It wasn't too long ago that the Yankees were by far and away the most hated team not only in Major League Baseball, but in all of American professional sports. Just a few years back, the Yanks would dominate headlines year round, dismantling the competition on the field during the season and in free agency during the winter. It wasn't at all uncommon to see the Bronx Bombers' annual spending spree steal the back page of Newsday, my hometown newspaper, from the Rangers, Giants or Knicks. More recently, though, it seems that the Yankees are spending less and less and, as a result, are becoming harder to hate.
On a slow New York-area sports day, today's Newsday back page features a premature preview of Saturday's Jets versus Giants game at the Meadowlands. Look deeper into the sports section, however, and you'll find a small article about the Texas Rangers winning the rights to negotiate a contract with Japanese starting pitcher Yu Darvish - for just over $57 million, Texas "wins" the chance to sign the 25 year old former Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighter to what is almost assured to be an inflated and overvalued contract. Doesn't it seem like, just a few seasons ago, Darvish would have been headed to the Bronx (or at least the Red Sox or Mets), angering small market teams and fans everywhere and solidifying the Yankees' reputation as the Evil Empire of baseball?
Newsday's back page does feature a note about the Darvish article that reads "Hardly Knew Yu: Rangers, not Yanks, win bid on pitcher Darvish," indicating that having any team other than New York sign a high-priced free agent still comes to most of us as a surprise. But with top stars heading everywhere but the Bronx this offseason - Albert Pujols to Anaheim, Jose Reyes to Miami, etc. - maybe we shouldn't be so shocked about Texas winning the Darvish sweepstakes after all. Perhaps times have changed and the Yankees are getting smarter (there's almost no way, in my opinion, that any of the Pujols, Reyes or Darvish contracts pan out financially for their new teams) and, as a result, just a little less hateable.
Of course, the Yankees won't be truly respected by small market fans until high-priced signings like Mark Teixeira and C.C. Sabathia have long gone and until confirmed cheater and overpaid diva Alex Rodriguez has retired and opened a chain of tacky Miami-area nighclubs. But all indications suggest that the post-George Steinbrenner Yankees are moving back towards a period of controlled spending, calculated risks and homegrown talent that we haven't seen since Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada lifted the Yanks back to World Series caliber in the mid-1990s. While I'll miss aggressively hating the Bombers, it does seem like it was time for an aggressive change of strategy - after all, the Yankees haven't won a World Series in over two years now.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Considering Adoption
Ever since I was a little kid, I've been following the Braves, Giants, Knicks and Islanders. When I got older and started college and grad school, I picked up Princeton and Stanford as my two NCAA interests. As I've moved across the country from New York to California, I've periodically found myself watching Dodgers, Clippers, Sharks or 49ers games, but never with any rooting interest - I've always stuck by my hometown teams and, with the exception of my two alma maters, haven't added to my roster of favorite teams since I was a child.
Recently, however, important influences in my life have had me gravitate toward Duke basketball. Over the last two years or so, I've seen a couple of Duke hoops games in person, toured Cameron Indoor Stadium on Duke's campus in Durham (twice), and watched dozens of Blue Devils games on TV (almost all of them are nationally televised on ESPNU or ESPN2 or even ESPN). Most recently, I sat in the Blue Devils fan section and watched Duke beat up on Washington at Madison Square Garden this past Saturday and, as much as it amazes me, found myself legitimately rooting for Duke.
As a kid, I always respected Duke, but never really liked them. I was always impressed by the way the school could maintain such high academic standards while remaining so competitive, year after year, on college basketball's biggest stage. As a college student I looked up to Duke as a model for what Princeton athletics should strive to become, and today I feel the same way about the comparison between Duke and Stanford basketball. But at the same time, Duke almost seemed to me like the Yankees of college basketball - always rebuilding and reloading while smaller schools struggled to recruit even the players who sat on the end of the Duke bench.
As I've watched more and more Duke basketball, though, and grown closer to one of their most diehard fans, my jealousy of - and contempt for - the school has slowly worn away. Now, I find myself listing Duke basketball as one of "My Teams" on my ESPN Android app, watching their games on TV and checking their postgame box scores online. For better or worse, I am now - at least on a minor level - a real Duke basketball fan. And while I can't ever imagine a world in which I care about Duke hoops more than I do Princeton or Stanford, at this point in my life I'm mature enough to realize that anything's possible.
