andalusian

Really? So all these analysts on TV that were players of different caliber do not count? Mr. Rice, the Blazer's own analyst was selected to the NBA at something like the round or so.

An industry is defined not by skills, but by the customers it is chasing. If you do not believe it - try to find out what happened to the passenger railroad companies once the automobile became popular. What happened to the railroad cargo companies with the arrival of heavy trucking. Cars are not effective on rails and trains can't go on roads - their skills are clearly different - but they are chasing the same customers and they are both part of the transportation industry. The NBA competes with the NCAA, the NFL and other events for money from merchandising and events and TV - it is absurd to define them as an industry when they so clearly compete for the same customers.

Yeah, and real-time programmers are often lousy database programmers and vice versa. It is a fragment of the same industry.

No they are not. The teams all compete within the same entity using the same rules. Of course they are willing - they do not want to miss on the next KG / Kobe / Lebron - and are taking the bad apples along with the good ones.

The teams will not employ the Gerald Greens of the world as well if they could evaluate them over a longer period of time against better competition - which is exactly what this rule will provide. It gives them more time to do proper evaluations. The only reason the teams employ them today is because they are afraid of missing on a superstar - and in return both they and their customers suffer.

[quote]
Well, on one hand you say that adults are entitled to take employment with any company that wishes to employ them - on the other hand you are not willing to let the NBA dictate who it is willing to employ. See the obvious conflict in your own argument? You choose to define the NBA an industry because it has several divisions that compete within it - but this is absurd because the NBA would not exist if this competition did not exist - it is the reason it exists - so you make the mistake of seeing the difference between a company and an industry.

And the league office, representing the teams and trying to help all of them - can choose to help the teams by coordinating them. Since the owners are basically the teams, and the league office works for them - it is the teams that are trying to make the change. It is not different from the salary cap. Do you think that a team (say, the Portland Trail Blazers) would not be willing to pay an awful lot more than what someone like NOH can offer CP3? Of course they can, but the league office prevents them from doing it. How is this not a monopoly?

This is not different from multiple divisions of, for example, Microsoft - trying to fight to get for example, Stanford university graduates and paying them absurd amounts of money because there are 3 - 4 really good ones that come from that program - and the company headquarters coming down with the idea that this is not going to happen and every recent graduate that works for the company gets a specific salary rate.

andalusian

I can see how one can claim that the NBA and the NCAA are, to a certain degree, a duopoly, sort of like the old Microsoft/Intel - but they do compete against each other for TV income, event money and sport merchandise - so they are still competitors - even if you disagree. Large companies are so large now-days, that they can compete and cooperate at the same time - and this is clearly an example of this.

mook

Well, if you view the NBA as a monopoly, it seems that the NBA is a monopoly for very similar reasons. Trying to maintain two separate pro basketball leagues is unfeasible (as evidenced by the end of the ABA). The solution is to allow a single league, but also implement a governing body to extensively regulate it to prevent harmful monopolistic behavior. One such harmful behavior is hiring unprepared high school players in the hopes that one day they'll pan out. It harms veterans, and it harms fans with inferior competition. David Stern is considering regulatory action to correct that harm.

That's a pretty unrealistic scenario.

Most people who object to torture do so because we're not really sure it's the most effective way to get information and it damages our world reputation. I think it is ethical to torture somebody IF you could be pretty sure it'd work and IF it would save many lives, and most would agree with me.

Let's bring up a scenario that eliminates many of these "ifs". Does a doctor with HIV have the right to perform surgeries where an accidental cut could infect a patient? Of course not. Why? Because he could harm the patient.

Minstrel

I don't know why you think this is relevant. Yes, there are related entertainment jobs for former players. These aren't comparable or even available positions for entrants into the basketball industry.

Yes, programming is an industry, because any programmer can enter any of those specializations, simply by adjusting their knowledge base a bit. Programmers routinely make the switch from search algorithims to optimization or to database work, etc. That's because the main skillset, programming, is essentially the same.

Athletes almost never switch from one sport to another and almost none of them switch from sports to movies or musicals or music (unless they become rich and famous enough that they can do it as self-funded hobby). That's why it makes no sense to call "entertainment" the industry; entertainers don't have the whole world of entertainment to use for employment. Basketball players have only the NBA, in this country, as a professional option for their skills, which means the entire industry that they are trained for is locked to them by dictates from the league commissioner.

So? That's the free market. Potential has a value and NBA teams are willing to purchase that value. There's no ethical reason why businesses should be barred from making that transaction with willing workers.

There is no contradiction, the NBA doesn't employ the athletes, the teams do. There's absolutely no validity, in the financial world, to calling teams "divisions" of the NBA. Each NBA team has its own ownership, accounting and everything else that goes with a privately-held business. They aren't owned or run by the NBA, as divisions of a company are. The NBA is a business that is ancillary to the teams, it does not own the teams.

The teams employ the athletes and therefore are the willing employers who get to decide if players meet their qualifications. If they are willing to draft and pay the athletes, that means that they've passed the team's qualifications (and yes, potential value is part of qualifications...that doesn't contradict this).

The league office does not work for the teams. The ownership elects the commissioner, but the commissioner does not then work for the teams. The league office works on its own behalf and often is in opposition to the owners.

