Big bucks deals and stories from the past

Another day, another few snippets of stuff.

Man, do we churn it out here or what?

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There’s been a lot of talk over the last couple of days – actually, it’s been a point of contention for most of the year for some of you – about who, or what, constitutes a “max-contract guy.”

Now, I’m here to tell you there a very, very, very, very few players who actually deserve those maximum contracts, I’d put Kobe, LeBron and Wade in that small group and probably Durant, too, but that’s really neither here nor there.

It’s perception that matters and if you’re going to have a “star” player, you’re going to have to pay him “star” money, regardless of what you really think. You hold your nose, right write the cheque and get on with life.

Is Chris Bosh worth 30 per cent of the annual salary cap, which is max value for him? Of course not. But it doesn’t matter. He’s going to get it and if you want to keep him, that’s the going rate.

Even Bryan alluded to this the other day:

“Contracts are not always justifiable in sports, they’re just not. But it’s a situation where Chris Bosh is considered a maximum contract player for multiple reasons and I would assume he’d be that if he stayed here.”

The whole thing of “worth” in any pro sports is rather nonsensical to me, as a matter of fact. Players in all sports get tagged, as the sage Jalen Rose once said, as dollar signs rather than the people and that’s not right.

So if Chris Bosh or Joe Johnson or Amar’e Stoudemire or anyone else goes out to market this summer and comes back with a contract worth untold millions and at the maximum allowable amount, I say good for them.

I just wish there were maximum-value contracts in my gig.

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As I’m sitting there watching the Miami Heat score all of, what, 10 points in the second half quarter and look like one of the most confused offensive teams in the history of NBA basketball, one thought came to mind:

“What kind of knucklehead would pick ‘em to win a series?”

Oh, wait. That’d be me. And, apparently, Charles Barkley and I’m wondering when some big shot network’s going to come calling.

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So, we took attendance and it seems you folks – a hearty few at least – do care.

Only because a few people asked, I’ll tell you we had about 690 folks around for the hour-long question and answer session yesterday afternoon and you sent in about 350 queries, about 70 of which were answered in the 60 minutes or so.

For the game? Well, it could have been better but it was the first night, a dog of a game and we had about 510 take part.

The Q and A numbers are about average for a regular season game, the in-game numbers are down, but it wasn’t unexpected.

But it’s enough to keep going, right?

We’ll be here for Charlotte-Orlando tonight at 7 and then let’s have ourselves a late night on Thursday with Lakers-Oklahoma City at 9:30 p.m. (I know I’m blowing off the Suns at 10 but they’ll have a Game 5 Monday and I can’t be sure there’ll be on in the Lakers-Thunder series).

Sound okay?

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I know this is old but I don’t think it got much ink up here and it probably should have.

Good on Sam Dalembert, I say, for winning a pretty prestigious award.

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Story time, in the absence of, you know, news and stuff:

With the season over here and all the post-season hoopla and wrapup seemingly done, I’m trying to think back to other great, end-of-the-year stories from days gone by. Not necessarily the nuts and bolts of what went wrong but the moments that stick with you.

Two come to mind:

Last day of the first season.

I’m standing on the loading dock of the dome enjoying some fresh air and chatting with Oliver Miller’s mom.

He’s got a player option that summer on the last year of a deal that’s going to pay him about $3 million I believe (and that was pretty good chunk of change 15 years ago) and for sure he’s going to come back, right? Well, no. Mom says, and I’m recalling quotes here: “Oliver’s going to go out and get a new big deal” and I’m thinking, “um, ah, er, well, good luck to him.”

So that season ends, O’s a free agent, he can’t get a sniff of a new deal and comes back later that next year on a minimum salary deal and bounces around for the rest of his career.

Heckuva end to that season, no?

Day after the last day of the KO Year.

Season ends in Milwaukee and we’ve all got mid-morning flights to get back for the locker clean out and never-ending stream of interviews. But there’s this feeling (brought on by the fact KO’d been trying for two weeks to get either a buyout or an extension) that something might happen so the flight’s get changed to stupidly early and we drag our tired carcasses down to the arena.

And that’s when KO gives us the (and I’m paraphrasing again, here): “There are people in this organization who don’t want to win, all they care about is sniffing jocks and it’s management and they need to leave the basketball people alone.” Whoo! And boy!! Sure enough, he gets whacked the next day and another glorious season comes to an end.

I tell ya, this franchise has been far better story than a team in the decade and a half I’ve been around.

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Mail? Sure, we’ll keep doing mail.

