The Athletic NBA Daily
Why the Clippers didn’t want Paul George | Celtics potential sale
Fri, 08 Nov 2024
Dave DuFour and Zena Keita break down the night of NBA basketball and the Tyrese Maxey injury for the Sixers. Then the breakfast club is joined by Senior writer at the Athletic Sam Amick to discuss the Clippers' new arena, Paul George’s return, and how the Clippers would rather have nothing than Paul George. In the final segment, Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic stops by to discuss the potential sale of the Celtics and how the new TV deal could affect NBA fans.Check us out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/AbAmrk65aa4Host: Dave DuFourWith: Zena Keita, Sam Amick and Mike VorkunovExecutive Producer: Andrew Schlecht Audio Producer: Grayson Moody Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What happened during Paul George's return to the Clippers?
Chapter 2: How did the Sixers cope with injuries to key players?
Yeah, and this has been the discussion all season long of the fact that Tyrese Maxey has had to carry such a load without the superstars beside him in Embiid and George. Knowing that he's already at a usage rate of about 30%, that's a lot to carry on his own. He's had several games this season where he's playing 41, 48 minutes, even that overtime win. right?
Like, I mean, this is something that you almost were scared was going to happen to him. But knowing the fact that they already had two superstars out with injuries, it's awful to see. Now, what's good for the Sixers is that they do have Paul George trickling back into minutes, right? Even on his restricted night, he played 32 minutes in his first game out. Joel Embiid coming back. So it's not as if
This is going to be a long stretch of period of time with the Sixers not having any stars. It's just going to be really tough because what Maxie brings in terms of intensity, energy, general fun to what the Sixers do is so important for their chemistry on the floor. So yeah, it's going to be really tough and you're going to definitely see Kelly Oubre having to step up.
Well, this is kind of this is the theory behind getting three stars, right? If one guy's out, you've got two. Right. Or if two guys is out, you've got one. If you're Philly, you're probably just hoping that any of them are going to be available at any point during the regular season. So, you know, good luck to Tyrese Maxey. Good luck to the Sixers. Hopefully he gets healthy. The Bucs.
They played the Jazz in Milwaukee. They got off to this rough start, 1-6, also like the Sixers unexpectedly. And you know what? It's the Utah Jazz. This one was probably not really in doubt. The Bucs won it 123-100. The big news here is Andre Jackson Jr. has now replaced Gary Trent Jr., In the buck starting lineup and, you know, I thought he was great in this game.
He's plus 19, super active, had four steals, had this chase down block that wasn't it wasn't actually a block, but it was just an athletic play. It was nice to see, you know, just a young athlete out there running around for the bucks.
having a good time. You saw him like literally physically get into comfort mode. The first play of the game where he basically gets the ball from Collin Sexton, uses his activity up in the perimeter in his grill, gets a steal, takes it the other way, dunks it down. On the way back, he literally like adjusted his shoulders and
It's if you're a basketball player, when you make that first shot and you're running back, you're kind of like, yeah, OK, I really did. You know what I mean? You physically saw that. And then he had that crazy chase down block. This is how you introduce yourself to a starting lineup. And I was really impressed with the way that he showed up. He did not cower in the moment.
And yeah, it was a nice boost for how the Bucks have been playing. Y'all don't get too excited. I mean, this is the Utah Jazz.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the potential Celtics sale?
Uh, what it says is that it's a, and this is gonna be shocking. It's a damn good time to be a person who owns an NBA team. Um, And, you know, there's been a lot of them since 2019. In the last five years, no league has had as much ownership turnover like the NBA has. I think this will be the ninth team that will change hands since 2019. The NFL, baseball and hockey have not have 10 combined.
Right. So like that's the pace that this is going at. The Bucs and Mark Lazarus sold his controlling stake, I think about like a year and a half after they won the title. But this one on the market two weeks after they got that ring title number 18 time to cash out.
And it was also like right before they re-signed their big players and came up against the second apron. They're going to start seeing some penalties because of that. Given the penalties, the potential financial constraints of re-signing those players. What's the challenge for whoever they do sell to?
Like, are they going to be interested in taking on that much of a financial burden on top of potentially paying $6 billion for the Celtics?
Yeah. Well, it becomes like you win the sweepstakes to just have a massive bill every year. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: Why did the Clippers choose to let Paul George go?
And they don't even own TD Garden, so they have to also pay for a place to play. This doesn't feel enticing. Is that coming up with you, Mike?
So you guys are just like, hey, trying to drive this price down, basically. Basically, yes. Well, it's actually a twofold problem, right? You're going to have to pay a very large tax bill if you keep this team together. And next season, 25-26, the tax rates, whether you're a repeater team or a team who hasn't repeated in the luxury tax, jump up a lot if you're 20 mil over the luxury tax line.