Recently, however, important influences in my life have had me gravitate toward Duke basketball. Over the last two years or so, I've seen a couple of Duke hoops games in person, toured Cameron Indoor Stadium on Duke's campus in Durham (twice), and watched dozens of Blue Devils games on TV (almost all of them are nationally televised on ESPNU or ESPN2 or even ESPN). Most recently, I sat in the Blue Devils fan section and watched Duke beat up on Washington at Madison Square Garden this past Saturday and, as much as it amazes me, found myself legitimately rooting for Duke.
After Duke beat Washington, Oklahoma State and Pittsburgh tipped off.
As a kid, I always respected Duke, but never really liked them. I was always impressed by the way the school could maintain such high academic standards while remaining so competitive, year after year, on college basketball's biggest stage. As a college student I looked up to Duke as a model for what Princeton athletics should strive to become, and today I feel the same way about the comparison between Duke and Stanford basketball. But at the same time, Duke almost seemed to me like the Yankees of college basketball - always rebuilding and reloading while smaller schools struggled to recruit even the players who sat on the end of the Duke bench.
As I've watched more and more Duke basketball, though, and grown closer to one of their most diehard fans, my jealousy of - and contempt for - the school has slowly worn away. Now, I find myself listing Duke basketball as one of "My Teams" on my ESPN Android app, watching their games on TV and checking their postgame box scores online. For better or worse, I am now - at least on a minor level - a real Duke basketball fan. And while I can't ever imagine a world in which I care about Duke hoops more than I do Princeton or Stanford, at this point in my life I'm mature enough to realize that anything's possible.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Why the NBA Doesn't Make Sense
Update: Looks like I beat ESPN.com's Mark Kreider to the punch by about 12 hours. His article, posted today, does a good job of explaining how the new CBA failed to fix the league's fundamental small market problems and points out that the deal "did not lay a foundation for a future in which smaller-revenue teams have more equitable chances to compete for the biggest prizes." I think he misses the mark a bit on revenue sharing - the NBA doesn't have the cumulative profits to do what the NFL does - but his overall point is correct; the NBA system doesn't work.
By now, you've likely heard all about the Chris Paul trade that wasn't. In short, the league nixed a potential Paul-to-Los Angeles trade because a number of small market owners argued that the league - which owns Paul's current team, the New Orleans Hornets - was unfairly trading one of the game's biggest starts to a larger market. Never mind that, as J.A. Adande points out, the Hornets were set to receive a pretty good haul for a guy who is all but certain to leave New Orleans for free agency after this season (if he makes it that far). As far as the NBA owners were concerned, this was just another example of the league's large market vs. small market struggles.
Every league, whether it be the NBA or NFL or MLB, has small markets, so why is it that the NBA always seems to have problems with its weaker franchises while the NFL and MLB don't? To me, it's a simple matter of economics, and the recently ratified NBA labor agreement unfortunately does nothing to address the NBA's most fundamental problems. Unlike the NFL and MLB, the NBA has a critical misalignment between franchise revenues and expenses that threaten to continue to cripple the league. Allow me to explain using the simplest terminology possible.
In the NFL, most of the money is earned at the league level and split evenly among the 32 franchises. While each franchise controls its own ticket sales and local sponsors, most of the money comes from the national TV contracts and national sponsors, and as a result large and small market teams generate approximately equal revenues. The NFL has paired its more or less equal revenues with a hard salary cap, so that all teams are spending roughly the same amount on players (the largest expense line item for any professional sports team). So, NFL teams are making and spending about the same amount of money, regardless of market - this is why teams in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh and New Orleans can compete, both financially and athletically, with the ones in New York and Boston and San Francisco.
The MLB works in almost the exact opposite way. In the MLB, the majority of revenue is generated locally - local TV deals with regional sports networks, ticket sales and local sponsorships provide a team with the bulk of its cash inflows. At the same time, the league has no salary cap, so each franchise can spend what it wants on players. This way, large market teams like the Yankees can choose to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money, while smaller market teams like the Pirates can spend wisely and still have their modest revenues exceed their expenses. Every team has a chance to earn a profit, and while this system certainly won't have the competitive balance that the NFL has, at least all of the franchises can remain financial viable.
