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Below are the rules of Pacers Digest. After you have read them, you will have a very good sense of where we are coming from, what we expect, what we don't want to see, and how we react to things.

Rule #1

Pacers Digest is intended to be a place to discuss basketball without having to deal with the kinds of behaviors or attitudes that distract people from sticking with the discussion of the topics at hand. These unwanted distractions can come in many forms, and admittedly it can sometimes be tricky to pin down each and every kind that can rear its ugly head, but we feel that the following examples and explanations cover at least a good portion of that ground and should at least give people a pretty good idea of the kinds of things we actively discourage:

"Anyone who __________ is a liar / a fool / an idiot / a blind homer / has their head buried in the sand / a blind hater / doesn't know basketball / doesn't watch the games"

"People with intelligence will agree with me when I say that __________"

"Only stupid people think / believe / do ___________"

"I can't wait to hear something from PosterX when he/she sees that **insert a given incident or current event that will have probably upset or disappointed PosterX here**"

"He/she is just delusional"

"This thread is stupid / worthless / embarrassing"

"I'm going to take a moment to point and / laugh at PosterX / GroupOfPeopleY who thought / believed *insert though/belief here*"

"Remember when PosterX said OldCommentY that no longer looks good? "

In general, if a comment goes from purely on topic to something 'ad hominem' (personal jabs, personal shots, attacks, flames, however you want to call it, towards a person, or a group of people, or a given city/state/country of people), those are most likely going to be found intolerable.

We also dissuade passive aggressive behavior. This can be various things, but common examples include statements that are basically meant to imply someone is either stupid or otherwise incapable of holding a rational conversation. This can include (but is not limited to) laughing at someone's conclusions rather than offering an honest rebuttal, asking people what game they were watching, or another common problem is Poster X will say "that player isn't that bad" and then Poster Y will say something akin to "LOL you think that player is good". We're not going to tolerate those kinds of comments out of respect for the community at large and for the sake of trying to just have an honest conversation.

Now, does the above cover absolutely every single kind of distraction that is unwanted? Probably not, but you should by now have a good idea of the general types of things we will be discouraging. The above examples are meant to give you a good feel for / idea of what we're looking for. If something new or different than the above happens to come along and results in the same problem (that being, any other attitude or behavior that ultimately distracts from actually just discussing the topic at hand, or that is otherwise disrespectful to other posters), we can and we will take action to curb this as well, so please don't take this to mean that if you managed to technically avoid saying something exactly like one of the above examples that you are then somehow off the hook.

That all having been said, our goal is to do so in a generally kind and respectful way, and that doesn't mean the moment we see something we don't like that somebody is going to be suspended or banned, either. It just means that at the very least we will probably say something about it, quite possibly snipping out the distracting parts of the post in question while leaving alone the parts that are actually just discussing the topics, and in the event of a repeating or excessive problem, then we will start issuing infractions to try to further discourage further repeat problems, and if it just never seems to improve, then finally suspensions or bans will come into play. We would prefer it never went that far, and most of the time for most of our posters, it won't ever have to.

A slip up every once and a while is pretty normal, but, again, when it becomes repetitive or excessive, something will be done. Something occasional is probably going to be let go (within reason), but when it starts to become habitual or otherwise a pattern, odds are very good that we will step in.

There's always a small minority that like to push people's buttons and/or test their own boundaries with regards to the administrators, and in the case of someone acting like that, please be aware that this is not a court of law, but a private website run by people who are simply trying to do the right thing as they see it. If we feel that you are a special case that needs to be dealt with in an exceptional way because your behavior isn't explicitly mirroring one of our above examples of what we generally discourage, we can and we will take atypical action to prevent this from continuing if you are not cooperative with us.

Also please be aware that you will not be given a pass simply by claiming that you were 'only joking,' because quite honestly, when someone really is just joking, for one thing most people tend to pick up on the joke, including the person or group that is the target of the joke, and for another thing, in the event where an honest joke gets taken seriously and it upsets or angers someone, the person who is truly 'only joking' will quite commonly go out of his / her way to apologize and will try to mend fences. People who are dishonest about their statements being 'jokes' do not do so, and in turn that becomes a clear sign of what is really going on. It's nothing new.

In any case, quite frankly, the overall quality and health of the entire forum's community is more important than any one troublesome user will ever be, regardless of exactly how a problem is exhibiting itself, and if it comes down to us having to make a choice between you versus the greater health and happiness of the entire community, the community of this forum will win every time.

