoia and insecurity he brings to his position, has quickly established himself as the face and voice of the Browns as he tries to deliver to the fans the relative glory days of the late 1980s. True, that may not be saying much given the rather low profile owner Randy Lerner has always taken, but in ways that former coach Romeo Crennel never did, Mangini has positioned himself as the voice of authority on a team that’s needed some solid parenting and not the extended visit it’s had for the last several years from the good time favorite uncle.

It may seem rather high schoolish to have professional ballplayers run laps when they forget the snap count or execute the wrong play. But one of the bigger problems on this team under Crennel was its rather casual approach to the fundamentals. Having eschewed any interest in them it wasn’t much of a surprise that they struggled executing more complex concepts.

A far more interesting development has been Mangini’s unwillingness to name a starting quarterback some 10 weeks before the first preseason game is played. Never having coached either Brady Quinn or Derek Anderson, it’s a pretty understandable posture. Mangini seems to have taken a measured approach to this, indicating over time the starter will essentially reveal himself. It will be based on amorphous concepts like huddle presence as well as the tangible results from the practice and preseason fields.

Nothing earth shattering in any of that, but the thing to keep in mind is that not all competitions are created equally. It’s simply far-fetched to believe that Mangini won’t have or doesn’t have a favorite, even if undeclared, going forward. While Mangini will no doubt keep both Quinn and Anderson dancing in the dark, mainly because Mangini likes others to share his own healthy sense of paranoia, the so-called competition isn’t likely to be evaluated simply on a bald comparison of the two’s results.

Whoever is Mangini’s undeclared favorite will be evaluated in the context of it being his job to lose. The underdog then gets evaluated in terms of whether or not he did enough to unseat the favorite. The distinction between that and an open competition may be subtle but it is significant. More to the point though, it isn’t a bad thing, particularly in the context of these two quarterbacks.

Fans clearly have their favorite so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the coach probably has one as well. Things may be rough, but they’ll just get rougher if a starter doesn’t emerge or if one performs better but the other is chosen starter.

If neither player is able to grab the reigns, then this team has a leadership problem and it will matter little who ultimately gets the start. That would be big trouble and it’s worth noting that the coaching staff seemed to think this could happen by at least floating rumors out there about acquiring another quarterback in the run up to the draft. Maybe that was just a way of making freight trains run through the middle of his quarterbacks heads, but, on the other hand you can’t start a fire without a few sparks.

If one plays better but the other is named starter, then there will be a credibility problem. Think back to the last two pre-seasons. No matter which quarterback you prefer, there’s no question that Quinn looked better in those games. But Rob Chudzinksi had a favorite, and that was the bigger arm of Anderson, and as a result Quinn sat.

That process worked well for one season and was a disaster the next. But beyond all that, it put the players into either a Quinn or an Anderson camp, just one of the dozens of unhealthy developments that emerged under the prior regime.

Mangini has done a decent job of asserting his authority. But that’s the easy part. The hard part will come in exercising it appropriately.

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Never underestimate the value of public relations professionals within an organization. I can’t help but think, for example, that many of the Browns’ initial missteps in their rollout of the two-headed Mangini/Kokinis hydra could have been avoided had they not just gotten rid of their p.r. staff. Lesson learned, perhaps.

For pure spin, you’d have trouble finding anything more enticing then the announcement a few days ago that the Browns and the Indians were teaming up on a unique partnership to peddle unsold loges at each stadium.

According to various reports, the two teams are offering “fans” the chance to purchase a “Touchdown Package” for $15,000. For that they get the chance to watch the Tribe play St. Louis and Detroit and the Browns play Pittsburgh, both from the relative luxury of a suite. There’s also a more moderate package for $10,000 that includes tickets to watch the Indians play St. Louis and Cincinnati and the Browns play the Packers. It’s their lucky day, for sure, all right.

