Creative Financing In The NBA, 2009
August 26th, 2009
If you Google the term “creative financing otis smith”, you’ll find quite a few hits. It’s long been a favoured phrase for Orlando Magic general manager Otis Smith, and his most famous usage of the phrase came in the run-up to the 2007 offseason. Smith used the term “creative financing” to describe how the Magic were going to handle having maximum cap room, juggling signing other team’s free agents with retaining Darko Milicic. It was a fairly generic term that said something without really saying anything. And it only gained its resonance after Smith used all his money to give Rashard Lewis a massive, massive contract You’ll also, slightly depressingly, find this website fourth in those search results. There’s a reason for that. “Creative financing” is something that I’ve harped on about for a while. The financial side of the NBA gives me a jolly; watching and learning how the NBA teams manage (or mismanage) their salary cap space, the luxury tax threshold and all their exceptions gets me going in ways that it really shouldn’t. I don’t know why it’s fun, I only know that it is. I think you agree. Therefore, there follows a list of some of the better examples of creative financing in the NBA today, some of the ways in which executives and cap experts have manipulated the system, staved off the shackles of oppression, and beaten the terrorists. – The Bulls set a precedent by signing four players to descending deals at the same time. At one point, the contracts of all four of Kirk Hinrich, Andres Nocioni, Smiling Joe and Sulking Ben had contracts that shrunk on a year-by-year basis. The idea of this was to maintain future salary flexibility to allow them to retain Ben Gordon, Luol Deng and Tyrus Thomas […]
The Absurdity Of The Bulls/Celtics Series
May 1st, 2009
I feel obligated to write something about the Bulls/Celtics playoff series. It has been untold drama, brilliant excitement, and well worth the fortnight of 7am finishes. It’s been better than Megan Fox’s shadow, worse than De Niro’s moustache in Cop Land, and awesome to a fault. And I feel inclined to write something that describes it all. But the truth is, I don’t want to. I don’t think I can. The series has been so unilaterally brilliant, so unrivalled in its drama and so and flawlessly flawed in its execution, that I’m not capable of writing the words to accurately describe it. I don’t think anyone is. It’s as though someone decided the Coach Carter series of films should rival Police Academy, wrote six of the most implausibly cheesy scripts ever written, and nailed them all on the first take in front of an audience of millions. The drama, for lack of a better word, is perfect. Disregard game three for a minute. (The Bulls forgot to turn up to that one, so it’s best we pretend that it didn’t happen.) Over the other five games, the other 275 minutes, and the 1,000 or so possessions, the difference between the two team’s aggregate score is one freaking point. There have been seven overtimes in four games, and one game that was decided in the final second of regulation. Never before has there even been more than two overtime games in a series. And yet we’re at four already, with one still to play. It is almost unfathomable how close these two teams are. It will never happen again. It doesn’t matter now about the peculiar series of events that made it this way; what we have now, quite possibly, are the two most evenly-matched teams in the sport’s history. All […]
