Why Stern is full of shiznit

The PR in the soon-to-be NBA locked saga has so far been lame and lamer, depending on which side you support. Because the players (that's my side) are clueless about how to present their side of the debate, I am going to try and lay down some knowledge. I want to try to help fans know what the real debate is about.

Imagine an nba owner as a restaurant owner who is basically absent from the business. He doesn't want to spend every day managing the day to day activities, he just wants to put up the funds and let that cash generate oodles of yearly cashola, thank you very much.

That's very different from a person who can put up cash and also ability, but in the NBA world we don't have to split the difference, yet (thanks Mark Cuban nonetheless).

So imagine that the owner hires a manager, and everything else runs under the manager. Its not perfect but it works for our needs. That's the union. Now some of the reasons the analogy doesn't work perfectly include the fact that the owner gets to put a lot of big salaries (kids, cronies etc.) under this manager, but this doesn't change the analysis in any important way.

So every day and every week, the union is making real profit, taking all salaries and marketing and so on into account. And at the end of the year, the owner shows up to get his profit, which is right there on the table.
And the owner says, oh, gee wiz, well I need to pay the bankers who lent me the money to buy this operation, so there your profit is gone, that money is off the table, no longer 'profit'. Not "profit" anymore, in the theoretical dreamland that Stern imagines exists. And its the same with the player depreciation deal, if you have been reading up on this stuff.

Now, what's really going on here is pretty interesting, ingenious, you might say. Or evil.  What this is all about is a little clause in the tax law, a great sop to the rich for their big investments. And its been there for years already. Now if you didn't know, the rich get to work together in small groups to bend (or distort) tax law to benefit themselves. So you shouldn't be surprised that there are nice tax loopholes just waiting for the rich to utilize.

Stern is trying to use a legal fiction created only so that the rich would pay less taxes as an excuse for putting more wealth into the pockets of his new crop of idiot owners. Brilliant, no? So far, the union seems incapable of making this clear.

Idiot brinkmanship.  That's the name of this era.