Lastly, there are also some posters, who are generally great contributors and do not otherwise cause any problems, who sometimes feel it's their place to provoke or to otherwise 'mess with' that small minority of people described in the last paragraph, and while we possibly might understand why you might feel you WANT to do something like that, the truth is we can't actually tolerate that kind of behavior from you any more than we can tolerate the behavior from them. So if we feel that you are trying to provoke those other posters into doing or saying something that will get themselves into trouble, then we will start to view you as a problem as well, because of the same reason as before: The overall health of the forum comes first, and trying to stir the pot with someone like that doesn't help, it just makes it worse. Some will simply disagree with this philosophy, but if so, then so be it because ultimately we have to do what we think is best so long as it's up to us.

If you see a problem that we haven't addressed, the best and most appropriate course for a forum member to take here is to look over to the left of the post in question. See underneath that poster's name, avatar, and other info, down where there's a little triangle with an exclamation point (!) in it? Click that. That allows you to report the post to the admins so we can definitely notice it and give it a look to see what we feel we should do about it. Beyond that, obviously it's human nature sometimes to want to speak up to the poster in question who has bothered you, but we would ask that you try to refrain from doing so because quite often what happens is two or more posters all start going back and forth about the original offending post, and suddenly the entire thread is off topic or otherwise derailed. So while the urge to police it yourself is understandable, it's best to just report it to us and let us handle it. Thank you!

All of the above is going to be subject to a case by case basis, but generally and broadly speaking, this should give everyone a pretty good idea of how things will typically / most often be handled.

Rule #2

If the actions of an administrator inspire you to make a comment, criticism, or express a concern about it, there is a wrong place and a couple of right places to do so.

The wrong place is to do so in the original thread in which the administrator took action. For example, if a post gets an infraction, or a post gets deleted, or a comment within a larger post gets clipped out, in a thread discussing Paul George, the wrong thing to do is to distract from the discussion of Paul George by adding your off topic thoughts on what the administrator did.

The right places to do so are:

A) Start a thread about the specific incident you want to talk about on the Feedback board. This way you are able to express yourself in an area that doesn't throw another thread off topic, and this way others can add their two cents as well if they wish, and additionally if there's something that needs to be said by the administrators, that is where they will respond to it.

B) Send a private message to the administrators, and they can respond to you that way.

If this is done the wrong way, those comments will be deleted, and if it's a repeating problem then it may also receive an infraction as well.

Rule #3

If a poster is bothering you, and an administrator has not or will not deal with that poster to the extent that you would prefer, you have a powerful tool at your disposal, one that has recently been upgraded and is now better than ever: The ability to ignore a user.

When you ignore a user, you will unfortunately still see some hints of their existence (nothing we can do about that), however, it does the following key things:

A) Any post they make will be completely invisible as you scroll through a thread.

B) The new addition to this feature: If someone QUOTES a user you are ignoring, you do not have to read who it was, or what that poster said, unless you go out of your way to click on a link to find out who it is and what they said.

To utilize this feature, from any page on Pacers Digest, scroll to the top of the page, look to the top right where it says 'Settings' and click that. From the settings page, look to the left side of the page where it says 'My Settings', and look down from there until you see 'Edit Ignore List' and click that. From here, it will say 'Add a Member to Your List...' Beneath that, click in the text box to the right of 'User Name', type in or copy & paste the username of the poster you are ignoring, and once their name is in the box, look over to the far right and click the 'Okay' button. All done!

Rule #4

Regarding infractions, currently they carry a value of one point each, and that point will expire in 31 days. If at any point a poster is carrying three points at the same time, that poster will be suspended until the oldest of the three points expires.

Rule #5

When you share or paste content or articles from another website, you must include the URL/link back to where you found it, who wrote it, and what website it's from. Said content will be removed if this doesn't happen.

An example:

If I copy and paste an article from the Indianapolis Star website, I would post something like this:

http://www.linktothearticlegoeshere.com/article
Title of the Article
Author's Name
Indianapolis Star

Rule #6

We cannot tolerate illegal videos on Pacers Digest. This means do not share any links to them, do not mention any websites that host them or link to them, do not describe how to find them in any way, and do not ask about them. Posts doing anything of the sort will be removed, the offenders will be contacted privately, and if the problem becomes habitual, you will be suspended, and if it still persists, you will probably be banned.

The legal means of watching or listening to NBA games are NBA League Pass Broadband (for US, or for International; both cost money) and NBA Audio League Pass (which is free). Look for them on NBA.com.

Rule #7

Provocative statements in a signature, or as an avatar, or as the 'tagline' beneath a poster's username (where it says 'Member' or 'Administrator' by default, if it is not altered) are an unwanted distraction that will more than likely be removed on sight. There can be shades of gray to this, but in general this could be something political or religious that is likely going to provoke or upset people, or otherwise something that is mean-spirited at the expense of a poster, a group of people, or a population.

It may or may not go without saying, but this goes for threads and posts as well, particularly when it's not made on the off-topic board (Market Square).