Drop a line here and we’ll start putting together the weekend compilation.

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Comments

[Kevin]

Jalen benefitted from having a dollar sign attached to his name.

[Wilber]

Love the Oliver Miller story. Amazed to find he just turned 40 and is still ballin' in the PBL (although probably didn't get that big contract there either...). Doug, if you fancy a road trip down the QEW to catch up with O, he's leading his Lawton-Ft. Sill Cavalry against the Rochester Razorsharks tomorrow night (22nd).
http://stats.crezbasketball.net/players/details.aspx?player=20243&season=2010&cs=2

[jimmie]

Hi Doug;

Two comments this morning:

1. I would go further than saying there are "very few" players who deserve max money. Not even Lebron and Kobe "deserve" the millions they make to play a sport for a living. But your point is taken. Bosh will get a max contract, because the NBA market dictates it. Fans can get too caught up in the financial side of things. One on hand, they want to critique and nickle and dime their top talent, and on the other, they want the organization to bend over backward to bring in more top talent. Pick your poison.

2. Are you at liberty to comment on your colleague D. Feschuk's "story" this morning? Even for Dave, rabid Raptor hater that he is, this baseless nonsense is very poor journalism. When did reporters stop having to back up their content with facts? If he has facts, he hasn't stated them, and if he doesn't, why print one man's personal conjecture? The paper can't be struggling that badly to fill column inches, can it? Terrible, and embarassing for the Star, in my opinion. Turning the sports page into a gossip rag.

[Kam]

Hi Doug,
Just caught a few bugs for you:

right the cheque - write
10 points in the second half - quarter perhaps

Blogger's note: Got 'em

[Dan W]

I agree Bosh is not a top player. But Bryan's point is true in that he is this teams top guy. Lewis and and Carter both make more then Howard. I'm sure at this point in his career KG is not worth what he is making. Signing Chris at max at his age is not that bad if BC can pull it off. He just needs to get him some help, mostly on the defensive end.

[D-Mac Ottawa]

So is Mr. Feschuk auditioning for the New York Post now, or is it the National Enquirer? Some mighty impressive bulldog sleuthing and hardcore investigative journalism going on there, boy howdy.
So appreciate your even-keeled reporting and blogging, Doug. Keep up the great work. Thanks again, and cheers.

[Geoff Read]

I'm not sure Feschuk's story was as baseless as "Jimmie" writes. There was the Turk incident after all and Feschuk quotes some anonymous sources... pretty standard stuff in the world of journalism. Nor do I buy the argument that I've seen others make that it's not fans' business. These guys make millions of dollars to play basketball. I don't care who you are, if you're showing up to work hung over or tired on a regular basis your job performance is going to suffer, and if you're a professional athlete being as well compensated as these guys are, the expectation that you will show up in a condition where you can perform to the best of your abilities is hardly unreasonable.

I would also be curious to hear your reaction Doug. Did you get the sense that there were too many Raptors who, to quote Prince, "partied like it's 1999?"

[doug]

ok time for a rant...I am tired of people saying these guys get paid to much for playing a sport.....its not a sport, its a business no different then your local bank, restaurant chain, cable company...a muti-billion dollar business....so players are employees and within that model they deserve the money they are getting, its no different then a actor getting 20 million for a movie, or a fighter milions for a fight or a CEO a salary and millions in bonuses....do you think owners buy these franchises because its a sport? ....wake up, and don't believe for a second when you hear owners plead poor..have you ever heard a owner say wow we made millions last year...even the Yanks,MlSE who people know make money hand over fist won't divulge the true figures because then is when you would hear sincere outrage....what is played in a schoolyard or the local Y is a sport don't confuse the 2.....that game last night between the Lakers-Thunder was a humdinger..to bad the west games couldn't be flopped with the eastern conference games so we could watch those games early and just go to bed and forget the eastern ones for now... there will be good match-ups in the east next round....right the west is where all the action is.

[Adam]

I'm not picking on anyone, just wondering in general. Why do people feel the need to correct the odd spelling mistake you may make in your daily blogs? This IS a blog let's remember not an actual article. Yeeesh.

[joe]

Hi Doug,

What's your opinion about the free agent system in basketball? Right now, if a player wants to get a max. deal, they need to either resign with their own team or find a team with the right assets to do a sign and trade with their current team. Barring that, they have to be willing to accept less money and years to go to a place they like. Contrast that to a sport like baseball where free agents are allowed to go where they want and the team that loses them is only entitled to draft picks as compensation. Do you think the NBA system is better for the competitive balance of the league or would a system similar to baseball work better? Thank You.

