It's not just attendance that matters. The TV money would be worth more than double, and the merchandise sales would also be higher. The attendance figures for Charlotte and Indiana have to be inflated also. There's no way those teams are drawing 13-15 thousand per night, unless they are giving seats away.

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I'm just going off of what was listed on ESPN for those numbers:http://espn.go.com/nba/attendance

St. Louis metro area has less than 3 million people. Chicago has 9. Factor in attendance, TV, merchandise etc and its' not even close.

The sooner the NBA realizes the more teams in bigger cities the better, the better than project will be. The league needs to move a few teams and just flat out eliminate a few

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Team Cutler.

That I agree with, at least in terms of eliminating a few. Quite frankly the only thing keeping Oklahoma City above ground is Kevin Durant, because let's be serious; who wants to watch basketball in Oklahoma?

I know for a fact that Indiana has given tickets away to games for free, and I would assume that Charlotte has done the same. If you see any of their games on TV, there's empty seats all over the place, unless they're playing a popular team like Boston, Chicago, Miami, etc...

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The NBA would be stronger as a league financially if they had like 20 or so teams.

West.

Lakers
Clippers
Suns
Mavericks
Rockets
Spurs
Utah
Portland
Denver

East
Bulls
Chicago Team 2
Knicks
NY Team 2
Boston
Philly
Miami
Washington
Detroit


I'm NBA ignorant, and that list is just off the top of my head, but I have to think the league would be a better product and much stronger financially. Obviously it would never happen with the players union

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Team Cutler.

The Clippers are only a joke because they have one of the worst owners in all of professional sports. If you put someone with any type or brain in charge of that franchise, it could be one of the more valuable teams in the league.

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This is easily...easily...the stupidest thing Simmons has ever written. I'm not even an NBA person and I can spot several obvious problems.

First, the movie Dave sucked. Everything about it sucked. Half the things Dave did were wildly unconstitutional (the cabinet doesn't just line item veto a bunch of shit, and they're not going to do it to save the first lady's BS spending). Then, the big send off at the end is that Dave proposes a federal jobs program. That's his big idea. A federal jobs program. No one has ever thought of this before.

OK, onto more substantive things:

This is common in all auctions; winners tend to overpay (there's even a name for it: winner's curse). That more free agents are overpaid than underpaid is completely unsurprising and is true of every sport ever. His entire article is premised on removing this. You cannot. It is inevitable.

The rest of his article is silly "have your cake and eat it too." He wants mid-level players to get paid less, but one of the reason mid-level players' salaries are inflated is because teams can only pay superstars so much. The money has to go somewhere so it goes to mid-level types. So he wants more money to go to superstars, but he doesn't actually want teams to big on superstars, because then Larry Bird might have gone to Detroit or something. So he has this convoluted system where superstars get most of the money, but are limited to staying in the same city. The union agrees to this why? There are more bad and mediocre players than good players.

Also, there's way too much "it's so easy!" crap in here. Players want the same revenue split and owner's want 50/50? Just split the difference! Oh, thank you Bill Simmons!

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Fire Phil Emery

Whenever there's a lockout, get your umbrella's out because that's when I brainstorm.

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