Re: salaries

[wfcooper@tiac.com (Bill Cooper)]

On Sun, 24 Aug 1997 20:45:49 -0400, you wrote:

>One thing that is being overlooked in the salary wars.  Will they
>continue to climb? In light of the recent signings some of the Celtic
>contracts do not look outrageous.  And there is an ecomnomic reality to
>this somewhere.   Does anyone know how much the NBA grosses, what the
>overhead is and what is available for distribution.  There will come a
>point, or the economy will fall, and salaries will have to stabalize, or
>the NBA will bankrupt.  The agents don't care about the league, the fans
>or even their own clients; all they care about is their own egos.  Like
>baseball where Fehr wanted to run baseball and ran into a dead end, the
>same will happen with basketball eventually.  Or some other road will be
>taken.  Salaries will not just continue to soar.

I believe that the salary cap is calculated to equal 53% of league
revenues from attendance and broadcast rights.  I don;t believe they
include ancilary revenues like the sale of lisenced merchandise.  so
we can guess that the leeagu has a revenue of 1.45 billion or so from
ticket sales and broadcast rights plus an unknown amount from other
sources.

Actually I'm not sure that salaries are going up.  For every player
likeTravis Knight or Brian Reeves, there is another player like Rick
=46ox (or soon to be) Cliff Robinson taking a cut.  It would be
interesting, once all the dust has settled to  see actual figures on
the change in salaries.

Bill Cooper
wfcooper@tiac.com