[jim]

jimmie...is dat bad ol' Feschuk being wuff on dose wittle Waptors?
Too bad.
It's good that somebody in this city is calling these turkeys out, because Doug and the rest of the Raptor media sure won't.
It's been chronicled often, that the NBA guys are big partakers in Toronto's temptations. I guess our guys are above all that, eh jimmie?...right.

I had to chuckle at B.C.'s contention that things aren't as bad as they seem.
Nice try, Bryan. It might not be so bad if we were only into the first year of a rebuild, with some high draft picks coming our way, but that ship has sailed.
We're currently about 6 years into this window of opportunity, and we've had 5 TOP TEN picks in those 6 years. Babcock and Bryan have botched this current rebuild big-time.
If Bryan was smart, he'd swallow some ego, trade Bosh for some youthful prospects, take a step back and start over, while he figures out what to do with some of the dead weight that he has so masterfully acquired.

[Mike kovacs]

Doug would you know anything about the NBA 3on3 tournaments? By this time last year the schedules were all out - have they been dropped this year as a cost-saving? The kids will be very disappointed.

Blogger's note: I don't, actually. I'll try to find out

[nate]

I think we should continue to speak of players' salaries in terms of percentage instead of dollars. It seems useless to critique how much Vernon Wells makes when the team could theoretically pay every player 30 million if they wanted, but the same criticism is relevant in capped leagues. To say Bosh makes the same percentage of his team's total salary as Lebron, Kobe, or Wade puts it in a much more enlightening perspective. Give me the roster of the Bobcats or Buck until we can find a top 5 player.

Ditto on the Feschuk article. Great writer, but does that guy's bed even have a right side?

[jimmie]

jim: Your opinion on the Raptors is well-known, but feel free to state it yet again. For my part, my criticism of Feschuk's latest has nothing to do with his calling out the team for its lack of production, it's the lack of any actual facts he uses to make his point. You can speculate all you want about whether players partied at all, too much, or not enough in private, but if you're a professional journalist tasked with covering a team, then you have a responsibility to have factual basis for what you write. The one iota of 'fact' in his story was the mention of the Hedo incident. Which, in itself, is rife with conjecture (no one has ever even said Turk was "partying" on the night in question, only that he was "seen" at a Yorkville restaurant). I'm not condoning anything, just asking for some journalistic integrity.

doug: Athletes make too much money. But I don't limit my comment to them. The whole industry is f*cked. Same with entertainment. I'm not suggesting anything will change, just that there is absolutely no way to justify player salaries (or ticket prices, for that matter). Yes, sports are a business. So is teaching. Why does a new teacher make $30,000 and Demar Derozan make $2 million? "But their careers are so much shorter and they can have life-long chronic pain afterward, blah, blah, blah..." There is no justification. I understand the way it is, which is why I made my point that player salaries are always market-driven, not dictated by the actual "basketball value" of the player, and that because of this, Chris Bosh IS in fact a max-level player.

[Vincent Lam]

Doug, nice story about Dalembert you linked to. There's a quote from a writer at the Toronto Star named Doug Smith. Any relation? (I keed).

Dalembert did a good job raising awareness of the situation in Haiti. A well deserved award. Sometime we get too cynical about professional athletes. It's good to hear a positive story.

[Mike]

You have no clue when it comes to basketball economics.

The truth is actually that the max contract guys like Kobe, Lebron, Duncan, Dwight Howard, etc are MASSIVE VALUE because in a system with no max contract they are worth FAR MORE than what they are paid based on any metric (ie. win shares)

To say that Bosh is not worth the max is flat out staggering.

Is Andrea Bargnani worth 70% of the max 2nd contract? Is Jose Calderon worth 65% of the max 2nd contract? Is Lamarcus Aldridge worth 90% of the max 2nd contract?

The max contract actually hurts the Lebrons and Duncans of the world by putting a ceiling on their value and it ends up rewarding players like Bargnani, David Lee, etc who end up getting 65-80% of that ceiling, when in a world with no player caps the "max" guys would get even more dollars and leave less to the rest.

Did you do any quantitative analysis to determine Bosh isn't worth max?

Colangelo said that Bargnani's contract is great value. That implies that he's underpaid. That means he should be at higher than 70% of the 2nd contract cap .... so Bargnani at 75-99.99% of the 2nd contract max is good but Bosh at the 3rd contract max is bad?

If there were no limits to the salary a player could make but the overall team cap remained the same do you think Bosh would actually earn less money than in the current system as a free agent?