We do make exceptions if we feel the content is both innocuous and unlikely to cause social problems on the forum (such as wishing someone a Merry Christmas or a Happy Easter), and we also also make exceptions if such topics come up with regards to a sports figure (such as the Lance Stephenson situation bringing up discussions of domestic abuse and the law, or when Jason Collins came out as gay and how that lead to some discussion about gay rights).

However, once the discussion seems to be more/mostly about the political issues instead of the sports figure or his specific situation, the thread is usually closed.

Rule #8

We prefer self-restraint and/or modesty when making jokes or off topic comments in a sports discussion thread. They can be fun, but sometimes they derail or distract from a topic, and we don't want to see that happen. If we feel it is a problem, we will either delete or move those posts from the thread.

Rule #9

Generally speaking, we try to be a "PG-13" rated board, and we don't want to see sexual content or similarly suggestive content. Vulgarity is a more muddled issue, though again we prefer things to lean more towards "PG-13" than "R". If we feel things have gone too far, we will step in.

Rule #10

We like small signatures, not big signatures. The bigger the signature, the more likely it is an annoying or distracting signature.

Rule #11

Do not advertise anything without talking about it with the administrators first. This includes advertising with your signature, with your avatar, through private messaging, and/or by making a thread or post.
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Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

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  • Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

    http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baske...ies/50687376/1

    NBA LOCKOUT WILL HAVE HUGE IMPACT ON CITIES

    Harry Buffalo is one of the downtown restaurants in Cleveland that counts heavily on the beer-drinking, burger-devouring NBA crowd to keep its doors open. Operations manager John Adams has taped an internet report outside the kitchen for his waitresses, bartenders and cooks to read.

    With yellow highlighter, he's shaded the grim news of the NBA labor impasse for his employees, some who might soon lose their jobs if there's no deal.
    This is where the lockout hits home, and hits hardest.

    "It's rough," Adams said, glancing toward The Q. "I've got three single moms on my wait staff and two single dads in the kitchen. I've got their 11 children to think about. It's painful when it's out of my control, when I have to put the business first and say I can't have 15 servers on staff because we don't have the business."

    This week, the NBA canceled its preseason. Monday, Commissioner David Stern might wipe out the first two weeks of the regular season if his millionaire players and even wealthier owners can't agree on how to split revenue and cap salaries.

    Sure, players are temporarily out of work and will have to find ways to maintain their skills. But Kobe Bryant has the luxury of potentially signing with an Italian team to do that, earning a big salary until the labor unrest settles.

    Others aren't as fortunate.

    The loss of one game, let alone 10 or maybe all 82, will have a devastating impact on workers with jobs dependent on pro basketball's six-month-plus season. A few clubs have already trimmed their staffs and more layoffs could be forthcoming if the discussions drag on. Then there are those who don't work directly for an NBA club but who still depend on the excitement the league brings to town.

    Ushers, security personnel, parking lot attendants, concession workers, restaurant employees and others all stand to have their hours cut or join the country's 14 million unemployed.

    "Yeah, financially, I'm worried," said waitress Jeannette Lauersdorf, a single mother of two, who on a quiet Wednesday afternoon is serving six guests at three tables inside Harry Buffalo. On a night the Cavs are playing, the place has a 30-minute wait for a table. "We've got bills to pay."

    Nerves, already frayed in a depressed economy, are unraveling.

    As it was during the NFL's labor dispute, certain cities around the league will bear more of a burden than others until the NBA gets bouncing again.
    Markets such as Orlando, Memphis, Salt Lake City and Portland, with no other income being generated by a major professional sports franchise, could be facing a long winter.

    At this point, there's no telling how long the lockout will last, but NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver projected losses if the season's opening two weeks are canceled in "the millions of dollars."

    "We've spent a lot of time with our teams walking through those scenarios of lost games," Silver said. "The damage is enormous, will be enormous."
    While Cleveland might be undergoing a minor renaissance with new construction, including a downtown casino being built by a group headed by Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, unemployment remains high. There's a thriving one-block strip of East Fourth Street, where upscale eateries lure guests no matter the time of year.

    But closer to the Q, some bars and restaurants are still recovering from the financial aftershock caused by superstar LeBron James leaving.
    When James was with the Cavs, the Gateway District crawled with fans, some who bought season tickets in 2009 for last season — under the assumption their favorite player would stay in Cleveland. But now that he's in Miami with the Heat, and the Cavs are no longer a title contender, fans aren't flocking downtown.
    "Even if there is a season, I think we're going to take a hit," said Caitlin Cassidy, manager at Harry Buffalo. "People love the Cavs, but they love the Cavs more when they're winning. Even last year, people who had season tickets didn't come all the time. Cleveland fans are a special breed. They come down and watch the Cavs and drink beer and hang out, but it's definitely not been the same without LeBron."

    Memphis could experience a similar dropoff if the lockout deepens.
    A young team on the upswing, the Grizzlies captivated the city last spring with its playoff run. Fans poured out of sold-out FedEx Forum and into the Beale Street entertainment area to toast each postseason win, and there's hope similar celebrations will take place this April, May — and maybe into June.