The NBA has mixed elements from the NFL and MLB collective bargaining agreements, effectively creating a "worst of both worlds" situation. On the revenue side, the NBA is more like the MLB - large market teams like the Lakers have huge local TV and sponsorship deals, while smaller clubs like the Milwaukee Bucks struggle to find media and sponsorship partners. But while large and small market NBA franchises have vastly different revenue levels, the league's soft cap system leads to closely-clustered player expenses, more like the NFL. As a result, you have 30 teams spending roughly the same amounts of money despite earning wildly different revenues. This is why small market teams, like the Hornets, don't stand a chance; the cap floor forces them to spend nearly as much as the Lakers do, despite generating only a fraction of the revenue. In theory this could be rectified through revenue sharing (where large market teams transfer money to small market teams to cover their losses), but even the new NBA CBA won't get the league to cumulative profitability and thus there won't be enough profits to go around.
This, in simple terms, is why the NBA's financial structure makes no sense and has never made sense. As long as this system remains in place, expect small market teams to continue to complain. While having Chris Paul go to Los Angeles could have benefitted NBA fans in both Los Angeles and New Orleans (not to mention Houston, the third team involved in the deal), the small market owners did what they do best; distracted NBA fans from the game of basketball and shined the spotlight on the league's financial problems.
By now, you've likely heard all about the Chris Paul trade that wasn't. In short, the league nixed a potential Paul-to-Los Angeles trade because a number of small market owners argued that the league - which owns Paul's current team, the New Orleans Hornets - was unfairly trading one of the game's biggest starts to a larger market. Never mind that, as J.A. Adande points out, the Hornets were set to receive a pretty good haul for a guy who is all but certain to leave New Orleans for free agency after this season (if he makes it that far). As far as the NBA owners were concerned, this was just another example of the league's large market vs. small market struggles.
Every league, whether it be the NBA or NFL or MLB, has small markets, so why is it that the NBA always seems to have problems with its weaker franchises while the NFL and MLB don't? To me, it's a simple matter of economics, and the recently ratified NBA labor agreement unfortunately does nothing to address the NBA's most fundamental problems. Unlike the NFL and MLB, the NBA has a critical misalignment between franchise revenues and expenses that threaten to continue to cripple the league. Allow me to explain using the simplest terminology possible.
In the NFL, most of the money is earned at the league level and split evenly among the 32 franchises. While each franchise controls its own ticket sales and local sponsors, most of the money comes from the national TV contracts and national sponsors, and as a result large and small market teams generate approximately equal revenues. The NFL has paired its more or less equal revenues with a hard salary cap, so that all teams are spending roughly the same amount on players (the largest expense line item for any professional sports team). So, NFL teams are making and spending about the same amount of money, regardless of market - this is why teams in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh and New Orleans can compete, both financially and athletically, with the ones in New York and Boston and San Francisco.
The MLB works in almost the exact opposite way. In the MLB, the majority of revenue is generated locally - local TV deals with regional sports networks, ticket sales and local sponsorships provide a team with the bulk of its cash inflows. At the same time, the league has no salary cap, so each franchise can spend what it wants on players. This way, large market teams like the Yankees can choose to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money, while smaller market teams like the Pirates can spend wisely and still have their modest revenues exceed their expenses. Every team has a chance to earn a profit, and while this system certainly won't have the competitive balance that the NFL has, at least all of the franchises can remain financial viable.
The NBA has mixed elements from the NFL and MLB collective bargaining agreements, effectively creating a "worst of both worlds" situation. On the revenue side, the NBA is more like the MLB - large market teams like the Lakers have huge local TV and sponsorship deals, while smaller clubs like the Milwaukee Bucks struggle to find media and sponsorship partners. But while large and small market NBA franchises have vastly different revenue levels, the league's soft cap system leads to closely-clustered player expenses, more like the NFL. As a result, you have 30 teams spending roughly the same amounts of money despite earning wildly different revenues. This is why small market teams, like the Hornets, don't stand a chance; the cap floor forces them to spend nearly as much as the Lakers do, despite generating only a fraction of the revenue. In theory this could be rectified through revenue sharing (where large market teams transfer money to small market teams to cover their losses), but even the new NBA CBA won't get the league to cumulative profitability and thus there won't be enough profits to go around.
