Will James Dolan’s firm opposition to the NBA’s 2024-25 budget impact the league? | Good Word with Goodwill

Yahoo Sports senior NBA reporter Vincent Goodwill and The Athletic’s David Aldridge discuss New York Knicks owner James Dolan’s relationship with the league office and comment on his firm opposition to the 2024-25 budget. Hear the full conversation on “Good Word with Goodwill” and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

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Video Transcript

D A.

We don’t got to go long on James Dolan because he’s James Dolan.

Basically, the Knicks chairman hates the league office.

It sounds like he doesn’t even come to these board of governors meetings because he doesn’t want to be in the same room with a lot of these people.

His big thing is he does not like the revenue sharing system.

He does not like sharing his Madison Square Garden market share with any of these other impoverished teams.

Like, how do you deal with a guy that’s clearly just a nuisance.

I’ll say this, one of the great quotes I ever got was from, was from Art Modell who owned the Cleveland Browns forever.

And I said, uh you know, the NFL seems to have, they always get more money.

Why do you guys keep getting more money?

And he said the reason we get more money is because we’re 30 fat cat Republicans who vote socialist.

And what he meant by that was we all do what’s best for the league.

So back in the day, the Browns, everybody had their own TV deal.

The Cleveland Browns had their own television deal to put their games on television in Cleveland because the thought was, well, nobody outside of Cleveland wants to watch the Browns.

So let’s make a deal for the Browns for Cleveland and they made a lot of money off of their TV deal.

And then Pete Roselle came in and said, you know what, it would be better for the league if we put all our games on national television and got rid of all the local TV deals.

And we want people in Green Bay to do well, just as much as we want people in New York to do well and, and, and all the NFL owners said.

All right, we’ll try it that way and we see what happened.

Right.

So that’s the same thing NBA is doing now.

The NBA is like, no, this is stupid.

We want more games on national TV because we want people to watch the Milwaukee Bucks.

We want more people to watch the Milwaukee Bucks that are watching them now because people will always watch the Knicks and they will always watch the Lakers.

Um, and they’ll always watch the Celtics and Jimmy Dolan because he’s Jimmy Dolan is like, but that’s less money for me and they’re like, yeah, it’s less money for you.

That’s right.

That’s more, and there’s more money for the league and that’s better for the league and all the, all the teams doing well is better for the league, as evidenced by this ginormous TV deal.

We just did.

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