Even if it was true that this was all done by the choice of the league owners, that's called collusion. And it goes to further disprove your claim that a sport is not an industry and can do what it likes in terms of its policies: in the 1980s, baseball owners entered into an agreement among each other not to bid highly on free agents, to keep free agent costs down. If they were all divisions of one company, that would be perfectly legal...a single company can always set its own pay rates. Of course, in the real world, that is not the case, and it was found to be illegal, since all the teams were independent businesses, and the teams suffered heavy penalties for collusion.

__________________
You'll never live like common people
You'll never do what common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view
And dance and drink and screw
Because there's nothing else to do.

andalusian

The league office is elected by the owners and can be removed by them - they are one and the same - even if some specific decisions on behalf of the entire league are a detriment to some specific teams in it. The owners vote on all the important things - expansion, relocation and if they figure out that something is a detriment to their own good - the ability to pay lots of money for players that they can not properly evaluate - they will do so as well - so the distinction you try to put between the league office and the teams - where the league office works for the teams - is arbitrary and absurd.

It is clear that the teams had a lot of time to evaluate the idea of not letting high-schoolers come into the league - and they chose not to remove the league office or dictate that the policy will be changed. This should tell you something about their willingness to employ these high-schoolers.

Minstrel

That's not a monopolistic behaviour. In what way is it "monopolistic" to hire players in the hopes that they'll pan out? You can't just dub something "monopolistic behaviour" in order to shoehorn it into what you desire to be a parallel structure, for convenience sake. There's nothing about hiring workers due to potential value that has anything at all to do with monopolies.

Also, regulation of legal monopolies is done by the government. The owners hire the commissioner. Power companies aren't allowed to hire their regulatory bodies.

Yes, but it shows that the logic of utilitarian analysis of limiting rights is incorrect.

Most people object to torture because it's inhuman, not because they're unsure of its effectiveness.

But since there's no way to prove whether "most" people would agree with you or me on torture, I'll use a much more universally agreed upon example: medical testing. Is it ethical to test drugs and surgeries in development, with no understanding yet of their safety, on humans because once the drug or surgery is perfected it will save many more lives? This is already well established as unethical, even though it is quite certain that testing on humans is the most effective way to better understand their effects and problems (other animsla clearly are less effective because they have different biologies).

__________________
You'll never live like common people
You'll never do what common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view
And dance and drink and screw
Because there's nothing else to do.

mook

huh. I'd never heard that definition of industry before. Here's what dictionary.com says:
1. the aggregate of manufacturing or technically productive enterprises in a particular field, often named after its principal product: the automobile industry; the steel industry.
2. any general business activity; commercial enterprise: the Italian tourist industry.
3. trade or manufacture in general: the rise of industry in Africa.
4. the ownership and management of companies, factories, etc.: friction between labor and industry.
5. systematic work or labor.
6. energetic, devoted activity at any work or task; diligence: Her teacher praised her industry.
7. the aggregate of work, scholarship, and ancillary activity in a particular field, often named after its principal subject: the Mozart industry.
8. Archaeology. an assemblage of artifacts regarded as unmistakably the work of a single prehistoric group.

I don't see the word "skills" mentioned once. why is that? where do you come about your definition of industry?

there are 8,660,000 results in Google for "entertainment industry."

there are 717,000 results in Google for "sports industry."

there are 150 results for "pro basketball industry".

don't you find it a little odd that nobody else seems to know about the industry you seem to think exists?

the reason it doesn't register is because common sense tells you that the NBA is part of the entertainment and sports industries.

the term "industry" isn't a function of production as much as it is a function of market. it takes vastly different skills to put a satellite in orbit or lay thousands of miles of cable, but everyone knows that DirecTV and Comcast are in the paid television (or "cable") industry.

Minstrel

There are many ties between ownership and the league office, but they are not always in alignment. That was my point. But I don't particularly want to waste time on arguing whether they are the same or different, because it's immaterial, as I'll explain next.

I have no doubt that as a group, they'd rather not pay players for their lesser seasons. But a group of businesses acting together to prevent themselves from individually having to compete (and thereby raising wages and related things) is collusion. And, again, the teams in a league are a collection of individual businesses. I illustrated this with the example of baseball collusion in the 1980s...if they had all been seen as "divisions" of one company, there would have been no legal repercussions. That they were found guilty of collusion shows that all the teams are seen as individual businesses.

__________________
You'll never live like common people
You'll never do what common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view
And dance and drink and screw
Because there's nothing else to do.

andalusian

I can see your point and I disagree. I think this is nothing more than a way for the teams to evaluate young player properly before they commit to giving them big money - not different from the basic requirements that are put in front of other young people in industries and businesses that have a big risk associated with them - be it doctors or lawyers or financial executives.

The facts that it helps the consumers and one of their biggest competitors are just an additional proof to the fact that this is not a monopolistic behavior.

Minstrel

"Industry" may be the wrong term, I'll admit. I can use "job market" then. The point is that the entire spectrum of entertainment is not within the options of basketball players, so the NBA is still a monopoly on the job market for these professionals. In a way Google or Microsoft aren't, since there are options for people who don't meet the policy for any one of those companies.

__________________
You'll never live like common people
You'll never do what common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view
And dance and drink and screw
Because there's nothing else to do.

Utherhimo