🥜 A Kick in the Nuts

Happy belated 4/20 🍃 - NBA players can now smoke weed, and you know this guy’s going to need it after taking a shot to the family jewels from Joel Embiid:

🗞 Big Story

While allowing marijuana use for players and adding minimum game requirements to regular-season awards were the headline grabbers from the NBA’s most recent CBA, the most important part of this deal was what was left out.

Namely, player ownership of a franchise.

Now, this idea has been floated by stars like Jaylen Brown, who noted that an expansion team with existing free agents could be pretty viable:

But this also calls into question a really interesting incentive structure the NBA could lay out for players.

I’ll spare you from all the details, but just know that NBA regular season viewership is down for two main reasons:

1. Players are taking too many nights off

2. NBA Roster turnover YoY is really high

This results in fans becoming less engaged in the regular season because who’s to say their favorite team’s star player will play any given night or even be on the team next season?

But what if NBA teams could give players equity in the franchise that would only fully vest if they stayed with that team for a certain number of years…

It could incentivize players to stay in smaller markets and even play more often to help increase the value of their stake in the team.

Now, this would - without a doubt - complicate the salary cap, but Jaylen isn’t too far off when he says to give players some more skin in the game.

💰 Fly Howie Fly

The Philadelphia Eagles just locked in their franchise QB for the next five years on a $255M deal.

Now, the skeptic (aka the Packer fan) in me immediately said “When you pay that much money for a QB, you close your Super Bowl Window.”

And for a lot of teams, that’s true (see the Green Bay Packers with Aaron Rodgers).

In fact, before Patrick Mahomes this year, no QB had ever won the Super Bowl taking up more than 12.6% of his team’s salary cap, and even then that QB was Tom Brady.

So it seems pretty logical that paying a QB a lot of money = no more Super Bowls because the team wouldn’t have the money to spend on other parts of their roster.

But once again Eagles GM, Howie Roseman, showed us why he’s one of the best in the business by ensuring that the prime of Jalen Hurts’ career is also when he gets paid the least:

They did this by kicking a bunch of the bonus money to the end of the contract (which they can just restructure to save some money when that time comes), making Hurts one of the most inexpensive star QBs in the NFL.

Now, in 2027 and 2028 the piper will have to get paid but until then consider the Eagles Super Bowl favorites every single year.

🎲 A Gambling Man

Just this week I made a video about the Oakland A’s dire stadium situation.

And yesterday the chickens came home to roost with an announcement that the team had bought 49 acres of land just west of the Las Vegas strip, all but cementing their move to southern Nevada.

Now, I’ve already ranted about the A’s and their owner John Fischer, but I’m calling it right now: the local and state government is going to shell out for this stadium (which I hate).

For reference, the Raiders got the most amount of money ever for a public-private stadium to build with $750M of taxpayer money going to fund their nearly $2B stadium - that’s 40% of the cost for a stadium the city or state doesn’t even own.

And now the precedent is set, so don’t be surprised if John Fischer asks for the government to pay for the whole damn thing.

🍬 Gum: A Gateway Drug

Did you know that the idea for Big League Chew was spawned in a Portland, Oregon dugout when a pro baseball player saw a 12-year-old bat boy packing his lip from a can of Redman chewing tobacco?

That professional baseball player told that bat boy that he “shouldn’t be dipping so young” and the 12-year-old boy responded by saying “It’s just shredded licorice, I wanted to look cool.”

That pro baseball player went on to found Big League Chew, and that bat boy went on to become an Oscar Nominated film director.

No joke.

Oh yeah, and in 1992 California tried to ban the product because it “too closely resembled tobacco and could be a gateway into kids using the real stuff.”

It failed in committee.

👋 If you made it this far, I’m testing out longer-form content on YouTube this weekend… go check it out :)