Here at the Wages of Wins our analysts’ opinions are highly valued. Our resident General Manager and expert Sports Economist David Berri has been answering questions about the lockout and beauty all over the web.
- Dan Hamernash has discussed how beauty gets you paid. It turns out this is especially true for NFL quarterbacks! (Dave doesn’t appear in person but his name is very prominently displayed at the 1:26 mark)
- Dave also appeared on NPR to compare the NBA to the European Union of all things. Yes the lockout has forced us there!
- Dave explained how the owners desire to crush the players rather than take the win is the problem in the lockout. He equated it to the Packers-Vikings most recent outcome. I might have picked Lions-Broncos
- Patrick Minton backs up Dave’s claim that the owners decision to crush the players is bad backed up by behavioral research.
Posted in: Basketball Stories, Football Stories
Wages of Wins Journal 
wiLQ
November 16, 2011
Irony alert: those “Packers-Vikings” and “Lions-Broncos” links may look good but they aren’t good because they lead to the same recap ;-)
Dre
November 17, 2011
wiLQ,
Dang it! My copy and paste skills failed me. Thanks for the catch.
Wayne Crimi
November 19, 2011
I still don’t understand how a league that will be at “break even” after this deal is crushing the players.
We can argue all we want about accounting, but the financial statement were audited by independent auditors and I haven’t heard any rumors of Davide Stern getting audited by the IRS either.
There may be some details in GAAP accounting that are worthy of discussion and we don’t have all the balance sheets available to know how much of the losses are related to leverage. However, the owners probably have close to 10 billion dollars of capital invested in NBA teams. It seems to me that a business that owning an NBA team will still suck compared to alternative uses of the same capital even after this deal.
If someone paid me a 1m dollars a year to be a computer programmer and then cut me back to 200K because he was losing his shirt, that’s not crushing me. It’s taking back 800K I never should have had to begin with and is probably still overpaying me by 100K.
wiLQ
November 20, 2011
“If someone paid me a 1m dollars a year to be a computer programmer and then cut me back to 200K because he was losing his shirt, that’s not crushing me. It’s taking back 800K I never should have had to begin with and is probably still overpaying me by 100K.”
Changes aren’t only about players’ money so the question is: would you accept that new offer if it meant you literally couldn’t leave your office for 10 months per year? It’s not a perfect analogy but owner could feel like you owe him that much after all those losses…
[in case of the NBA it would be “improving competitive balance”].