And you have a choice then. Are you going to pay these exorbitant tax rates? And the Celtics will be repeaters. And I think it's like becomes seven dollars and twenty five cents for every dollar that you're over. Right. So you're talking about like a little more than seven X for every mil that you're over there, which someone can do the math on me. But I.
believe generally translates to a lot of money. And then the other question is like, all right, if you don't want to pay this money in the Celtics right now projected for over $200 million payrolls each of the next few years, because all those signings you guys mentioned, are you going to be the person who buys the Celtics and breaks up a title team? Right.
Like Derek White, Kristaps Porzingis, Jalen Brown, Jason Tatum, all under contract for the next few years. I think I'm forgetting someone else on top of that. But you're going to have to make a decision whether you want to pay those pay those taxes or whether you want to deal with the second apron restrictions, which might include a frozen pick.
Or you're going to be the one who says, hey, we got to start over and dip under.
i think that the repeater tax that they're hoping for is the repeat champion tax that goes on the sale price right like locking in this team you think hey look valuable franchise already they just won a title so it's a good team so you're you know you're not buying on the ground floor this is not the charlotte hornets that you're purchasing you're purchasing a team that has history already as a championship level team just had a championship last year
and maybe gets a second one this year. And to be honest with you, there's no reason why this team isn't going to be in contention for the remainder of these guys while they're under contract. So I understand the thinking they're locking these guys up and then making the move to sell. They're the first team to go for sale under this new TV deal.
And we've watched, like, like we just said, the number keeps going up for these franchise valuations. I mean, Mark Cuban in the time that he owned the Mavericks made quite a bit of money in return on his investment.
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Chapter 5: What factors influenced the Clippers' decision-making regarding Paul George?
And so I think the Celtics will go above that. They'll set a record for the NBA. Where it lands exactly, I don't know. You talk to smart people, they're like, hey, maybe it lands $4.75 billion, $5 billion. I talked to an NBA owner who thought it might land close to $6 billion. If it gets that high, then maybe the NBA starts asking for $7 billion when it goes to expand in Vegas, which...
A lot of money, again.
Well, FanDuel has a lot of money invested in Vegas, so I'm assuming that by the time we get there, we're going to have some other looming questions.
People keep betting parlays on FanDuel. I'm sure FanDuel will do very well. The big thing, though, is
the celtics are also an odd case right they don't own their own arena now real estate is a big proposition part of the value prop when you buy an nba team you want to own like essentially all of the revenue that comes with the team from tickets to gate to uh to media rights to all of it the other part it's a weird ownership structure like the grosbecks own 30 roughly according to my sources with grosbeck who's the controlling um owner right now owns about two percent his dad irv grosbeck who's uh
You know, 90 and they said the part of his estate planning owns about 28 percent there. And you've got a bunch of minority owners who have to kind of be dragged along in case of a sale. So this is this is a weird one, right? It might not be the perfect test case to see where everything goes.
And if you talk to people who are interested in investing in NBA teams and sports teams altogether, they think prices are going to keep going up, but maybe not like hockey stick prices. Up and to the right as it's been, but just maybe like a little bit slower. And so if you see some slower growth, what does that mean? The new media rights deal should really help.
But I think that's been baked into prices the last few years. People have been expecting it. Although, from what I understand, if I think it came in a little bit higher than maybe, you know, some people are expecting it. And the big question, really, and this goes back to what we were talking about with the tax rates and how much you want to pay for this.
If you are paying for a team to be really good and you're paying a lot. Right. That means you're over the first April and you're over the second April. That's around generally the point where it's actually maybe not even profitable to own a team anymore. Again, if you're losing a few mil and the valuation of your team goes up by like three billion dollars over the course of your ownership.
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Chapter 6: How does the new TV deal affect NBA fans?
Like League Pass, as you mentioned, you know, there will be more games on national TV, which will, you know, I guess help things in this in one sense. But also it just means you're going to have to subscribe to more different services to be able to watch those games. Right. And not to mention whatever happens with local TV, which at this point really is just super hard to predict.
I don't know where that's going to end up. I, you know, the Celtics are on NBC, a regional NBC network. Diamond sports has, I think 15 teams, 14 teams that has contracts with, and they're still in bankruptcy court. And they've been there for, I think two years now or something like that. So like, Where this all ends up is really hard to predict.
But I think as of right now, you're basically saying like, hey, I'm going to have to subscribe to all these things if I'm a big NBA fan who wants to watch my team every night. And that's going to be annoying. And I think people have subscription fatigue.
Yeah, I mean, and speaking of, go and subscribe to The Athletic so you can read Mike Vorkinoff and all of his hard work. That's going to do it for today's show, folks. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Sam Amick, for joining us. For Zena Keita, I'm Dave DeFore, and this has been the NBA Daily. Thanks for waking up with us.