Money Abounds and Ethics is Forgotten - Marty K’s Unfiltered Sports Takes Episode 4

Money Abounds  and Ethics is Forgotten - Marty K’s Unfiltered Sports Takes Episode 4

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Welcome to Marty Kay's Unfiltered Sports Takes, where opinions and facts intersect. This is yours truly, Marty Kaiser. Be there. Happy Tuesday, everyone. This is Marty Kaiser with Marty Kay's Unfiltered Sports Takes. Hope everyone had a great weekend and is looking forward to a warm Florida week. Knock on wood so far. We've avoided really any terrible storms. And the forecast is that it's going to be a below average hurricane season. And we've got about two months left of peak season, so keep our fingers crossed that nothing major hits. So I thought we'd cover a few things today. Some interesting things going on today in sports. A lot of them are more philosophical or what I would call kind of State of the Union topics. So let's get started. First off, I wanted to uh cover the NBA, the National Basketball Association. And you may know the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the iconic franchises of basketball, were just sold. But the the really interesting thing is they were resold. And what I mean by that is the Lakers have been an iconic franchise. They, along with the Boston Celtics, have been the two most successful franchises. The Lakers were were owned previously for years by Dr. Jerry Buss, and when he passed away, his family took over and has been running it. Well, they were sold uh less than a year ago to a financial and hedge fund uh billionaire, Mark Walter, and he purchased them for at that time an unheard of price of $10 billion. And the franchise was purchased, you know, like 40 years prior to that, maybe even more than that, for you know, not even in the same stratosphere. Uh $10 billion is a record purchase price for any type of sports franchise of any of the sports in the United States. So Mark Walter, it's come to pass over the past few months. It's become public knowledge that uh he's being investigated from the UN U.S. Attorney's Office and Securities Commission for what appears to be some uh irregular uh business and uh uh pretty pretty major things that are relating to fraud. So he hasn't been charged yet, but they're they're deeply investigating him, and just the uh conjecture is it's not a good thing, obviously, for Mr. Walter, and and may result in some pretty substantial uh issues that he's gonna be facing. So quietly he went ahead and sold the team. Uh this this sale was kept extremely quiet. Nobody knew the team was for sale. As I mentioned, he only owned the team uh for less than a year, and he sold it to uh Robert Iger, who used to be the um CEO of Disney on two different occasions, and Josh Kushner. Uh and you may um say that the Kushner name is familiar. Well, Josh Kushner is Jared Kushner's brother, and Jared Kushner, of course, is Donald Trump's son-in-law. And um, interestingly, uh Josh Kushner has made his billions uh from again um private equities and hedge funds and um in a large investment group, and his net worth supposedly is around five billion dollars. And Robert Iger, of course, has accumulated uh a lot of his wealth from his time at Disney and then ancillary investments that he's made. So Mark Walter, with all this um financial rhetoric that's going on around him and this investigation, made a two and a half billion dollar profit in less than a year. It's just mind-boggling. I think from a um public relations point of view, the NBA is starting to be a lot more scrutinized now because they they seem to be letting the dollar strictly dictate how they're operating. And the reason I say that is you have uh three different uh big topics that have gone on recently. Uh number one, obviously, the this Walters purchase and then sale. Where was the NBA's due diligence? I'm sure this investigation's been going on for more than 10 months. So, where was the NBA when they approved him? Obviously, the biggest item for approval was his financial wherewithal and the purchase price, not maybe the uh character of the gentleman and and how he was going to impact the long-term um not only success but viability of the Los Angeles Lakers. Uh secondly, right now there's a big investigation going on with the Los Angeles Clippers, and the Los Angeles Clippers uh are accused of what we call salary cap circumvention. And basically what that means is each team has a total payroll that they can pay their players. So the NBA payroll uh hypothetically right now is around $180 billion for the team. And the team normally carries approximately 15 players on their payroll. Um now that that figure changes every year because it's tied into total revenues of the team and what percentage goes back to the players, etc. So if business is good, that cap goes up a little bit each year. If they have a down year, like during COVID, uh they had some loss of revenues due to the suspension of play and such. So the cap may have gone down a little