Raking it in
With a bit of careful wording, this could be a Fark item: “NBA salary cap drops because league-wide revenues went up 2.5 percent this past season. Wait, what?”
And nowhere did they go up more than right here in the Big Breezy:
Oklahoma City['s] … gate receipts increased $27.2 million last season, a 145 percent jump over the franchise’s final season in Seattle. Jim Grinstead, publisher of the trade publication Revenues from Sports Venues, said the one-time bump from a new arena in an expansion city overshadowed the struggles in many other cities — and can’t be counted on again. If the team had merely experienced flat ticket revenues compared to the previous season in Seattle, the league as a whole would have posted an $11.1 million decline in gate receipts, according to analysis by CBSSports.com. Once the novelty wears off, the NBA will no longer be able to bank on such a boost from one of its smallest-market teams.
Well, yeah. And the Ford Center will have slightly fewer seats after its reconfiguration, which means no more 19,163 sellouts. But I’m still reeling from that $27.2 million figure. Spread over 41 home games — I have no idea how they account for preseason games, and anyway there were only two here — that’s an increase of $660,000 per game. Compare that to this:
The Bucks were one of only five teams in the league to generate less than $500,000 in gate receipts per home game, according to the data. The Pacers, Hawks, Timberwolves and Grizzlies were the others.
Meanwhile, they’re pulling in a million in Oklahoma City. And if not every seat is occupied, even if every seat is sold — the average 18,700 paid-for seats last season contained only 14,400 butts — you have to figure that the financial picture is at least slightly rosy. For now, anyway. And you’ll note that of those five teams with the most meager gate receipts, four of them finished well back of the playoff pack, which tells me that the best way to keep this team in the black in the years to come is to start winning more games.
