NBA owners don't matter, and yet

The cartel members have captured a huge portion of the league's value despite being mostly irrelevant to success or failure.

Good morning. Is it finally time to talk about Dennis Schroder? Eh. Let's basketball.

LeBron James and Mark Walter both left the Los Angeles Lakers in unceremonious circumstances this summer.

LeBron wrapped up an 8-year stint in L.A. that included a championship and an armful of individual accolades including some of the NBA's most hallowed records. LeBron earned $347 million from the Lakers for his services over those eight years of work. Over an illustrious 23-year career which has landed him in conversation as the greatest player in the sport's history, a tenure that involved making films, having a major signature shoe line with the biggest sneaker company in the world and being as active in the endorsement game as an active athlete since MJ, LeBron has earned a reported $1.7 billion.

Walter owned the Lakers for 10 months, contributed what appears to be absolutely nothing but some headlines and netted a $2 billion profit.

These are extreme examples, both in terms of LeBron's excellence and earnings and Walter's feckless NBA resumé. But the truth embedded in the comparison is real: athletes and staff have to perform well to earn money in the league, while team owners can literally trip into it.

Owners are the NBA's weak link. As has been argued ahead of every potential labor stoppage, no one shows up to see the owners. It's all about the athletes and the brands. And the owners have almost nothing to do with the brands, at least not now. What could Walter, a faceless financier now in trouble with the law, do for the L.A. Lakers brand that Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, LeBron and Luka Doncic did? Absolutely nothing. You can credit Jerry Buss for being the leader of the Showtime revolution that made the Lakers the hottest brand in the NBA and the hottest ticket in Los Angeles. If he didn't have Magic at the head of that snake with Kareem, James Worthy and all-time basketball minds in West and Pat Riley, it never takes off and we might have two Clippers franchises. And we see what's happened to the Buss legacy now: an embarrassing meltdown that will have not one iota of impact on the actual team, because owners, even with legendary family names, don't matter.

Did I mention the Clippers? They are owned by one of the 10 richest humans on Earth, and have been for 12 seasons now. Steve Ballmer, a mega successful and seemingly generous billionaire corporate CEO, taking over the franchise from Donald Sterling, a racist slumlord miser, was seen as the moment the L.A. Clippers became a real NBA franchise: professional, committed to excellence, serious. And yet: Sterling's Clippers won nearly as many playoff series in his final 12 seasons of ownership (three) as Ballmer's Clippers have won in the first 12 seasons of his ownership (four). This despite evidence (sorry NBA, I know that's a touchy word) that Ballmer's Clippers broke the NBA cartel's salary cap rules to cheat their way to signing and retaining at least one high-end player that helped the team's cause greatly, a scandal that has dominated the offseason discourse and hangs over the franchise like a cloud. It doesn't seem like Steve Ballmer has been all that more effective an NBA owner than Donald Sterling despite the obvious human upgrade.

Why? Because NBA owners don't matter.

New York has two NBA franchises. One is owned by a literal failson with terrible politics, a horrid temperament and enemies of his own making everywhere he looks. The other is owned by one of the most successful modern businessman in the world who co-founded a retail giant and has an impeccably elite pedigree. That first owner's team (James Dolan's Knicks) just won the NBA championship and is among the most lucrative brands on the planet. The second owner's team (Joe Tsai's Nets) have existed on this planet primarily as a punchline, even well into Tsai's tenure.

Before last season, you give 100 smart NBA fans the choice between having Dolan or Tsai buy their team, and at least 90 pick Tsai. And yet, reality strikes. Because as it turns out, NBA owners don't matter.

They don't do anything! They hire a few people: maybe a general manager or president of basketball operations, maybe a team president to handle business affairs, a general counsel. They might chime in during periods where personnel decisions are made; this almost always goes poorly for everyone involved, because NBA owners are usually the least knowledgeable voice (compared to scouts, coaches, cap experts and team executives) and the voice the actual experts are least likely to disagree with. Some of them apparently orchestrate side deals with players to circumvent the salary cap. They threaten City Councils and state legislatures and, worst of all, fans with relocation if the public doesn't foot the bill to construct and/or modernize their arenas, all for the privilege of paying insane prices to then visit said arenas. They sit courtside, or in a suite, and act like maestros of a symphony for which they have only a minor role. Every few years they push the league's commissioner to expand their margin a little more through collective bargaining with the players, or they push the commissioner to give them an edge over the other members of the cartel by tweaking the rules this way or that.

And when they're ready, they sell the franchise for massive profits, all of which they can keep (unless, of course, they've been involved in fraudulent business and they need to move the proceeds around to stay ahead of the feds). It's a pretty amazing set-up for those lucky enough to have entered the ownership ranks when it was viable for the mere super-rich and for those ultra-wealthy folk who have found ways to get in since the valuation explosion. Talk about a safe investment vehicle.

Except, the bottom has to fall out at some point. The world is running out of billionaire financiers to scoop up these teams. We think Bob Iger and Josh Kushner bought the Lakers from Walter last week, but as TrueHoop's whipsmart Henry Abbott (the dean of reporting on NBA owners) points out: Iger doesn't have the money and Kushner's equity funds are shrouded in mystery. It's quite possible that the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund is almost entirely backing the Lakers purchase. It appears that the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund almost entirely backed Walter's original Lakers purchase! Ownership structures are getting more and more convoluted. Adam Silver has been over his skis for years now, and it's going to get worse for him. Does he even really know who he answers to?

This isn't to say that we're in a sports franchise valuation bubble, because as noted the owners have a really sweet deal. But the more that these ultra-wealthy parties treat NBA franchises as liquid assets, the less stable the NBA becomes. The league is accelerating toward a team ownership paradigm it can't control, with results it can't predict. All that trouble for basically no value added in return. Some game.

Another time, Dennis. Tut mir leid. Be excellent to each other.