bit. But overall, the cap typically goes up. So the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers had had bought the per had purchased the team in the last 10 years. He was also a billionaire. That common theme in sports, huh? Billionaires own them, uh, was Steve Ballmer, and he was one of the co-founders and owners of uh the um tech baron Microsoft. So Mr. Ballmer, uh, according to most reports, is the wealthiest owner in the NBA. And he has uh spent money uh very uh what I would call liberally. In fact, he they just uh built a new arena in the last couple years, and it's uh I haven't had a chance to visit it, but it's supposedly phenomenal. So, what the Clippers are being investigated for is their star player who they acquired uh approximately five or six years ago, Kawhi Leonard, and I won't go into the backstory how they acquired him and such, but uh there's talk that in order to have him generate the amount of revenue that he wanted, in addition to the on-the-book salary that the Clippers were paying him, he was able to work out several endorsement deals with vendors that the Clippers use for, you know, millions of dollars. And according to the reports that have come out, he really didn't do anything to earn the money. You know, when you're uh an endorser for a company, normally you you participate in events, you have national commercials, you're you're a true spokesperson for them, because obviously they're wanting to sell their products and services based on celebrity affiliation. And there's no evidence that uh Kawhi Leonard ever did anything at all other than get paid by them. So the reason that salary cap circumvention is being looked at is there's inferences that somehow the late the Clippers put this transaction together of the player and the endorser in order to get the player money that he wanted, but that it wouldn't be on the books of the Clippers, so would circumvent their their salary restrictions. And think about it, all the other teams are playing by the rules, so if this uh is allowed to go on, it it really makes kind of a mockery of the rules involved. Now, Ballmer vehemently denies this, and so far, according to the media reports that have come out, uh there there's nothing directly tying Ballmer to this circumvention. And there may there may not be now, that doesn't mean he didn't do this, that just means he was smart enough to cover their tracks. It just seems odd that we've got two examples now of uh vendors that are paying him a lot of money, and there's no evidence that he did any work for them. Plus, the the first vendor, Aspiration, was uh they just got convicted of being involved in a Ponzi scheme, and their founder and CEO is serving time in jail now. The other vendor that just came out, Dictronics, they're kind of the producers of the um the Clippers scoreboard, which uh up to this point was uh tremendous state-of-the-art and phenomenal, and the the acquisition cost to the Clippers approximately was a hundred million dollars just for the scoreboard. But they have the type of product and service that they wouldn't need to do public marketing on. So again, it makes no sense why they would have paid Kawhi Leonard to do this. So it's very suspicious and very troubling. But again, it's another example of maybe the NBA. Uh, the only reason this investigation is coming out is because Pablo Torres, who did some investigative reporting on a podcast, came out with these rumors and some uh evidence that that he had um discovered during his investigation. I'm sure if he hadn't come out with this, there would be no NBA investigation. Because if you listen to my podcast last week, I talked about capitalism and greed and such, and unfortunately, they're tied together at the hip, uh uh, especially in sports. Uh our country, of course, it is uh supposedly a capitalistic society, but the almighty dollar has really tarnished a lot of um American icons that uh are you know very popular with the average citizen. So keep an eye on that um Clippers investigation. I did want to get back to the Laker acquisition again, Robert Iger and uh Josh Kushner, and it's a highly leveraged deal. So that's one of the things that never comes out with these sports uh purchases is well, how much actual equity do the purchasers have, and how much of it are they doing with creative financing and and selling minority shares and doing creative things? And does it put the the franchises at long-term risk at all if if things somehow go sideways? But the the financial components of these deals are never made public, and you could argue that sports teams uh should make all this information public because they're kind of stewards uh of an important aspect of being in a city. A lot of cities take a lot of pride in their sports teams, and the sports teams uh generate a lot of revenue for the city, and they're a source of big pride. I know myself, as I've mentioned previously, you know, I'm a transplant from the DC, Maryland area. So back in the day I was a big at the time Washington