Having spent some time in the suites at both stadiums, I can definitively tell you that neither lacks for luxury or comfort. While some suite locations are better than others, that’s mostly quibbling. I’m trying to play salesman here, but the loges are a nice way to watch a game. The biggest selling point, perhaps, is that they have dedicated bathrooms. Maybe that was a bigger selling point in the days of Municipal Stadium, but it’s still a pretty good selling point nonetheless.

The question is whether or not you have a spare 10 or 15 grand floating around to take advantage of that privilege. Of course you don’t, even if you’re all day working on the highway laying down some blacktop. But don’t worry; you’re not the fans either team has in mind.

The back story in all of this is that a bad local economy has caused many businesses to feel like they’ve been working at a car wash where all it ever does is rain. It’s forced them to rethink how they spend their entertainment dollars, assuming they have any to spare. With both teams struggling on the field, a business trying to balance budgets against that backdrop makes the decision not to splurge on a loge a little easier. Many businesses right now don’t feel their missing out on entertainment opportunities by not purchasing a full season loge. In truth, if you really want to take a customer to a game, there’s plenty of tickets available right up to game time.

While the two teams are certainly to be applauded for being innovative, undoubtedly they both see this as a stop gap measure. For each team to be financially successful, they need full commitments on their loges before the seasons start. Right now it seems like there ain’t nobody that wants to come down there no more. The ability of the Indians to sell the 43 loges that are unsold this season may not have a direct line relationship to their ability to re-sign Cliff Lee, but it isn’t exactly an indirect line either. Both teams need this kind of revenue to remain competitive.

If there is any good news in this it’s that most other teams are struggling on the same streets with their lights growing dim and their access to ancillary revenue growing slim. It’s hard to get solid figures on where the Indians, for example, stand relative to their peers on this issue, but undoubtedly every team is sitting in that same lonely motel room with only a radio playing as they contemplate their dwindling luxury revenue at the moment. If this maneuver ends up giving both teams a competitive advantage, you can bet other teams in other cities will follow suit.

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It was interesting that David Stern said earlier this week that he still needed to talk to LeBron James before deciding whether or not to fine him for not shaking hands with the Orlando Magic players after game 6 and for not attending the post-game press conference; interesting because a day later Stern announced he was fining James $25,000 for those transgression.

On the day that fine was announced, James was also named the 19th most powerful celebrity in the recent annual rankings by Forbes magazine. James is on the list not only for his money but his influence. He’s got the money. He can rock all night. In fact, the $25,000 fine represents about .000625% of James’ reported $40,000,000/year income. For perspective, it’s the equivalent of a $46 fine to someone making $75,000/year. In other words, it’s not even a parking ticket. More like a night at the Regal Cinema.

The fact that Stern fined James so quickly after saying he would take his time sure sounds like the amount and announcement was coordinated with James. Stern probably made the point to James that he had to be consistent in approach and James probably said “whatever.”

The question about James’ conduct after the game six loss has received roughly the same media play as President Obama’s speech in Egypt but has been far more passionately presented. Frankly, it’s only an issue because it’s James. Nobody much cares if Wally Szcerbiak does the same thing.

James is the face of the NBA, a position he’s courted through word and deed. It does come with responsibility and my sense is that he recognizes that as well. But after everything James did to will the team to victory, he undoubtedly felt like a dog that had been beaten too much and decided to just walk away.

In the grand scale of misdeeds, this isn’t worth the mention, so I’ll do what pretty much everyone else talking about it should have done and stop.

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Twenty-five years ago this week, one of life’s seminal albums by life’s seminal artist was released, Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen This album more than any other solidified Springsteen as a cultural icon and treasure that he will forever remain and coincidentally launched the career of Courtney Cox. It leads to this week’s question to ponder: It’s 10 more years burning down the road, is Mangini still leading the Browns?

Storm Clouds

If ever there was a time to love the sport and not the players, now is that time. While it has probably happened any number of times in the past, it is difficult to remember a time when all three major league sports were operating under such serious clouds at the same time.

