Why Franchise Players Stayed with Original Team

I reviewed a couple of recent situations when top NBA stars left team which had drafted them so it was a natural follow-up to take a look at the other side of this coin: what GMs had to do to keep their franchise players?
Rules are the same as in previous post so I won’t repeat them.

Let’s start with probably the most popular and the most often cited case…

 

Review Why Top NBA Stars Left Their Teams

Have you heard recently about Top NBA Stars which left their hard-working and poor teams?
OK, that was a joke, if you follow NBA in any capacity you couldn’t have missed that memo ;-)
But there was always one thing which bothered me about this topic: reason for their actions.
Was it big market glamour? Was it a chase for fame or rings? Was it money/greed? Is it some kind of a trend? A lot of articles were written about this so I finally sat down and spent far too many hours to figure out why… but I think I found an satisfying answer [at least for me].

There were some rules for this exercise, thanks to prosportstransactions.com I reviewed every team’s move from the time franchise player was drafted or signed huge extension to the dreaded day given star was out with following assumptions:

• All decisions are in a chronological order,
• I included every contract worth more than 5 million dollars [total],
• I ignored every minimum contracts and all other small ones unless they were important in some way,
• I included every significant trade – meaning either good or expensive players were involved,
• I ignored every trade with marginal assets involved like 2nd round draft pick for future 2nd rounder or bench guy for bench guy with low salaries etc unless they were important in some way,
• I tried very hard NOT to use hindsight in my judgements but obviously in some cases [especially with rookies and injuries] it was inevitable,
• Obviously some if not all grades are subjective and probably arguable but I doubt you can move them up or down significantly,
• I measured predictability of each outcome in a very simple way: “what if said GM had used advanced boxscore statistics like Win Shares, PER, Wins Produced to support his decisions?”,
• It was a quite long list so if I missed anything important please let me know in the comments,
• If you are not interested in gory details, just scroll down to the end of this post for conclusions.

Let’s start with a case which not only couldn’t be more clearer but also had some impact on others…

 

Should Team’s Prices Become a Factor in Next CBA?

I can’t discuss matters with the NBA or research financial health of the league better than Nate Silver but what I can do is… present some more tables and ask questions ;-) Because when you collect a lot of data about one topic like ownership history… you really should have some fun with it, right?

If you prefer picture than tables… well, that’s your lucky day because it will be the first one on this blog! ;-)

Known Team's Prices in the NBA Since 1962

This graph and table below have basically the same content as yesterday’s data but it’s focus is on a different piece of the puzzle… Here’s detailed version of League-Wide Picture of Team’s Prices.

 

Buying NBA Team, Ownership Timeline with Prices

With a lockout under way and it’s unusual focus on employers I wondered…
When and For How Much Money Owners acquired Teams in the first place?

So today’s post is simple in premise but I hope it will become very helpful data…
I compiled a History of Ownership for All Teams including Date and Cost of Transactions.

Please note and remember that:

• sources for this one were all over the map and I had to Google a lot for pretty much every case,
• most information came from [in a random order] prosportstransactions.com, Forbes, Rod’s Sports Economics, sportsecyclopedia.com, Wikipedia and local newspapers’ sites,
• All prices are in millions of dollars [first column means "original price listed" and second one was Adjusted for Inflation to Average for 2010 with data taken from inflationdata.com],
• I don’t have any inside information and I can’t guarantee accuracy any of those reports,
• If you know any information behind ??? please let me know in the comments or via e-mail, Thanks!
• List was sorted alphabetically by current team’s name and then descending by year of transaction.
• I’ll update this post as often as needed/possible – LAST EDIT: 09 November 2011, Sixers

Unfortunately not every team has listed previous owners as nicely as Rockets [MediaGuide.pdf, 8MB] and not every team had such clean and easy history as Pistons, quite the opposite, overall it was a mess and time-wise it was by far my least efficient post to date.

Anyway, enough of caveats, here’s the full table of all owners in the NBA history…
[if you are interested in different views of this table I sorted it by expansion fees and all known sales].