NBA players’ lockout hurts MVP’s ‘dream team’

SACRAMENTO, California—National Basketball Association commissioner David Sterns’ warning of “ominous consequences” from the league’s four-month-old labor dispute has hit closer to home.
Because NBA players and owners remain a mile apart on how to divide billions of dollars from the league’s basketball-related income (BRI), two weeks’ worth of the regular season set to start the day after Halloween has been canceled.
This translates to economic pain for 30 NBA cities from coast to coast, particularly the small markets like Sacramento and its Kings—the same struggling NBA franchise coveted for ownership by a few business moguls, reportedly including Filipino tycoon Manny V. Pangilinan.
The Kings will not play eight games, four of them at home, because of the gutted games schedule.
A local TV affiliate of CBS News crunched some numbers and reported last night that the four home games erased from the league calendar will cost the Kings just under $1 million per game from lost attendance, parking, and food and drink receipts.
CBS 13 News Sacramento also said the city will lose $80,000 in sales tax from forfeited Kings business; it will also take a big hit from a similar levy on the revenue of restaurants and clubs around Power Balance Stadium that counts heavily on the beer-drinking, burger-devouring crowds that keep their doors open on home-game nights.
City officials are also worried that with the first two weeks of the NBA regular season wiped out, the real stinger could be the erosion of some of the public enthusiasm for a planned new Kings arena.
The Kings, amid rumors of a takeover by businessmen waiting in the wings—Pangilinan supposedly among them—decided not to move to Anaheim last year. A loyal fan base and a committed public-private effort to build a new arena prevented them from leaving.
“It (the NBA labor dispute) is not an issue that helps anything,” Michael Ault, a member of the arena task force, told the Sacramento Bee newspaper.
He stressed that the loss of games could “have some psychological impact” on the public support for the $387-million arena proposed for the railyard area of downtown Sacramento.
Mayor Kevin Johnson, who was instrumental in convincing the Maloof family, owner of the Kings to keep the team in the capital city, said the arena project is on target. “We’re going full steam ahead,” he proclaimed at his weekly press conference.
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The NBA’s absence from the sports scene is a boon to the other professional leagues. Also, a likely beneficiary of the NBA’s absence could be boxing and two of its forthcoming championship fights featuring Filipino boxing icon Manny Pacquiao and his heir wannabe, Nonito Donaire Jr.
Pacquiao’s third match with Mexican legend Juan Manuel Marquez will be fought at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on Nov. 12.
Donaire, whose burning desire is to box in a Pacquiao undercard, appears to have been left at the station when the train left.
Three Filipino boxers will be spotlighted in Pacquiao-Marquez III, but not the Filipino Flash. Leaving Donaire off such a blockbuster is either a slip or a stroke of marketing genius.
In any case, Donaire will have center stage all to himself on HBO’s Boxing After Dark when he stakes his WBO and WBC bantamweight titles against unbeaten Omar Narvaez of Argentina from the Theater at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 22 (Oct. 23 in Manila).