[esajr]

I am glad to know that you believe that Chris Bosh does not deserve the max salary. I will add to that, I think Chris bosh is better out of the raptors as I have seen in their last games sans Bosh. There were lots of sharing of the ball and the ball does not stay in the hands of a single person(bosh) for a long time to decide what to do with it. I even think that too much concentration offensively on Bosh is even detrimental to the progress and flow of the game. Jay triano has to design and make plays that involves every single player on the floor and not all four players just stand on the side to give way for one person to execute and finish the play.

[manap3000]

hey doug, if i see calderon at point with bargnani at centre next year the raptors and i will reach the end of the line, not a single game will be watched let alone going to one;I just can't handle the defensive dissapointment; is my boycott justifiable?

[GM]

Everyone throws out Kobe, LeBron and Wade when talking about max deals. Who are the lesser players with max deals? Still, though, it's only market value if other teams would pay Bosh the max. Do we know this for a fact? And shouldn't Colangelo find out before he doles it out?

Didn't see anything wrong with Feschuk's column today. Sure, it was conjecture based on some inside information, but it was reasonably presented.

[greg]

i was actually looking for feschuk to publish some evidence about who does what, but what he has said is he has heard they are partying. I am sure everybody does something other than work so even if one athlete, say Jack, is seen out once or twice its really not a big deal. If he did what Turk did, then thats another issue. Anyway on to something that has to do with this Blog.

What a player is worth is only decided by franchisees in the NBA. The whole point about a players worth is all relative. What is a bar of gold worth? We cant eat it, we barely wear it, it generally has no tangible purpose, and we hide it from others, but it is the most valuable rock on this planet because society said it should be. The same goes for athletes, they are worth what the NBA can and will pay them from the money they make from fans buying seats that go as high as $3000 in some arenas.

[elwyn jennings]

Holy smokes...the title of Feschuk's story implies that Raptors are more serious about booze broads than ball. The story, on the other hand....gives no evidence, not even antecdotally. That Turk was in a bar after a game in which he didn't play hardly provides proof 'of partying.' This is yellow journalism at its best....

[George]

Did the 2004 Piston's team have any max contract players? Or did Dumars pull off an amazing feat of bringing the right mix of 2nd tier talent for a championship?

[Juan]

Esa Jr, I concur.
I got the sense from Jay's comments many times this year that "Bosh is our best guy so we go to him a lot", or in other words "he's the best option we have". I don't believe that is necessarily high praise. He isn't saying he wouldn't rather have another option or wouldn't rather have a roster better suited to playing a different style of ball.
Which doesn't mean Bosh can't play the style they want. We've seen him do it a lot during the middle of the season run - I just don't think it comes naturally to him. I think the question should be "can he adapt to a different style of play on a consistent basis"? A lot of the problems this year came with a plodding style where the ball got sucked into a low post doubleteam and never made it back out.

[doug]

in terms of what "GM" said are we sure that Boish would be given max contract by other teams??/...every team in the league that had/has space would, some fans here don't realize how good he is....he needs a Joe Jonhson or Igadoula to compliemt him as well a sa center like Haywood..teams don't make their money off of ticket sales, it's called tv revenue...it's revenue from tv that drives or doesn't drive every sport........the NHL is the one league that doesn't get huge tv revenue and thats why teams in the NHL move or at least 7,8 are in dire financial shape.....stadium deals, concession deals, tv deals...means big bucks to the NFL,MLB,NBA, and even the NCAA and NASCAR....

plus does anyone here remember a guy named Babe Ruth, or Ty Cobb, Paul Hornung, Billy Martin, or Doc Ellis, Mantle, Rodman etc.the list goes on and on....hall of famers, etc. that partied and showed up to play...to bad the old reporters such as Proudfoot, or Dunnell aren't around or even Doug could tell a few stories....i am tired of the morality police taking over sports such as Goddell in the NFL one of those players needs to challenge him in a courtroom, Roethlesberger was charged with nothing yet he is being suspended...come on Wilbon and Kornheiser had it right yesterday, sports is entering a territory they have no right to be involved in....

[John]

Doug, I think the biggest issue the BC has is that he has to pay a power forward the MAX contract. Even if the argument is made that CB is the best 4 in the game, the skills of a power forward do not allow them to dominate a game like a 2-3 can cause its too easy to take the ball out of their hands with double teams. Who was the last power forward to get the MAX? Any idea?

Blogger's note: Um, Duncan, Nowitzki, and, ah, Bosh come quickly to mind. But I haven't really thought about it.