Chapter 710 [Success Is a Storm, Failure Is a Storm]
This season, the league is extremely divided between strong and weak teams. Except for the Cavaliers, Pacers, and Celtics, the Eastern Conference can be said to be all weak teams. It seems that the only competitive players in the Western Conference are the Clippers and Thunder, and even the Mavericks and Spurs are weakening.
Some literary youths began to discuss on the Internet: Has the NBA become boring because of teamwork?
The answer is no. In fact, the audience does not care whether to sign up for a team. What they care about is what data their favorite stars can produce and whether their favorite team can win the championship.
Didn’t we join tour groups in the 1980s? So how did the great Lakers show come together? Could it be that the Celtics won the championship with Bird alone? Wasn't the Bulls team big enough in the 1990s?
The game is no longer exciting. The key problem is that the salary cap is growing too fast. The abilities and values of many stars will explode in an advanced manner and break the original system.
In addition, the decision of the Cavaliers' Big Three in 2010 broke the rules. In the past, the management operation was used to exchange for the giants. The three brothers discussed directly behind the scenes, and then the eldest brother stepped forward and asked the management to do it. Although they failed to win the championship, in the long run it still affected the balanced development of the NBA.
On January 14, the Clippers, who had won 9 consecutive games, faced the Lakers, who had 7 wins and 6 games.
The Lakers started with four more games than the Clippers, including three consecutive back-to-back games. From the schedule, we can see some trends in the league. They have weakened their efforts to support the Lakers.
Not only are the players playing poorly, the Lakers management is also under tremendous pressure, and everything is not going well this year.
In Yang Rui's previous life, the Lakers began to plummet in a visible trajectory starting in 2011, until they reached the bottomless abyss. The former king has been ranked last in the Western Conference for consecutive years, heading straight for the No. 1 pick.
The reasons for this tragedy are due to Kobe's aging and his style of play being too simple and rough. The change in the league's attitude is the key.
In this life, the league is pretty good to the Lakers. In his previous life, Stern was able to prevent Paul from joining the Lakers for "basketball reasons."
At that time, the Hornets received Odom, Scola, Kevin Martin, Dragic and the 2012 Knicks first-round draft pick. Is it worth more than Gordon, Kaman, Aminu and the 2012 Timberwolves? Lower picks?
To put it bluntly, it was the Lakers' sky-high broadcast contract that was to blame.
For a long time, Lakers owner Jerry Buss has been Stern's ally and friend. It was Buss who proposed to Stern that "the NBA should create stars", which led to the rapid development of the NBA in the past thirty years. But during the lockout in 2011, Stern and Buss parted ways and fell in love.
The Bass family still maintains its original idea of "creating stars and creating a big market." After the NBA cake became bigger, Stern began to think about common prosperity.
The Time Warner contract makes the Lakers an outlier. It is also a TV broadcast contract. The Grizzlies, Suns, Hornets, Bucks and other teams only have about 10 million US dollars. This has seriously affected the pattern of the entire league.
This year, Stern was really afraid that Facebook would also announce a monopoly on the Clippers broadcast rights in the summer, which would cause other bosses to make an even bigger fuss. Fortunately, Facebook did not do this.
No matter what Thomas Bentley and Yang Rui's considerations are, Stern is relieved. He will retire in two years. He hopes to wait until that day safely. Now he only needs to suppress the Lakers.
This phenomenon is common in any commercial league. For example, there have been rumors in the football world for many years that UEFA is suppressing the Premier League. It is precisely because the Premier League's profitability is too strong, which is not conducive to the value-added of the UEFA Champions League brand. The more the Lakers make, the NBA brand will also be adversely affected.
The friendship between Stern and Bass is not worth mentioning in the face of interests, not to mention that now that the old Bass is seriously ill and the younger Bass has taken over, there is no need to give them face.
In Yang Rui's previous life, Stern prevented the Lakers from acquiring Paul and openly exposed his thoughts on suppressing the Lakers in order to "equalize the rich and the poor."