    The club reports season-ticket sales are up. But tickets have no value without a season.

    "We have a franchise we feel is locked and loaded to be very competitive for the next four, five, six years barring injuries," said Kevin Kane, president and CEO of the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau. "We've got a product the city's really excited about, the city's engaged with."
    Orlando's situation is different.

    In February, the Magic are slated to host NBA All-Star Weekend, an international event projected to bring $100 million to the city. But the lockout's uncertain endgame is delaying plans from being finalized, and already local businesses are scrambling to help offset losses if more games are canceled at year-old Amway Arena.

    Owners of upscale Draft Global Beer Lounge and Grill, which opened across from Amway in March, fear it could be a tough season ahead.

    "The economic impact would be detrimental," co-owner Willie Fisher said. "This location is one of the main reasons we chose this location."

    During the winter, Utah fans eat up the Jazz and Crown Burgers.
    From the parking lot of his restaurant, Mike Katsanevas can see the edge of EnergySolutions Arena, home of the Jazz. Katsanevas, whose family has been selling burgers, including one crowned with pastrami, for three decades, estimates a lost NBA season would offset his business by 25-30%— and not just this season.

    Katsanevas predicts fans won't renew their season tickets.
    He survived the last work stoppage in 1999, but times are different.
    "People were upset and had a right to be. Everybody needs to be paid for their jobs," he said. "But how much money do you need to make? Let's be honest here. Everybody else is suffering (in this economy). I don't want to bad-mouth players or the owners, but how much money do these guys really need to keep making?"

    Cassidy said while the vibe around Harry Buffalo's staff is upbeat and hopeful that the lockout will be lifted, several employees are making plans just in case. A few of her waitresses have picked up shifts elsewhere, and she's being honest with any new applicants who come through the door.
    In days and weeks ahead, the staff might shrink.

    "It's scary for us, too," she said. "Because who is going to want to work here if there's no customers? I always tell applicants that the good times always make up for the bad times. Now, there may not be any good times."

  • #2
    Re: Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

    It’s A Numbers Game

    by Allen Powell II

    All numbers are created equal, but some numbers are more equal than others.

    by Allen Powell II

    The NBA Lockout is about numbers, but not the ones people think.

    Numbers like 53 percent and 50 percent have been tossed around for weeks. Everyone has heard the terms millions and billions as well. Fans have been told about “BRI” splits, salary cap thresholds and rising revenues for days, upon days. Numbers, numbers, numbers, this lockout is clearly about numbers.

    But, there are some numbers that don’t get discussed that often. Like the number 450. That’s how many jobs there are for NBA-caliber players every year. A minimum of 60 of those jobs are dedicated to first round-draft picks who are rookies or second-year players. I would estimate that at least 30 more jobs are committed to rookies playing out the third and fourth years of their rookie contracts. That’s 90 jobs, and possibly more than 100, set aside every year. Do the math and it comes to at least 20 percent of the available jobs in the NBA.

    Basically, every year at least 20 percent of the NBA finds itself replaced by younger, less experienced talent that’s willing to work for less money. Moreover, that 20 percent of the League is playing at a fairly discounted rate based since rookie contracts are set by League mandate and are based on draft position. The annual pay for the No. 1 pick is slightly more than $5 million per year while the pay of pick No. 30 is $1 million annually.

    That means that salary of the No. 1 pick is only slightly more than the “average” NBA salary. Look closely, and it appears some very lucky teams get the value of a potential superstar on the budget of what the 225th-best player in the League should earn.

    Now, consider the number five. That’s the average length of an NBA career in years. That number also represents how many years it takes 60 percent of the year to blow through their career earnings and wind up bankrupt once the paychecks stop coming in. It’s the number of African American team presidents in the NBA, and it’s about half the number of black coaches in the League as well. The League’s playing ranks are 83 percent African American, by the way.

    How about the number 18? That’s how many of the League’s owners have owned their teams for longer than 10 years, or double the average career of the typical NBA player. That includes the seven owners who have had their teams for an average of 26 years, or five times the typical NBA career, if you’re calculating at home.

    There are other numbers to consider, like 2.5 percent, which is the average annual increase in player salaries under the recently expired collective bargaining agreement, and 3.3 percent, which is the increase in total revenues over the same period. Don’t forget the number 1.641. That’s how many billions of dollars League owners took home after paying all player salary costs last year.

    If you average that number, every team in the League received $53 million based on the total Basketball Related Income collected. That money can be used to pay all necessary costs, and the rest is profit. However, that figure doesn’t include 60 percent of the revenue from luxury suites and arena signage sales. That is excluded from the BRI pot, just like 50 percent of the revenues from arena naming rights. All that money goes directly into the team’s coffers.

