Pity the Poor Plutocratic Sports Owner
By 
This is an entertaining piece about Howard Schultz’s brief ownership of the Sonics: plutocrat buys team, manages it horribly, demands taxpayer bailout, and then sells the team to be moved out of town after promising he wouldn’t. And yet it’s actually too generous in a way that drives me up the wall:
Schultz and a team of investors spent $200 million to acquire the Sonics and the WNBA’s Seattle Storm from the Ackerley Group, a local outfit that had owned the team for decades.
It was a difficult time for NBA franchises in smaller cities, with many teams losing money.
First of all, LOL at the idea that Seattle is some kind of impoverished hick town where nobody can make a buck selling pro sports. Leaving aside the obvious, the MLS team draws 40,000 people a game! 33,000 people have put down deposits for NHL season tickets! And of course the Sonics were doing fine until Schultz came along to alienate fans and players alike:
The Sonics were getting reasonable attendance totals until, IMO, the good players started getting sold off in Schultz’s tenure: (year/avg att.)
2004-05 16,475
2005-06 16,198
2006-07 15,955
2007-08 13,355https://t.co/93sOpEp0Og— Andrew Martin (@andrewmartin) March 9, 2019
But even worse is taking claims that lots of NBA teams in the early aughts were losing money at face value. These assertions are infamously unreliable, as it’s trivially easy to structure your accounting so that “the team” loses money while the owner reaps windfall profits from various related sources of revenue, and also easy to get reporters to print your legend because they reflexively side with management over labor in sports labor disputes. But even if you assume that some teams have operating losses, there’s the fact that franchise values generally appreciate rapidly. Schultz and his investors made a $150 million profit in 5 years! Tough life.
Anyway, this is definitely the alternative to Donald Trump America needs!
…I do think “No One Applauds” would be excellent campaign slogan.
Howard Schultz now onstage at #SXSW, reliving the first weeks of his exploratory bid. "I said I was considering running as a centrist independent outside the two-party system." No one applauds. Let's see how this goes.
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) March 9, 2019