Baseball’s deliberate ignorance of its mushrooming steroids problem is coming home to roost for good in the next week or so when Barry Bonds finally surpasses Hank Aaron’s career home run record. The dark underbelly of those that are allowed to lace up the spikes every Sunday in the NFL is being revealed in the form of one of its most prominent players, Michael Vick, who now has been ordered not to report to training camp because of a multi-count indictment over dog fighting. Meanwhile, the NBA’s integrity hangs in the balance as the Tim Donaghy referee scandal is spreading like a wild fire. As a sports fan, if you don’t find all this just a bit dispiriting then you’ve either lost your capacity to be surprised or you just don’t care anymore.

Much has been written about each of these topics already and many more words are yet to be spilled. But it is the combined effect of all three that most serves to alienate the average sports fan at a time when none of these leagues are in a position to afford it, even if they don’t know it or don’t care about it.

The issue with Bonds, for example, has polarized the game in a way that Commission Bud Selig still can’t fully appreciate. He may fiddle over the decision as to whether to follow Bonds around in order to witness the historic event, but Selig’s overall strategy is to simply drag this issue out long enough in the hope that the fans simply lose interest. The Mitchell Committee, by all accounts, has made virtually no headway in its investigation of steroids. Selig seemingly strong-armed New York Yankees user Jason Giambi into talking to Mitchell but then reportedly let him off the hook by not even asking him about other players. What did they talk about, the weather?

Selig, as Commissioner now and as an owner when steroid use became rampant, is paralyzed by indecision and the only thing suffering in the process is the foundation of the game. What is all the more disgusting in this entire debate is the utter lack of courage by the players or their union to stand up for what is right—the good of the game. Each continues to play the “we don’t know all the facts” game as a way of avoiding the issue all together, fully failing to recognize that they all stand as unindicted co-conspirators as a result of their inaction.

The fact that Bonds is even being given the opportunity to play this year is perhaps the most reprehensible aspect of this whole matter. The grand jury testimony regarding Bonds may have been illegally leaked, but that fact doesn’t make what that testimony supposedly says about Bonds steroid use any less credible. Bonds can continue to act as if his continued abuse of the drugs was inadvertent, but he can’t hide behind the fact that he did use and baseball can’t hide behind the fact that he hasn’t been penalized for it. In fact, he’s been rewarded for it.

The fans in San Francisco are simply delusional about this issue, choosing to take the short-term feel good approach of one of their own rather than consider the long-term implications. The Giants managing general partner, Peter Magowan, who approved Bonds for the one year contract he’s playing under this season, is far more interested in the additional revenue that the circus that is Bonds will generate than in protecting the game at any level. And Selig, he just wrings his hands.

In many of the same ways that Bonds and his co-horts has already threatened the integrity of baseball, so too does what is taking place in the NBA threaten the integrity of that game.

The reason gambling is, in many ways, worse for a sport than illegal drugs begins and ends with the simple fact that it is the tipping point between sport and theatre. You can always toss out a druggie or two from the game, but trying to rid the sport of a reputation that its outcomes are pre-ordained is a much more vexing and serious problem.

The story that is emerging about Tim Donaghy will not be easily swept under the rug by Commissioner David Stern, despite his attempt to minimize the damage by letting the story break during the death days of July. Stern’s performance, and it was a performance, during his press conference Tuesday morning showed him at his shakiest. Clearly traumatized by the issue, he nonetheless gave fans little comfort by essentially creating more questions than he answered.

Two things in particular stand out. First, Stern gave the fans no idea how long the investigation was going on or how it even came to light. Was the league watching Donaghy or was the league contacted by the FBI? It pushes the limits of his credibility for Stern to say, as he did, that this problem begins and ends with Donaghy. If Donaghy was indeed making phantom calls, how is it that none of his fellow referees noticed, and if they noticed, didn’t say anything? If that’s true, doesn’t make them at least partially complicit, even if they didn’t reap any benefits personally? Any referee in any sport can and will blow a call. But if a referee is doing enough of that in order to deliberately alter the outcome of a game, certainly someone in the league had to notice before it would have otherwise been brought to their attention.

