I imagine Adam Smith would say its not so much strange as a potential danger to free market capitalism :p
The NBA is different than MLB in terms of trades though. MLB you can take on as much Salary as you want, as long as the owner is cool with it. In the NBA, in order to take on salary, you must either have the full space available to absorb it, or be able to send back an equal amount of salary as is coming in. So having some larger contracts means we'll have pieces to send out that will add up to a nice big Fish. This is how my optimistic brain works, anyway.
While they do compete with one another on a business stage, they also share common ground in terms of dealing with these Franchises and feeding the content through their pipelines. By "teaming up", they now not only own the Networks and Channels which show these teams, but the actual Teams as well.
As is the case with The Knicks and the MSG Network, Bell and Rogers were worried that MLSE could go out and create their own channel which would show ALL games (and not TSN, Sportsnet, The Score; which are all owned by either Rogers or Bell) and thus end up cutting Rogers/Bell out of the deal almost completely. By buying the Teams, they decide which pipeline gets which content. Its smart business.
little off topic here but just a nice write up about DeMar. http://www.sportsnet.ca/basketball/2...erozan_growth/
I think that with the dwindling hope that the Leafs are going to have a season, MLSE must be looking at this as a large revenue loss, one great way to recoupe that revenue is to boost sales in other sporting avenues.
While the NBA is a little bit of a tougher and more expensive market, let's see what MLSE will potentially do with TFC, that's the club I'm interested to see if any significant movement happens. They have a good fan base and still a good attendance record, despite not making the playoffs in 6 years. They're dead last usually. And they've had coaching issues since day 1 (I believe, not a big TFC fan).
I believe MLSE is merely trying to mitigate any future losses from the Leafs, which could result in a ticket price drop for the Raptors if they continue to lose, whereas, a trade in the blockbuster arena is doubtful. I say that only because I can't see MGMT spending a lot of money on a team that is currently 2-6, in the toughest division, injury plagued, and not a single game has been picked up by an American broadcaster. It doesn't spell return on investment.
This is just my 2 cents, take it for what it's worth (probably 1 cent).
Cheers.
You can still lose, while spending exorbitant amounts of money.
However, you can't win without spending money. In my opinion.
Not sure on the exact stats, but I'm pretty sure any team that has done anything in the playoffs for the last so many years, has been a tax paying team.
Bellogers (See what I did there?) wouldn't get any financial boost from the American viewership on ESPN or NBC etc. And vice-versa. It doesn't make sense for the American Networks to pick our games and give away half of the possible Viewership numbers.
And NBATV (American Network) has picked up a few of our games already this year.
It makes sense for them to invest in the team and try to get Raps hype back up to where it was on both sides of the border in the early 2000's. The traditional source of team income, gate receipts, is becoming less and less important. You can sit at home on your couch watching hidef on your 50" tv and if you have LP or a DVR you can pause, rewind etc etc. The ability to deliver your product further and further, to reach millions of people, is where the cash is at. 18,900 people at the ACC is nice, but not as critical as it used to be. Raps have a wider market to broadcast to than most teams in the NBA, BnR have a lock on broadcasting the games and now just need a halfway decent team to drive ratings a little. Get a really good team and suddenly they are capable of jacking up media space sales prices because more and more people will be watching the games.
The worst thing they could do is alienate the "casual fan" types who can tune into broadcasts from closer US teams and turn away from BnR owned channels by fielding shitty, dysfunctional teams.
The big trade the Jays made is part of a process that started about 2 yrs. ago when AA took over as GM. His plan was to stockpile prospects so they can be used when trade oportunities arise. Thus he was able to make the deal. Yes things work differently in base ball but a similar strategy can be employed with the Raps. In-fact BC is doing something similar only he didn`t start the process when he took over. He tried different things and when he ended up losing Bosh, the rebuilding started and is in process. Unlike in base ball there is no farm system in basketball but the likes of Ross, Davis and maybe even Jonas could be used as pieces to pull off a big trade in a year or two.