Cuban Sanction
Tom Spurgeon and I will post another NBA Preview this October, but the league has been going through upheval thanks to a weird, one-time clause in the new collective bargaining agreement, allowing teams to cut one player (they still have to pay him) to remove his salary from their luxury tax. It’s a complicated issue, but the upshot is that about 20 teams have cut players whom they’d recently given big contracts to.
Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, just wrote about his decision to cut Michael Finley, saving the team around $90 million. It’s a neat post, because it provides some insight into the financial landscape of the NBA, and philosophies on player development:
When the annual league revenue increases stopped and a luxury tax loomed, teams adjusted their financial profiles. To get under the tax threshold, they offered good players packaged with horrible contracts. We took them. We hoped the talent would get us a championship before the number of bad contracts we took on in trades caught up with us.
It didn’t happen.
Of course, he never does get around to explaining the Raef La Frentz contract . . .
Mobilize the Cabal!
According to this piece in the NYPost, the check at Parkhill’s Waterfront Grill in Allenhurst, NJ was presented to “Jew Couple”. No, seriously:
“We are a family restaurant, and we welcome everybody,” [the manager] said, adding that the words “Jew Couple” were never intended to be derogatory.
“We use it as a form of identity,” she said. She would not elaborate on what the restaurant does when there is more than one couple assumed to be Jewish at the restaurant.
Maybe they put different colored stars of David on the checks.
It’s an outrage! We’d better get our lawyers, bankers and entertainment executives on the case!
In other news, the born-again Christian who does a half-assed job as a receptionist at my office has been putting articles in my mail-slot that explain how the Israeli pullout from Gaza is defying Biblical prophecies and will lead to ruin.
One more of these, and I’ll launch into my “You belong to a psychotic death cult that believes true happiness can only come after apocalyptic destruction!” rant.
–Jew Blogger