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Originally Posted by bullsville
I'm curious as to how the Knicks could sign Jordan to an even higher salary, since the cap that season was only $24.3 million and the Bulls paid MJ $30 million? I admit I'm not real familiar with what the cap rules were back then, but I'm pretty sure that with a $24.3 million cap the Knicks ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM offer to MJ was only 81% of what Jerry gave him.
And I'm sure that MJ was ready to go to NY to play with 11 minimum salary guys, because certainly All-Stars would have flocked to NY for the chance to play with MJ, even if they had to play for the minimum salary.
JR paid MJ 23.5% MORE than the salary cap for an entire team, I guess he should have been all $hits and grins?
MJ could have left after his rookie contract was up if Reinsdorf was so bad... he had been here for only 6 years and left after the 1990 season, Phil's first (MJ hated the Triangle then) and MJ's 6th in Chicago without even one trip to the NBA Finals.
I'm assuming JR was involved in the negotiations back then as well?
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What Checketts was offering was all somewhat shady and would have been held up to a lot of scrutiny by the league, even inasmuch as they'd have loved to have him in NY. What he did was offer to sign Jordan to a modest deal until the Knicks had his Bird rights, then tear it up and pay him a huge, unprecedented deal. In the interim, he had arranged for Jordan's then-current endorsement deals to have huge premiums tacked onto them for Jordan being in the NY market, and a bunch of new endorsements on top of that.
Whatever the deal was, it was enough of a threat to the Bulls for them to offer, as you point out, a mammoth deal of their own, albeit only a one-year one.
Here's an interesting excerpt from David Halberstam's "Playing for Keeps" (which is where I thought I remembered reading about Checketts, but it's not; I'll keep looking) that does a pretty good job of explaining why Reinsdorf's approach to negotiation leaves poisonous fallout:
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[T]hose who thought there was something shortsighted about the Bulls in their negotiations could point their handling of Grant as an example. The special trademark of the Bulls in their business dealings was a certain toughness, a need to win, which was one thing in normal business but another thing in a world of talent, where if you won, you won at the expense of your own prime resources. There was a downside to that, some thought, a certain almost-inevitable long-term unhappiness on the part of their best players.
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Reinsdorf's zero-sum approach works well in real estate, e.g., against opponents with competing interests. To me, a person who owns a sports team should be predominately interested in his team's winning, and this ought to be a no-brainer common interest between the owner and the people he is paying to play for him. Unlike any other owner, however, Reinsdorf chooses to set up a competitive dynamic between himself and the people playing for him.
And unlike you, I don't see how this way of doing business can be considered a success. Fine, he didn't mess things up when Jordan was around: well, except for the part about the ugly premature end to things. Beyond that, in thirty-odd years of owning the Bulls and White Sox, his victories have been few and basically insignificant -- a +.500 season here, a division title there, lots of mediocrity.
His failures, on the other hand, have been pretty notable: he's presided over the worst six-year record in the history of the NBA, he's played a enormous role in accelerating the destruction of baseball, both by orchestrating the lockout and making sure his puppet remains as commissioner (an absurdity that wouldn't be tolerated in any real-life business), and he built the least user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing major-league sports facility in the nation.
Great track record.