Lebron to Olympiakos in 2010?

[rabbitproof]

Thanks, American Dollar!

I suspect the cap will have to be adjusted in some way, even though it's already a soft cap, perhaps reducing the luxury tax?

Though not yet, I would also suspect some of the more primo targets in the future will be the rookies and sophomores who outplay their rookie contract but aren't up for an extension yet. Not sure what the rules around rights and extensions would be around that. Could a player duck out after his rookie year, collect 8M a year and come back in 2-3 years to look for a new non-rookie contract payday?

[Fidel]

IMO it´s an interesting and ultimately a bad developement that will be hard to stop. What Germandunk said about the popularity of basketball in europe is not nesessarily true. It´s mostly a German perspective. In other countrys like Greece, Spain, Russia, Israel basketball is rapidly growing and very popular. Soccer is the clear Nr.1 but in all of the countrys that don´t have rugby (rugbys very popular in great britan and france) there´s room for a 2nd big team sport.

Teams like CSKA Moscow or Olympiacos allready have a budget of around 50 mio $ and that will only go up. The problem that the NBA will be facing is that they are competing with teams that don´t have salary cap. The salary cap is one of the things that make the NBA great though. It gives smaller market teams a chance and prevents stuff you see in european soccer (only a couple teams from England, Italy, Spain and one team from Germany can win the champions league really and that stays the same every year cause ultimately money rules).

The strong euro also has alot to do with the threat that euro teams will pose for the NBA in the future. Asia might get into the mix also. There´s lots of fresh money. So what´s the NBA gonna do about it.

Maybe guys like Kobe or Lebron or Wade can make more money in the US if you add their advertising deals, but that´s about it. If someone throws 40 mio$ (roughly 25mio euros) at a player like Duncan or Stoudemire or Dwight Howard don´t you think they would take it?

[sike]

Talk about honor, history, legacy, brotherhood, etc....but its really just following the money...you know players will, and you can't blame them.

[dalger]

Originally Posted by Fidel

IMO it´s an interesting and ultimately a bad developement that will be hard to stop. What Germandunk said about the popularity of basketball in europe is not nesessarily true. It´s mostly a German perspective. In other countrys like Greece, Spain, Russia, Israel basketball is rapidly growing and very popular. Soccer is the clear Nr.1 but in all of the countrys that don´t have rugby (rugbys very popular in great britan and france) there´s room for a 2nd big team sport.

Teams like CSKA Moscow or Olympiacos allready have a budget of around 50 mio $ and that will only go up. The problem that the NBA will be facing is that they are competing with teams that don´t have salary cap. The salary cap is one of the things that make the NBA great though. It gives smaller market teams a chance and prevents stuff you see in european soccer (only a couple teams from England, Italy, Spain and one team from Germany can win the champions league really and that stays the same every year cause ultimately money rules).

The strong euro also has alot to do with the threat that euro teams will pose for the NBA in the future. Asia might get into the mix also. There´s lots of fresh money. So what´s the NBA gonna do about it.

Maybe guys like Kobe or Lebron or Wade can make more money in the US if you add their advertising deals, but that´s about it. If someone throws 40 mio$ (roughly 25mio euros) at a player like Duncan or Stoudemire or Dwight Howard don´t you think they would take it?

You bring up a few interesting points, Fidel, though I’m not sure that I can agree with all of them. Simply because some countries don’t have a true big team sport besides soccer, it doesn’t mean that there is necessarily the potential for it. I’m under the impression that a lot of it has to do with socialisation. In Germany and other European countries a lot of sports fans are seemingly exclusively socialized to soccer, and it seems that the interest for other sports is mainly being developed through the success of the respective athletes. In the 80ies and 90ies, tennis was extremely popular over here due to the achievements of players like Boris Becker and Steffi Graf. When they ended their careers, the interest noticeably declined and Formula 1 came on the map with the historic successes of Michael Schumacher, this alongside boxing where we had a longtime light heavyweight champion in Henry Maske and a wannabe heavyweight champion in Axel Schulz. Today it’s Wladimir Klitschko who generates a lot of interest, yet there’s not even a regular TV coverage for sports such as basketball or hockey.