This, in simple terms, is why the NBA's financial structure makes no sense and has never made sense. As long as this system remains in place, expect small market teams to continue to complain. While having Chris Paul go to Los Angeles could have benefitted NBA fans in both Los Angeles and New Orleans (not to mention Houston, the third team involved in the deal), the small market owners did what they do best; distracted NBA fans from the game of basketball and shined the spotlight on the league's financial problems.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Decisions, Decisions
Because I currently live on the West Coast but mainly follow East Coast teams, I don't often run into conflicts between live and televised sporting events; usually, I can make time to watch one of my teams play on TV in the afternoon and head to a game in person at night. Yesterday, however, I had a surprisingly difficult choice to make: Go to a sports bar to watch my Giants battle the previously undefeated Green Bay Packers on TV, or make the short drive to campus to watch an intriguing non-conference college basketball match-up between Stanford and the NC State Wolfpack. Both games started at 1 PM PST. I'll take you through my decision-making process, and you can tell me which way you would have leaned:
Reason to watch Stanford: It's a live sporting event. Televised games can be DVR'd and watched later in the day (although admittedly it's not the same), but there's nothing like watching sports live. There aren't that many Stanford basketball home games that I'm realistically able to attend - many of them are during the month that I'll be away for Winter Break - so I feel like I should take advantage of the opportunity to go to free college basketball games when I can, particularly when they feature interesting battles such as this one.
Reason to watch the Giants: I've been a Giants fan for way longer than I've been a Stanford fan, so picking the Cardinal over the G-men seems wrong. It would be like ditching your childhood best friend to go hang out with a guy you just met through work - something about it just rubs me the wrong way. I've invested so much time in the Giants in my life and received so much joy from them - highlighted, of course, by the Superbowl victory over New England in 2007 - that I feel like I owe it to them to watch their games whenever possible.
Reason to watch Stanford: Unlike the Giants, Stanford had a good chance to win their game (and they did, 76-72, in a hard fought battle). Although the Giants did put together an impressive performance (particularly offensively) in a narrow 38-35 defeat, I was pretty confident that the inconsistent Giants weren't going to take down the NFL's top team. While I'm certainly not a front-runner - I root for my teams no matter how awful they are - it is undoubtedly more fun to see a victory than a loss.
Reason to watch the Giants: The Giants' match-up with Green Bay was clearly more critical than Stanford's non-conference game versus NC State. At 6-5 entering Sunday and desperately needing a victory to save their seemingly sinking ship, the Giants would have received a major boost to their potentially crumbling playoff hopes had they been able to knock off the Packers. While Stanford's win over NC State might help them beat out another bubble team when Selection Sunday rolls around (but probably not), there's no doubt that a Week 13 NFL game is more significant than a December college basketball one.
There were some other factors that went into my decision-making process, but those were the main ones. In the end, I decided to go to Maples to watch the basketball game (it was the live versus televised factor that swayed me) and I'm glad that I did - the crowd was excellent by Stanford basketball standards, the team showed resiliency in coming back from a double-digit deficit in the second half and the Cardinal earned a valuable victory over a solid ACC opponent. I even made it out in time to "watch" the fourth quarter of the Giants game on my computer and, considering the way it ended, it's probably better for my sanity that I wasn't at the sports bar watching it.
Reason to watch Stanford: It's a live sporting event. Televised games can be DVR'd and watched later in the day (although admittedly it's not the same), but there's nothing like watching sports live. There aren't that many Stanford basketball home games that I'm realistically able to attend - many of them are during the month that I'll be away for Winter Break - so I feel like I should take advantage of the opportunity to go to free college basketball games when I can, particularly when they feature interesting battles such as this one.
Reason to watch the Giants: I've been a Giants fan for way longer than I've been a Stanford fan, so picking the Cardinal over the G-men seems wrong. It would be like ditching your childhood best friend to go hang out with a guy you just met through work - something about it just rubs me the wrong way. I've invested so much time in the Giants in my life and received so much joy from them - highlighted, of course, by the Superbowl victory over New England in 2007 - that I feel like I owe it to them to watch their games whenever possible.