In 2012, the NBA sold the Hornets, which had hosted them for more than a season, for a total price of only US$3.5 billion. Three years later, the Milwaukee Bucks, whose status and strength were still inferior to the Hornets,
The sale price reached US$500 million. The premium of NBA teams is precisely at the expense of the Lakers' interests. It is the tacit understanding reached by NBA small market teams and the league during the lockout period in 2011.
The outside world always viewed the 2011 labor negotiations as a confrontation between owners and players. At the same time, the counterattack launched by small-market teams against the Lakers was ignored. Buss Jr. once said sadly: "Most teams are targeting the Lakers. They think anything we do is unfair."
Before the lockout, the Lakers would pay about 5 million US dollars to the league every year for regional television broadcast contracts. After the lockout, the Lakers' "protection fees" increased more than 10 times, and they must pay 50 to 80 million US dollars to the league every year.
After this lockout, many teams got rid of their losses.
In Yang Rui's previous life, in the 2012-13 season, Jordan's Bobcats claimed to have made a profit of 8 million US dollars. In fact, they lost 6 million US dollars, but received an additional 14 million US dollars in dividends from the league, and part of this 14 million US dollars was Lakers money. To put it nicely, the NBA is "equalizing the rich and the poor", but to put it worse, small-market teams are "taking advantage of the big players" in the same way that other NCAA programs are taking money from basketball and football.
It is not difficult to see that in 2014, new president Adam Silva used Sterling to get into a racial discrimination crisis and forced him to sell the team to the super-rich Ballmer. He also had the idea of supporting the Clippers' promotion and weakening the Lakers' influence in Los Angeles.
For business, it is not enough to stand alone. Even if the Lakers' market value soars to 5 billion or even 10 billion US dollars, as long as most teams in the league are still losing money, the overall value of the NBA will not rise. Suppressing the Lakers, as long as more teams benefit, it will be more helpful to the NBA. After all, this is no longer thirty years ago. It is time for the NBA to rush to open up the situation. Sharing hardships, sharing wealth and hardship, we are invincible everywhere. truth.
Jerry Bass is an old gangster, so the golden lin is just a thing in the pond. It transforms into a dragon when encountering wind and clouds. The dragon roars in the sky and changes the sky. He swims in the shallow water when the wind and clouds come. He succeeds and loses in the wind and clouds.
The Clippers made the most correct choice, regardless of profits, using exciting games to attract fans and build a broad fan base.
In this game, Yang Rui did not start Tony Allen and started an offensive attack with the Lakers.
The Lakers have not been able to improve in terms of interior defense against pick-and-rolls and point guard defense. In this game, Lakers substitute forward Matt Barnes was also absent due to injury, and the defense became weaker. With Luol Deng, the wings were full of holes.
DeMarre Carroll has the potential to become a good role player, but Byron Scott has never liked him, and the management traded him to the Nuggets in exchange for only a second-round pick.
In the Lakers, Carroll is very much like Cunningham, a small 4 position who is active defensively and has a short range.
Playing the 4th position, he is just a rough guy. He is still short and has no advantages. In fact, as long as he switches to small forward, his defense will become very good. If he can practice 3-pointers well, he will become a 3D player.
After playing as a substitute for a few games, Love came to the management to argue and returned to the starting lineup. When he returned to the starting lineup, he did not have much possession of the ball and could only serve as a fort on the outside, and his defense was sparse.
The Lakers' bench was not led by a scorer and had poor offensive power. Neither Murphy nor McRoberts were good at attacking with the ball. The Clippers led by 24 points at halftime.
In the end, the Clippers won 130-94. Six players on the team scored in double figures and four scored 20+.
Only three Lakers scored in double figures. Gasol made 7 of 17 shots, 14 points, 7 rebounds and 3 assists; Love made 6 of 13 shots, 0 of 2 three-pointers, 12 points, 13 rebounds and 4 assists.
Kobe made 14 of 28 shots, 2 of 5 three-pointers, 12 of 14 free throws, and scored 42 points, 7 rebounds, and 4 assists. 71