And if they did notice, how could they not do something sooner? This is the second thing that stands out about the Stern press conference. He said that the league certainly would have liked to have terminated Donaghy sooner but was told that the investigation was best aided by not terminating him until he did. That may be true if the ultimate goal is criminal prosecution, but it seems like the ultimate goal for the NBA should have been protecting the game first and foremost and then let the criminal justice process have its hacks at him.

Here’s why. If Stern knew that Donaghy was affecting the outcome of games and did nothing about it in order to let the investigation run its course, how can we be sure that the games Donaghy affected didn’t impact the standings? And if they impacted the standings, it is likely that they impacted who qualified for the playoffs and who didn’t, the seeding of the teams in those playoffs and, ultimately, the pecking order in the NBA draft. By letting the investigation run its course, how can any franchise be certain that it hasn’t been negatively impacted for years to come? But it this way—if the difference is one or two additional ping pong balls in the lottery that ultimate gets you, say LeBron James and not Darko Milicic, wouldn’t that bother you as a fan?

The answer, of course, is that you can never be sure. And while that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to blow up the sport, it does mean that Stern has to do more, much more, than rail against Donaghy as some sort of rogue or that this was some sort of isolated incident. Even if that is possibly true, the effect of his actions is hardly isolated.

It may very well be that some fans don’t mind having their outcomes scripted. That’s why the WWE is so popular. But in any sport where the outcome isn’t supposed to be preordained, such as basketball, no issue threatens to bring it down more quickly than someone on the inside who’s been gaming the system. And whether Stern wants to admit it or not, putting in place a whole new set of procedures to safeguard the integrity and the transparency of his sport is what it will take to even begin scratching the surface of removing the whispers that will inevitably followed the next time LeBron James gets clobbered going to the basket and the whistle isn’t blown.

As for the NFL and its Michael Vick problem, it may not threaten the league in the same way that the Donaghy incident threatens the NBA, but it is a public relations nightmare of the first order that can’t be minimized, either.

Commission Roger Goodell has been rightfully applauded for drawing a line in the sand early on that bad behavior will not be tolerated. He, too, has rightfully held up Adam “Pacman” Jones as the poster child by suspending him a year. It wouldn’t be too much to ask, frankly, for him to consider suspending the entire Bengals team for a year or so given the institutional problems it has. But having taken himself so far out on that limb, Goodell finds himself hamstrung by the Vick incident in a way he never anticipated.

The indictment against Vick couldn’t be more damning and includes charges of interstate illegal gambling, dog fighting and animal cruelty. It is sufficiently well detailed and documented (read a copy of the indictment here) to make it reasonable to draw some conclusions about Vick, at least in the same way Goodell drew some conclusions about Pacman following his indictments.

It did Goodell no good to initially avoid the suspension of Vick by trying to distinguish his situation from the numerous run-ins that Pacman has found himself in the center of. What Goodell didn’t realize is how heinous Vick’s alleged conduct is viewed by the average person. Goodell also didn’t appreciate the ability of the internet as an organizing tool, which was on full display when PETA and others picketed outside of Goodell’s office in New York last week. When PETA showed up in Atlanta next that was enough for Goodell to at least take a mid-term approach and order Vick not to report for camp until the NFL’s investigation is complete.

If the NFL has any hopes of surviving this public relations disaster, one of two things need to happen. Either the indictment against Vick has to get dropped or the NFL has to keep Vick on the sidelines until the legal system runs its course. The first is unlikely and the second will undoubtedly be challenged by the union. But that is one case that Goodell should be more than willing to take on, for it’s far better to have an arbitrator force Goodell to let Vick back at work than it is for Goodell to appear as though he’s making an exception for Vick because of his status in the league.

While no one is predicting the ultimate demise of any of the leagues, what this does do is further cement in the minds of the fans that investing in them and particularly the people who play them doesn’t come without great risk. Unfortunately, it’s a message that isn’t likely to register all that much with any of these leagues. After all, right now, if you’re willing to part with $260, you can get an authentic Michael Vick jersey by ordering it through the NFL’s official web site.