Redskins, now they're the Washington Commanders, I was a big fan of theirs. And as I've been in Florida for a long time, I've adopted the Florida team. So uh specifically, I'm a big uh Tampa Bay Bucks fan and the Orlando Magic. So I still have my northern affiliations, but um I probably have a little bit more um interest now in the Florida teams. And so a lot of citizens here, you know, we root for the teams, and it obviously it's a bragging point if our team does well, and it's a source of pride for the community. I know in Orlando we've only had one professional team, which is the Magic. Uh unfortunately, we haven't had a real aggressive or creative political structure in Orlando because this would have been a phenomenal place uh for a baseball team. And I know we're still trying to get one, hoping that Tampa Bay's uh stadium situation doesn't work out in Tampa. We also would have been, to me, an iconic uh location for a football team, but obviously we're too close to um Tampa and Jacksonville for that to ever happen. So anyway, these are things to keep in mind. And as as we're talking about um all this financial information, one thing is crystal clear, especially when you're talking about basketball and football, and that they're all run basically by their salary caps, because their salary cap has so much importance and dictates how their teams are run. And to me, uh salary caps are are ruining sports. Uh it's especially uh become a big talking point in the NBA, the the Basketball Association, because they've come out with these very uh detailed and technical salary caps and what they call the first apron and the second apron. And like in this past year, the uh Oklahoma City Thunder, who have probably been the best run NBA franchise over the past uh five to ten years, they've they've come a guy out of nowhere with tremendous proactive and future planning, and they're one of the two top teams in basketball, even though they're in a small market. And they just did a phenomenal job of acquiring assets, players, draft selections, etc. But because of these uh salary cap rules, they had a trade, or actually pretty much what I would call somewhat giveaway, uh, three of their top um players. One was a starter and two were two key reserves. Now, fortunately for them, they've built up a lot of depth over the years, so it won't hurt them like it will other teams. But normally they wouldn't have gotten rid of these players because they didn't get a whole lot back for them. The reason they had to get rid of them was because of the salary cap. In order to not pay ridiculous amounts of taxes and affect their future operations, they thought it was in their best interests and the team's future interests to get rid of these players. And it's a sad commentary. When you have a well-run franchise, they've done a great job of acquiring talent, and they have to get rid of players not through any fault of their own, but just because of the rules in basketball uh limit how much you can pay them. And the theory behind the NBA is they claim they don't want dynasties, but it's also clear that basketball fans they like dynasties uh in the sense that it gives them uh a standard bearer and it gives them a team they can root for or against because a dynasty gets a lot more uh fan reaction. You know, like in baseball back in the day, before our time, the New York Yankees were a dynasty. Uh in today's sports, the Los Angeles Dodgers are starting to be a dynasty, and there's a lot of sentiment about how they've acquired their assets through their liberal spending. Uh, in basketball for years, you had the Boston Celtics, who were the pre-eminent dynasty for years and years. Then the Los Angeles Lakers have been a very strong organization, and um then you had that period with Michael Jordan where the Chicago Bills were were a dynasty and a standard bearer. And and then in the 2010s, the Golden State Warriors uh did that, and one of the things that a lot of um fans didn't like was they were able to acquire a superstar, uh Kevin Durant, after they already had the top team in the league, due to some changes in the salary cap that happened to create uh the ability for teams to spend a lot more than they normally could. So the NBA, in their wisdom, is doing their best to eliminate dynasties by every time you acquire a lot of talent, you're gonna have to shuffle players because you're not gonna have enough money to pay them. So I personally am not in favor of money being the controlling force in sports. And then right now in Major League Baseball, they're gonna try to implement a salary cap, and that's why it's expected that um the players are gonna go on strike after this season ends. And it could be a lengthy strike, and strikes are never good for the health of baseball. The last time we had a baseball strike in the 1990s, it said baseball back a number of years. And the only reason they kind of recovered was they had uh a famous home run battle between Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire, where