    That’s a lot of numbers. But, these numbers are important because they provide give a better sense of the power balance and cost of this lockout. In one year alone, the players would collectively lose hundreds of millions of dollars that most of them will have no chance of ever recouping. This lockout was instituted by owners to make more money in a business operation that’s already set up to make them a lot of money for a very long time.

    Unfortunately, many fans say they’re tired of hearing about numbers, particularly if those numbers aren’t listed in box scores. They are tired of boardrooms, business suits and Billy Hunter.

    Fans don’t want to hear about how much money players will lose, or how much money owners have lost. The only number most fans care about is the number “1” preceded by the word “November.” That’s the day the NBA regular season would start if no games are lost. But, if fans truly care about that number, then they need to pay attention to all these other numbers.

    Then they can understand why 450 are still battling 30.
    So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

    If you've done 6 impossible things today?
    Then why not have Breakfast at Milliways!

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

      Bully Tactics

      The Commish on the latest in the NBA labor dispute.

      by Vincent Thomas / @vincecathomas

      NBA owners are making public opinion history. It takes a hubris-dripping amount of greed to make professional athletes seem like quasi-activists for worker rights, but that’s basically where we’re at. In today’s post-Enron/”Wall Street Bailout” America, filthy rich billionaires can’t be so cavalier about their money-grubbing, even if, on the other side of the labor line, stands one of the country’s pariah archetypes, the “rich, spoiled, millionaire athlete.”

      With the players union and owners unable to make progress on a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that would end the lockout and save the scheduled start of the season, the League said the first two weeks of the regular season would be canceled if a new deal was not reached by Monday. In other news, the bad guys are now clearly identifiable after a summer of ambiguity as to which side held claim to the moral high-ground real estate. The divvying up of basketball-related income, a.k.a. BRI, is what this all about now, and the owners’ M.O. is one of uncheckable, unwarranted greed. They know the game is blowing up all over the world—almost entirely due to its marketable players—and with revenues on the rise, they want a bigger share than they deserve. It might actually be time to put love of basketball on the backburner and root for the players—just on principal.

      When this whole labor dispute began this summer, there were basketball issues to be resolved. Both sides—the owners and the players—tried to posture, convince the public and media that they stood on the side of fairness, honor. But it wasn’t about them—it was about basketball. There was a competitive imbalance, some teams were losing money and the system needed to be fixed. Whichever side was pushing for concessions or restructuring that benefited The Game, was the side to root for. That often meant siding with the owners.

      Where I come from, professional athletes are almost never begrudged their salaries. “Get your money, man,” is a maxim. But if there’s a way, via a new CBA, for them to stay rich, while also putting into place some indirect, latent policing measures for the humans that make franchise decisions, then that’s what hoops fans should root for. (As always, for anything CBA-related, you can check Larry Coon’s FAQ for the best explanation in the biz.)

      Morality, even fairness, wasn’t really an issue. All you had to do to determine which side was worthy of support was ask, “which side is arguing for what I think will make the League better and/or give my favorite squad a better chance to compete?”

      Last month, the owners’ “Why We Need This Lockout” poster boy, Rashard Lewis got candid: “Talk to the owner. He gave me the deal,” said Lewis, who is—no joke—the second highest paid player in the League. “When it comes to contracts, the players aren’t sitting there negotiating that contract. I’m sitting at home and my agent calls me, saying, ‘I got a max on the table.’ I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘Naw, that’s too much. Go out there and negotiate $20 or $30 [million] less.’ ”

      Exactly. It pains me to quote Pink songs when referencing the NBA, but she says she’s her own personal “hazard” in “Don’t Let Me Get Me.” That’s like an ode to NBA owners and personnel executives. Any system that has built-in checks and balances to either keep execs from making stupid decisions or helps franchises recover from the bonehead decisions quicker is a good thing.

      As a guest writer for ESPN.com, the outspoken and thoughtful Etan Thomas wrote an impassioned (but smarmy) piece from the mind of the owners that included this passage: “We also know that if teams controlled their own spending, hired the right people to evaluate talent and made better decisions, they wouldn’t be operating in the red.”

      The problem is that there’s not a whole lot of rationale when it comes to pro sports decision-making. So the owners wanted things like a hard cap, a revision of guaranteed contacts, shorter length contracts, an amnesty clause (which would allow squads to waive one player contract without it counting against the cap)—things that would provide, as it was termed early in this process, “profit certainty.” You could also refer to them as “idiot measures.”

      By now, however, both sides have come to, at least, tacit agreement on many of the actual basketball/competition-impacting issues—salary rollbacks are out, there will be a “less hard” cap, new contracts lengths appropriately shortened. So what are they left with? BRI.