Reason to watch Stanford: Unlike the Giants, Stanford had a good chance to win their game (and they did, 76-72, in a hard fought battle). Although the Giants did put together an impressive performance (particularly offensively) in a narrow 38-35 defeat, I was pretty confident that the inconsistent Giants weren't going to take down the NFL's top team. While I'm certainly not a front-runner - I root for my teams no matter how awful they are - it is undoubtedly more fun to see a victory than a loss.
Reason to watch the Giants: The Giants' match-up with Green Bay was clearly more critical than Stanford's non-conference game versus NC State. At 6-5 entering Sunday and desperately needing a victory to save their seemingly sinking ship, the Giants would have received a major boost to their potentially crumbling playoff hopes had they been able to knock off the Packers. While Stanford's win over NC State might help them beat out another bubble team when Selection Sunday rolls around (but probably not), there's no doubt that a Week 13 NFL game is more significant than a December college basketball one.
There were some other factors that went into my decision-making process, but those were the main ones. In the end, I decided to go to Maples to watch the basketball game (it was the live versus televised factor that swayed me) and I'm glad that I did - the crowd was excellent by Stanford basketball standards, the team showed resiliency in coming back from a double-digit deficit in the second half and the Cardinal earned a valuable victory over a solid ACC opponent. I even made it out in time to "watch" the fourth quarter of the Giants game on my computer and, considering the way it ended, it's probably better for my sanity that I wasn't at the sports bar watching it.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Why Dress to Impress?
In addition to NFL and NCAA football, my Thansgiving break was filled with lots of college basketball. Every November, I enjoy tuning in to the various pre-season college hoops tournaments that happen across the country - they give viewers the unique opportunity to see a lot of intriguing non-conference battles that you normally don't get before the NCAA Tournament and NIT begin in March. In particular, I enjoy the Maui Invitational - the combination of top-notch competition, unique setting and small gym atmosphere makes the tournament particularly fun to watch. Weirdly, though, perhaps more than anything I like how the coaches at the Maui Invitational dress.
Part of the Hawaii-based tournament's laid back image involves the various coaches ditching their traditional suits and ties in favor of khakis and school-branded dri-fit polo shirts. Seeing Duke's Coach K man the sidelines dressed comparatively comfortably and casually got me thinking about why coaches normally dress the way they do. Why do basketball and hockey coaches dress so formally, putting on a jacket and tie for every single game? Why do baseball managers wear full uniforms, as if they might enter the game at any moment? Why is football the only sport that's found a reasonable middle ground, dressing its coaching staffs in branded polo shirts, jackets and hats? After all, doesn't the picture on the left look more practical than the one on the right?
Part of the Hawaii-based tournament's laid back image involves the various coaches ditching their traditional suits and ties in favor of khakis and school-branded dri-fit polo shirts. Seeing Duke's Coach K man the sidelines dressed comparatively comfortably and casually got me thinking about why coaches normally dress the way they do. Why do basketball and hockey coaches dress so formally, putting on a jacket and tie for every single game? Why do baseball managers wear full uniforms, as if they might enter the game at any moment? Why is football the only sport that's found a reasonable middle ground, dressing its coaching staffs in branded polo shirts, jackets and hats? After all, doesn't the picture on the left look more practical than the one on the right?
Isn't it time for basketball coaches to start dressing more casually on the mainland, too?
Sports uniforms and equipment change so much these days that it seems like athletes are wearing something different each and every week. It's a wonder, then, that coaches have seemingly been wearing the same thing for decades. While I certainly respect sports tradition, I don't understand why coaches wear what they wear. If I were coaching, I would want to balance looking professional and being comfortable, and football seems to be the only sport whose coaches have gotten things right. Basketball and hockey coaches seem way too overdressed to be running up and down the sidelines and screaming at the refs, while having 70 year-old baseball coaches dressed in baseball pants and stirrups is even more absurd. In my opinion, it's time for basketball, hockey and baseball coaches to change the way they dress for sporting events.
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