Barry Bonds set the record for uh most home runs in a season. And of course, he's been accused of using steroids. And the that time in the 1990s was basically the steroid era. So I know I'm getting off the beaten path, but I just don't like when money controls things. And you look at our society now and how our politics are, it our politics are so corrupt right now, and they and they've taken the guardrails off, and then we have a rubber stamping Supreme Court where almost anything goes when it comes to uh, you know, kind of money laundering, having these third-party groups throw millions into campaigns. And then right now in the Oval Office, uh president and his family are making untold money off the backs of citizens and taxpayers, and everybody in his party is looking the other way. And this is just uh it's a disease of money rules in this country to a degree that we've never seen before. Last but not least, let's talk about baseball. Um, the San Diego Padres were the latest team that was just sold. Their deal closed yesterday for $3.9 billion, and that was the highest price of any baseball team that sold. Now, when you talk about appreciation in sports, the San Diego Padres were sold in 2012 for $800 million, so they had a 500% increase in 14 years. And the new owners of the team who I don't know much about, Jose Feliciano, not the singer, and his wife Kwanzaa Jones purchased the club, and they are equity billionaires. Again, it's all about billionaires now in sports, and usually they're in some type of financial sector. I don't know much about these two owners, but I'm sure more will come out. This purchase in areas other than Los Angeles, or San Diego rather, I'm sorry, probably stayed under the radar a lot because we had so many other things going on right now. But I'm sure more will come out about these two owners. Switching to football, right now the biggest news in the NFL is training camp updates. The NFL training camps usually last for about six weeks, and then the season starts the first week of September. So usually what you find in training camp are two or three things. Number one, who's having a salary dispute with their team or holding out. Number two, which we hate seeing if you're a football fan, are the injuries. The training camp has a lot of injuries, some of which are season-ending and can be very detrimental to the team before their season even starts. And then lastly, of course, the prediction market. So let's start off with the holdouts. Well, the two biggest holdouts from my perspective are the local team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Baker Mayfield, who's their quarterback, is on the last year of his contract, and he and the team haven't been able to come to terms, and they seem like they're quite far apart. Assuming that Baker Mayfield plays this year without an extension, he'll be a free agent. What a free agent means in sports is that he can sign anywhere he wants to. The Bucs have no legal right to uh keep his rights. So if the Bucs do lose him, that'll be a major loss because A. Baker Mayfield's a very good quarterback. In my opinion, he's one of the top ten quarterbacks in the league, and they don't have any capable backup. So if they lose him, quarterbacks are the most important position by far in all the sports. And if they lose Baker Mayfield, uh it's going to be a rebuilding process for the Bucs, and thus they somehow become very fortuitous. The other major whole holdout that they have is their star tackle, Vita Veya. And he doesn't get the publicity because he's a defensive lineman and they're not the they're not the uh colorful players or the players that accumulate a lot of statistics. But he's kind of the um he's kind of the the rock that stays in place that that makes their defense uh have some success. He's a big, what I call run stuffer, meaning that teams have a hard time on the ground against the Bucks, and they have a hard time moving him out of the way, which gives the other players an opportunity to make bigger plays and make tackles. Uh he's what we call a run stuffer, but he also does do some pass rushing as well. So he's demanded a trade. Now, some of that may be posturing, obviously, but compared to the other players of similar skill set at his position, he's making far less than the going rate. He's probably making just above half of what some of the star tackles are making. So it's clear that he's underpaid. And you you run into this periodically, you know, you have a tug of war between what the teams are willing to pay and what the players are willing to accept. And some teams are are more um they're more frugal with their money to other teams. So we'll just have to kind of wait and see how that plays out. Um injury-wise, you always hear about a couple of uh major knees knee uh injuries. Typically in in this part of the year, they're usually either uh training camp injuries uh or possibly, I mean, excuse me, they're ACLs, which are knee injuries, or possibly Achilles tendons. And we've had