      This is how the Players Association president characterized the negotiations in a letter to the union: “The owners have long been pushing for significant economic relief and we have differences about the extent of the owners’ losses. There have been numerous proposals to shift more dollars to the owners’ side and help cover the increased cost of running this business. In our last formal proposal, we offered to reduce our share of BRI to 52.4 percent, and then gradually increase that percentage over the course of a six-year deal to 54 percent, yielding an average of 53 percent. This offer—measured against our current system which guarantees us 57 percent of BRI—shifts an average of $185 million per year to the owners’ side, for a total of $1.1 billion over six years…

      “The owners, on the other hand, have been in a far different place. Prior to yesterday, they had stood on an offer averaging 46 percent of BRI, rolling back this year’s salaries and benefits to $2 billion flat and growing very slowly over 10 years. Yesterday, they hoped to exchange back and forth offers in an effort to bring our proposal as far down as possible. They began the day offering an increase of just over one point—to an average of 47 percent. (They characterized the proposal as a 50-50 split, but with a new $350 million expense deduction, their offer would actually result in the players receiving only 47 percent of current BRI.) We informed them, in no uncertain terms, that such an offer was unacceptable, and that we would not engage in this type of horse trading.”

      “Nobody pays to see the owners.” That’s not a cliché’, that’s a truism. Yet, while the players continue to show a willingness to concede, the owners want to gobble up the money the players make them. And they have all the leverage. Players are rich because of the NBA. The owners—many landing in Forbes annual list of the richest Americans—were living like Ken Jeong’s Slim Chin character before they owned a team. Owning a team is not their main source of income. Like Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote, it’s more like owning a piece of art, one that they can sell for upwards of $400 million, if ever they get the urge.

      The owners are engaging in bully tactics. Bullying has recently become a hot topic in this country. There’s a government website dedicated to stopping it. America hates bullies now. And with the shameful income-gap chasm growing wider, America is starting to despise billionaires, especially bully-billionaires. It’s crazy, but the owners have actually turned the players into millionaire victims.

      Doomsday is a few days away. The owners can either back off or keep giving the players wedgies.

      Vincent Thomas is a columnist and feature writer for SLAM, a contributing columnist and commentator for ESPN. You can email him your feedback at vincethomas79@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @vincecathomas.
      So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

      If you've done 6 impossible things today?
      Then why not have Breakfast at Milliways!

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

        450 vs 30. If only it were that simple. On the 30 side you have untold numbers of employees who are employed because of the teams. And most if not all will not be making league minimum salary. Most will work 30-40 years or more. I have little sympathy for either side. But it is not as simple at 450 vs 30.
        {o,o}
        |)__)
        -"-"-

        Comment


        • #5
          Re: Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

          Originally posted by owl View Post
          450 vs 30. If only it were that simple. On the 30 side you have untold numbers of employees who are employed because of the teams. And most if not all will not be making league minimum salary. Most will work 30-40 years or more. I have little sympathy for either side. But it is not as simple at 450 vs 30.
          It is if you make the 450 responsible like so many do.

          the 450 did not fire the ones who worked for the Lakers, one of the 30 did and so on.
          So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

          If you've done 6 impossible things today?
          Then why not have Breakfast at Milliways!

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          • #6
            Re: Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

            Originally posted by able View Post
            It is if you make the 450 responsible like so many do.

            the 450 did not fire the ones who worked for the Lakers, one of the 30 did and so on.
            Even at that, able, it is still not that simple.

            In fact, Lakers fired come of their employees not just because they chose to fire them. They fired them directly due to the fact that the 30 and the 450 could not come to an agreement. So, in fact, although the ultimate decision was made by Laker management, actions taken (or not taken depending on your POV) by the 450, as well as the 30, compelled them to do so.

            So folks who are losing their jobs due to a lack of an agreement can blame either side just about equally. Both sides are to blame.

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            • #7
              Re: Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

              Originally posted by beast23 View Post
              Even at that, able, it is still not that simple.

              In fact, Lakers fired come of their employees not just because they chose to fire them. They fired them directly due to the fact that the 30 and the 450 could not come to an agreement. So, in fact, although the ultimate decision was made by Laker management, actions taken (or not taken depending on your POV) by the 450, as well as the 30, compelled them to do so.

              So folks who are losing their jobs due to a lack of an agreement can blame either side just about equally. Both sides are to blame.
              I see one side giving up and i see one side taking, i can totally see the first side having the opinion they have given enough.

              It is ultimately clear now that this was never about competitiveness, or balancing the league or whatever terms they come up with, it was all about the money and precisely about how much more money the owners could get from it all.

              So far they 200 million a year more, some shorter contracts, a possible amnesty period, some more limitations on lt land, yet they want more.

              bucket-->drops-> full --> over flowing--> no season

              indeed bullying, numbers, why are some of you so dead set on blaming the players and wondering why they dont give in?