There is no doubt that basketball is really popular and, apparently, rapidly growing in Greece, Russia, Turkey, Spain, and a few other former Soviet countries, but these clubs don’t naturally make the money to pay $50 million for any given superstar athlete. I’m not aware of the current budgets European basketball clubs can work with, but the numbers of the various soccer clubs are available. Recently, Zlatan Ibrahimovic of Inter Milan became the highest-paid soccer player in the world with an annual net salary of €12 million ($18.5 million). The club itself had a revenue of €264 million ($407.5 million) in 2007. When you put into perspective that even the biggest European basketball teams make much less money than that, I can hardly see them pay a single player like Lebron James $50 million (€32 million) per year. Granted, they have less players to pay compared to soccer clubs and can split the available money on fewer players, but that doesn’t compensate the lower budgets.

Even if the money was there and actually earned through TV rights fees, ticket sales, sponsoring deals or merchandise sales, we would talk about two or three clubs at best that could afford, again at best, one player of that calibre and pay the other players so much less that the team’s salary structure and hierarchy would be totally unbalanced and cause for a conflict.

There is one exception to it. Having no salary cap in Europe means that some crazed Russian oil billionaire owners could take money out of their own pockets to pay players wasteful amounts of money just for the sake of winning, but, personally, these owners would lose serious money. England’s successful soccer club Chelsea FC has an owner like that in Roman Abramowitsch who has been spending hundreds of millions of euros over the last few years to win it all. Well, they didn’t, even though they were close.

From where I sit, I guess it’s just as likely that European sports officials will eventually try to implement some sort of salary cap, if the aforementioned development were to escalate even further since it significantly affects equal opportunities. There has been talk of it for years, and the NBA and U.S. sports in general have always been mentioned as a good example.

I truly believe that your system with salary caps is better than ours considering the involvements of rich owners who somewhat distort competition. It would be great if the teams were only allowed to spend the money they make instead of relying on the private pockets of their billionaire owners.

Still, I can’t see Lebron going to Europe in the foreseeable future.

[Mah23]

Lebron wants to be a billionaire. If he's able to take money he'll do it. Greedy man.

[birdsanctuary]

We better worry more about Dirk going to Europe when his contract expires not Le Bron...

[EricaLubarsky]

No American star will go over there in his prime, but you can bet that every greedy player will mention being willing to think about it.

I think the NBA will need to adress this like they did the Arenas situtation but I think the Euro angle will be a huge bargaining chip to inflate NBA salary prices even further until the next CBA.

[BGMaverick9]

I still don't see why Lebron or Kobe, specifically Lebron, can't go over there for 1-2 years, get his money and still come back to the NBA closer to his real prime and really dominate. It's the best of both worlds for him, over Kobe, because he's still young enough to do that and come back and still have a lot of his prime still left in him.

Stern needs to expand (like he wants to), or let go of the salary cap.

[rabbitproof]

It grows.... I love this competition. Vai free market vai!

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Kobe says Europe a possibility

By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports 10 hours, 21 minutes ago

BEIJING – Kobe Bryant won’t sign a contract extension with the Los Angeles Lakers until he has tested the global market, the U.S. Olympic basketball star told Yahoo! Sports on Saturday.

Asked whether he plans to solicit overseas offers before signing an extension, Bryant flatly said yes.

It’s possible Bryant could leave the NBA for Europe – perhaps in a dual role of owner and player – as early as next summer. Bryant is signed with the Lakers through the 2010-11 season, but can opt out after next season.

Suddenly, the best player in the world seems determined to pair the changing global economics with his unparalleled popularity to create an international bidding war. A day earlier, Bryant told the Boston Globe that he would consider a $50 million offer to play in Europe.

“As players, the business of the game (is) evolving,” Bryant said before a Team USA practice at Beijing Normal University. “I think free agency now is becoming a global thing …. When players become free agents, the team they’re currently with – their competition is no longer the rest of the teams in the NBA. But it’s global. So, the market’s opened up. So we’ll just have to see how the league responds to it.”

Bryant spent several years of his childhood in Italy and loves it there. Seven years ago, he bought an ownership stake in Olimpia Milano of the Italian league for his father Joe to run. When Bryant was asked whether he held intrigue with owning and playing on a team together, he said, “Absolutely.”

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the rest of it:

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/bei...yhoo&type=lgns