a few of those already, and I won't name the players or anything at this point, but if it's one of your favorite teams, uh it's just not a fun thing for the team, and of course you feel bad for the players, because some of these injuries can be possibly career-ending, depending on the extent of the injuries and how old the player is. The older the player is, uh, the less likely it is that they're going to recover their previous skill set from that. The next thing is sometimes you get what we call quarterback competitions, which are a big talking point. So the big quarterback competition this year in the NFL training campus is with the Cleveland Browns. The two quarterbacks that are getting a lot of uh chatter are Deshaun Watson and Shador Sanders. Cleveland has been uh a pretty poor team for a number of years now, uh a poorly run franchise, and they've gone through more quarterbacks over the last 25 years than any franchises. I think the number that I do I recently read was over 40 quarterbacks. So right now they have a quarterback battle in training camp. Deshaun Watson about five years ago was one of the top quarterbacks in the league, and he was a younger player, so he had a tremendous future. But then he had a lot of personal problems uh to do with just some very um uh abhorrent behavior he did with um multiple massage therapists, and then he also suffered some significant injuries. So he's been pretty much of an unproductive player for four years. He just recovered from some major injuries, so this is his first year back for a year and a half. And so, of course, the Browns are hoping that he can come close to his old form. And then Shador Sanders has gotten a lot of publicity for a couple reasons. Number one, he's the son of Deion Sanders, um, who they used to call primetime, one of the greatest uh defensive backs in the history of the NFL. And he's also the uh head coach of the Colorado Buffaloes, a college football team. And um Shador had a had a very strong college career. Uh he was rumored to be a first-round draft pick last year. This is he's he's going into his second season, but for different reasons, he dropped quite a bit in the draft. He had a lot of uh it still hasn't been determined to this day exactly why he dropped, other than some people questioned his behavior, even though he didn't do anything that would get you in trouble. They just thought he was too cocky. I think there was a certain amount of jealousy, maybe they don't like the the influence his dad had. And anyway, he dropped down to the fifth round, which in football parlance is almost like an afterthought. So they're competing for the uh quarterback job, but it seems like at this point Deshaun Watson has the inside track for that. But it gets a lot of conjecture because uh both players are um talked about quite a bit. I myself think the Browns should give Shador Sanders a full shot. I think they've, since he's been up, they've limited him for whatever reasons. He's had his ups and downs, but the team has never shown any confidence in him, and he's never really played with the top players. So that's the biggest uh quarterback competition. Last but not least is the prediction market. Uh it's still early in training camp, but I would say, in my opinion, uh the preseason favorite uh would be the Los Angeles Rams, definitely in the NFC. Um they've got a stacked team, and they they made a huge acquisition getting Miles Garrett on their team, who's the preeminent defensive lineman and the premier pass rusher in the league. And then they may get back their their all-pro future Hall of Fame player, Aaron Um Donald, who had retired a couple years ago, but now that the Rams have another pre-eminent defensive lineman, there's a good possibility he's gonna come back. And they also have a tremendous head coach, Sean McVeigh. Football's probably the one sport where the head coach means the most. And Sean McVeigh is just uh he's a very intelligent, enthusiastic, still a youthful coach, and he's very creative and he's done a great job with the Rams. So the Rams aren't a tough division, but I'd make the Rams the favorites in the NFC this year. On the opposite conference to determine who's gonna go to the Super Bowl, it's more wide open. But if I had to give you my two favorites, I'm gonna pick the preeminent just missed team, the Buffalo Bills, led by their all-pro quarterback Josh Allen. And the other team that I think is gonna do well and surprise a lot of people this year if they can not have all the injuries they had last year are the Los Angeles Chargers. I think the Chargers are on an upswing. They've got all the components to have a big year this year. So it should be interesting. Football is definitely the one sport where there's a lot of teams you can make an argument for. So keep an eye out on that. That's all for today. As they used to say uh in Watergate, watch where the money goes, and you're gonna know how sports goes too. That's all for today. Stay hydrated, stay safe, and this is Marty Kaiser out.