              BRI is not total income, despite some sites like espn making it sound so, a chunk is out already so if you read the numbers thread, 53 mio becomes at least 60 mio, do the Pacers really need to spend that kind of money to run the team?
              (Players are paid from BRI, since they got escrow this year, income was high and outgoing (total salary) was lower or equal to 57% of that BRI) meaning at least 60 million for a team like the Pacers to pay for overhead, with no rent and maintenance surely you are not telling me those are all cost.
              So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

              If you've done 6 impossible things today?
              Then why not have Breakfast at Milliways!

              Comment


              • #8
                Re: Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

                A counterpoint. Why the lockout will have no effect on local economies. I'm probably more inclined to side with this take if only because the authors did some academic research on the subject. The evidence in the first article seems mostly anecdotal and speculative.

                http://www.slate.com/articles/sports..._e.single.html

                No Basketball, No Problem

                Why a lost NBA season wouldn’t be a disaster for local economies.

                By Neil deMause|Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011, at 12:30 PM ET

                LeBron James arrives to the NBA labor negotiations at The Waldorf Astoria September 30, 2011 in New York City.
                Photo by Michael Cohen/Getty Images.

                After another fruitless round of talks between the players and owners, it looks like the start of the NBA season—if not the whole thing—will soon be wiped out. It's not only hoops fans who are anxious at the prospect of a lost season. By all accounts, cities with NBA franchises have also been cringing in terror. With the start of the season a month away, we've already seen predictions of a "devastating" impact on Charlotte, N.C., businesses, a $55 million loss to the city of Indianapolis, and certain disaster for sports bars in Portland, Ore.

                This kind of reporting is a staple of sports work stoppages, and it's easy to see why. Idle turnstiles and shuttered souvenir stands are obvious indicators of lost economic activity, and an easy visual symbol of the impact of the sports world’s regular strikes and lockouts. The problem with these stories is that there’s no evidence to support any of their claims. The lost city revenues, the devastation for local businesses—none of it ever happens.
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                "There is no way the NBA lockout will have any significant economic consequences," says the University of Alberta’s Brad Humphreys, an economist who has studied the effects of sports work stoppages. Humphreys' most in-depth investigation came in 2001, when he and Dennis Coates of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County set out to determine the effects of the lockout that wiped out the first half of the 1998-99 NBA season. Since economic data weren't yet available for those years, Humphreys and Coates instead focused on five previous MLB and NFL work stoppages, starting with the mass holdout over baseball's pension plan that briefly disrupted spring training in 1969 and running through the strike that wiped out the last two months of the 1994 MLB season and that year's World Series.
                The economists looked at per-capita income data from metropolitan areas that were home to striking (or locked out) sports teams. They found that even when ticket sales stopped, average income in a city didn't change. At all. "Work stoppages in baseball and football have never had significant impacts on local economies," they wrote. As icing on the cake, they looked at NBA cities that had lost their teams and found the same thing: bupkis. "The departure of a franchise in any sport, particularly in basketball, has never significantly lowered real per capita personal income in a metropolitan area,” Humphreys and Coates wrote.

                Still, some critics objected. Humphreys and Coates, they noted, had looked for changes in year-long income data as a result of strikes that in some cases lasted only a couple of weeks—the equivalent of trying to hear a whisper at a My Bloody Valentine show.

                So, five years later, Robert Baade, Robert Baumann, and Victor Matheson tried a different tack. That trio of economists zeroed in on the state of Florida, looking at how sales tax receipts changed during every MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL labor stoppage since 1982. Baade, a Lake Forest College professor who's spent the better part of three decades studying the impact of pro sports teams, explains that they picked Florida because it reports sales tax data on a monthly basis. "You're really looking for a needle in a haystack," he says of trying to divine economic effects on a whole city from a single sports team's absence. "But if you're looking at something like tax revenues, you're reducing the size of the haystack."

                The new study delivered the same results as the earlier one: When leagues shut down, sales tax receipts keep chugging along. In Miami, the disappearance of the Heat during the 1998-99 NBA lockout showed an extremely weak 0.00987 correlation with sales tax figures; the 2004-05 lockout of the Florida Panthers has an even slighter effect, at 0.00739. And almost as often, the direction of the signs ran the opposite way: The 1994-95 NHL lockout had a negative correlation of 0.00353 with sales taxes—if anything, people in Miami appeared to be spending more as a result of the Panthers being on the shelf.

                "If professional sports have a positive impact on a region’s economy, then one should expect a consistent pattern of increasing taxable sales following franchise expansions and the construction of new stadiums and a pattern of decreasing taxable sales ratios during periods of labor disruptions," the three economists reasoned. Instead, "no statistically significant effect on taxable sales is found from the sudden absence of professional sports due to strikes and lockouts."

