Workers and the means of production, and the NBA

DA readers FB and NB have raised some questions about what I'm suggesting with respect to professional sports leagues. Am I saying it should be illegal for rich guys to own teams? Am I saying that team owners don't do anything valuable? Am I discounting the value that coaches provide by teaching the players how to play proper, winning basketball? Am I suggesting that NBA teams should have a different management structure from the one they have?

I'll respond briefly to these specific questions, and then I'll try to re-cast what I'm saying slightly differently.

Q: Am I saying it should be illegal for rich guys to own teams?

A: No. I'd just prefer for it to be different.

Q: Am I saying that team owners don't do anything valuable?

A: No. Team owners choose the people to run the basketball side of the business and the people to run the non-basketball side of the business (the General Manager, and the Team President or CEO, respectively). Hiring two people is certainly worth something, at least if it's the right two people. (I'm not sure if Charles Dolan, owner of the Knicks, did anything of value when he chose Isiah Thomas as General Manager.) Some team owners do some or all of the duties of the GM and/or the CEO, in which case they contribute the value of not just the guy who hires two people (what could that be worth, $100,000 per year?), but also the value of the GM (maybe $3M per year) and of the CEO (maybe $1M per year). So a very active team owner might be worth $4.1M per year.

Q: Am I discounting the value that coaches provide by teaching the players how to play proper, winning basketball?

A: No, not at all. But, a league with really good players and crap coaches will draw much better ratings than a league with really good coaches and crap players. In other words, the players contribute much more value.

Q: Am I suggesting that NBA teams should have a different management structure from the one they have?

A: No, that's not what I'm saying. I don't know what the right management structure is, and that's beside the point. I want a different ownership structure.

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Here's the point: as a consumer of the NBA and as a supporter of labor in general, I wish the players owned the league. They could own the league, as I pointed out in the example in the previous post. The key is that the players already possess the means of production. Sure, they don't contribute all the value – team doctors, coaches, team-builders (General Managers), and others all contribute some value. But the majority of the value of each team is wrapped up in the sinew and gray matter inside the players' bodies.

See, it's difficult for workers to own a business in which they don't own the means of production. If there's a large building, or a fancy machine, or some other physical entity that the workers do not own but that is vital to the business, it is pretty difficult for the workers to own the business.

But when the workers already own the means of production, then there is NO NEED for a rich-dude owner. The NBA owner's $20M/yr is just a huge source of inefficiency. With 30 teams, that's $600M/yr that we, the consumers, ultimately pay for, but for which we receive no value. Insane. Half a billion dollars just completely wasted.

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Finally, here's one more objection that DA reader NB raised: Let's say the players pulled the coup I suggested, and the investment bank went along with their plan, and now it's the Players' Basketball Association (PBA) that everyone watches. Let's say that the public likes it just as much as they used to like the NBA, and the TV contract is just as rich. Well, now there's still that $20M of profit each year per team (on average), only since the players are the owners they just split up the profit amongst themselves. The consumers won't benefit at all; only the players will.

Even if this objection is true, I'd still prefer this scenario to the current economic model. At least the guys making the profit would be the ones who generate the profit through their labor.