                It may seem counterintuitive—how can the shuttering of a major business not affect the local economy? But economists have an explanation, or rather two.
                The first is a well-established phenomenon called the substitution effect. When people choose to spend money on one entertainment activity, that's also a decision not to spend that money elsewhere. Every basketball ticket you buy is a movie ticket not purchased, or a fancy dinner not eaten. If the NBA season doesn't start on time, Charlotte and Indianapolis and Portland will find something else to spend money on: college basketball, movies, restaurants.

                In that sense, sports expenditures should be looked at less as new economic activity than as spending that’s cannibalized from elsewhere in the local economy. During the 1994 baseball strike, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation surveyed Toronto businesses on how the sudden disappearance of the then-World Series champion Blue Jays was affecting local businesses. It found that some of them were doing just fine, indeed, with video stores reporting a particular boom in rentals. As one Toronto comedy club owner quipped, "We really think it'd be in the best interest of the entertainment community in Toronto if the hockey players sat out the whole season, too."
                In fact, there are some indications that losing games to a labor dispute could be good for a local economy. Humphreys and Coates found that per-capita income actually increased during sports work stoppages, albeit by a fraction of a percentage point: 0.38 percent for baseball strikes and 0.17 percent for football.

                Though Humphreys cautions that the effect was below the threshold of statistical significance, he and Baade say the phenomenon of leakage could explain why local economies might benefit when sports leagues shut down. The magic of consumer spending is that it begets even more consumer spending: Buy a can of tuna from your local grocery store, and the store owner uses a share of the cash to pay his workers, who in turn spend it on more groceries, and so on. The cycle continues until somebody sinks the money into a bank account or spends it on something in another state or country, at which point it "leaks" out of the local economy.
                At a sporting event, however, the cycle is cut short. That's because a disproportionate share of sports revenues goes to a handful of people—the team owner and the players typically soak up the majority of every dollar spent at a game. When a local grocery store owner goes out to dinner, he ends up putting money in the pockets of busboys who'll later visit his store to buy vegetables and milk. When LeBron James cashes one of his paychecks, by contrast, it's unlikely that he spends it all at the local Walgreens. Rather, your outlay on Heat season tickets will end up doing as much to boost the Bahamas as it does the economy in South Florida.

                If you believe the leakage theory, then a lengthy NBA lockout could actually improve local economies. "People are still going to spend their money," says Baade, "but they're going to spend probably more of it on locally owned and operated entertainment activities." Baade does note that a handful of studies seem to show minor-league teams giving a small boost to local economic activity. If your city is small enough and has few other attractions, perhaps would-be visitors will steer clear unless there's a game on. That could indicate that smaller NBA cities like Oklahoma City or Sacramento would still be at risk from a lockout.

                Yet those single-team cities actually have an advantage over their big-market brethren. In New York, a spurned Knicks fan might instead take in a Rangers game, giving his entertainment dollars to the same corporate owner and to a new set of players who spend their salaries out of town. In Sacramento, they're more likely to, say, go bowling. That means less leakage, countering any negative effects from out-of-towners who remain out of town.
                The biggest impact is likely to be felt in cities whose new arenas are being paid off with dedicated arena-district taxes, as those municipalities could face short-term problems in paying off their bonds. (Sacramento, which is considering building a new arena for the Kings in part with ticket taxes and other game-related revenues, might want to take notice.) But ultimately, that's little more than a bookkeeping problem: If cities' general funds are flush with sales taxes collected from non-NBA spending, that should more than make up for any shortfall.
                Despite this mostly sanguine news, a few businesses do still need to worry.

                "There is no doubt in my mind you can find a bar or a restaurant right next to the [Verizon Center] in D.C. where they're going to lose some business," says Humphreys.

                If you run a nonsports bar across town, however, you should stock up on liquor. While a lockout may be bad for businesses in the shadows of NBA arenas, it could be boom times for anyone offering fans something else to do on cold winter nights. And if that doesn't cheer up despondent fans, consider this: Whatever's on Netflix has to be more entertaining than the Timberwolves.

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                • #9
                  Re: Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

                  Good stuff, King Tut. the article you cite is right.

                  Professional sports accounts for a small part of amusement spending to begin with, and the money that doesn't get spend on NBA tickets will get spent on other forms of amusement.

                  Concession workers will lose 41 nights' work. It will be hard for them. But that $55 million projected loss for Indianapolis -- even if it did occur -- is negligible in Marion County's annual business tally.
                  And I won't be here to see the day
                  It all dries up and blows away
                  I'd hang around just to see
                  But they never had much use for me
                  In Levelland. (James McMurtry)

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                  • #10
                    Re: Your Actions Impact the Less Fortunate Around You | NBA Lockout

                    I think some of the players and owners have been using this to fling mud at the other side in past weeks. I'm in no position to judge motives, but I would hope both sides are cautious in doing so...
                    Check out my autographed 1972-73 Topps basketball project

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