The National Basketball Association (NBA) is widely recognized as an entertaining and innovative league whose teams play regular season and postseason games in packed arenas at home and away sites in the United States and Canada. This book discusses the development, growth, and success of the 61-year-old NBA from a business perspective. Covering the late 1940s to 2009, it focuses on the league's expansions and mergers, team territories and relocations, franchise organizations and operations, basketball arenas and markets, and NBA domestic and international affairs. Readers will gain an insight into when, how, and why the NBA emerged, reformed, and gradually matured to become one of the world's most dominant, prosperous, and popular professional sports organizations today.
This Brief identifies and contrasts the groups of National Basketball Association (NBA) expansion franchises and of any teams that relocated from one metropolitan area or city to another from 1950 to 2013. It discusses historical differences and similarities in the teams’ markets and performances and then as members of divisions and conferences. It measures and compares the emergence, development, and success of the teams by analyzing demographic, economic and sport-specific data. It also discusses the respective mergers of the Basketball Association of America and National Basketball League in 1949, and the American Basketball Association and National Basketball Association in 1976. National Basketball Association Strategies makes an important, relevant, and useful contribution to the literature regarding professional sports operations and to the NBA’s short and long run business strategies in American culture. Besides numerous sports fans within metropolitan areas and extended markets of these NBA teams, the book’s audiences are sports historians and researchers, college and public libraries, and current and potential NBA franchise owners and team executives. This Brief may also be used as a reference or supplemental text for college and university students enrolled in such applied undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars as sports administration, sports business, and sports management.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is widely recognized as an entertaining and innovative league whose teams play regular season and postseason games in packed arenas at home and away sites in the United States and Canada. This book discusses the development, growth, and success of the 61-year-old NBA from a business perspective. Covering the late 1940s to 2009, it focuses on the league's expansions and mergers, team territories and relocations, franchise organizations and operations, basketball arenas and markets, and NBA domestic and international affairs. Readers will gain an insight into when, how, and why the NBA emerged, reformed, and gradually matured to become one of the world's most dominant, prosperous, and popular professional sports organizations today.
This book examines the development and organization of the NBA and its clubs, how each club has performed in seasons and postseasons, and to what extent each has prospered and succeeded as a business enterprise despite competition for market share from other types of entertainment. Each chapter contains two core themes—Team Performance and Franchise Business. The former highlights how teams won division and conference titles and NBA championships while the latter analyzes and compares financial data including revenue, gate receipts, and operating income. The book also explores such things as when each franchise organized and why it joined the NBA, a brief profile of its current majority owner or ownership group, records of teams’ special coaches and players, attendances at home games, and how their arenas rank as venues for fans. This book explains why particular teams located in very large, large, midsized, or small markets win more games and titles than others and when and how frequently this occurs. In addition, it provides ways to individually—and by division or conference—compare basketball franchises from a financial perspective.
The book focuses on, identifies, and analyzes various divisions and conferences of four professional sports leagues and their teams' historical regular season and postseason performances, and also provides a recent financial profile of them while being competitive, profitable or unprofitable, and well-known enterprises. The parent sports organizations are the American League and National League in Major League Baseball, American Football Conference and National Football Conference in the National Football League, and the Eastern and Western Conference each in the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League.
This edited collection conceptualizes professional basketball not just as a sport but as an historically, culturally, and economically embedded entity. The chapters analyse the fact that the sport of basketball contains alternative logics that can easily clash, and by treating professional basketball as the negotiation place of these multiple demands, ideas, and logics, the editors have identified three areas in which these clashes manifest: the realization of the game; the cultural impact of professional basketball and the global outreach of professional basketball. The book is explanatory and qualitative, offering new perspectives and touching on topics including gender, diversity, racism, and minority experiences within professional basketball. As such it will be of interest to sport sociologists, as well as those researching the history of sport, sports marketing and cultural studies.
The National Basketball Association reaches a global audience via a multiplatform strategy that leverages its uncanny ability to connect fans to all things NBA. Steven Secular brings readers inside the league’s global operations and traces the history of the NBA’s approach to sports media from its 1980s embrace of cable through the streaming revolution of the twenty-first century. As fans around the world stream games and other league content, NBA teams incorporate foreign languages and cultures into broadcasts to boost their product’s appeal to audiences in Brazil, China, and beyond. Secular’s analysis reveals how the NBA continues to transform itself into a wildly successful media producer and distributor more akin to a streaming studio than the sports leagues of old even as its media partners and sponsors erase any notion of sports as a civic good. A timely look at a dynamic media landscape, The Digital NBA shows how the games we love became content first and sport a distant second.
Contemporary sport business is international. From global sport competitions and events, sponsorship deals and broadcasting rights to labour markets and lucrative flows of tourists, anybody working in sport business today has to have an international perspective. This book offers the broadest and most in-depth guide to the key themes in international sport business today, covering every core area from strategy and marketing to finance, media and the law. Including authors from more than twenty countries spanning the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, this handbook addresses the most important issues in the world of sport business from a uniquely global perspective. Each chapter examines a particular cross-section of business and sport, encompassing all levels from grassroots to professional and elite. Divided into seven major subject areas, it offers insights from experts on: International Sport Business Strategy Sport Marketing Sport Economics and Finance International Sport Law Sport Media and Communication Sport Tourism Sport Development. The Routledge Handbook of International Sport Business is an essential resource for any course on sport business, sport management or international business.
In September 1941, I was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. I completed elementary and secondary schools there and then in 1963 graduated with a bachelor of science degree from Indiana State College. After serving as a logistics officer for five years in the military, I worked for Ford Motor Company in Detroit, Michigan, and later for Indiana National Bank in Indianapolis, Indiana. In the 1970s, I earned master of business administration, master of science, and doctorate of philosophy degrees, and since the late 1970s, I have taught classes in economics, statistics, and business administration to undergraduate and graduate students at various American colleges and universities. Besides teaching, I have also authored articles and books about the business, economics, and operations of leagues and their franchises in professional team sports. For activities, I became a reader of Advanced Placement examinations, an investor, and a distance runner. Being a competitive and dedicated athlete, I played varsity baseball and basketball while in high school and college, and performed as an all-star catcher and pitcher in Little League and on championship teams in Babe Ruth and Connie Mack Leagues. At a baseball tryout camp for major league prospects held in Columbus, Ohio, I tried but unfortunately did not play well enough to sign a contract with a professional team. As a student, I usually earned good to excellent grades in many subjects and, in fact, was salutatorian of my class at Gerstmeyer High School. Then I graduated with an accounting degree at Indiana State College (now University), master's degrees at two universities, and a PhD in economics at Georgia State University. To achieve academically at these schools, I disciplined myself to attend lectures, complete all assignments, conscientiously study my notes and textbooks, and maximize scores on examinations and class projects. Indeed, my accomplishments as a student in high school and colleges and universities led to a career in higher education. Between the late 1970s and 2007, I was a teacher and author who taught several types of economics and business administration courses to undergraduate and graduate students at accredited schools in Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. In addition, I was a classroom instructor with the University of Maryland in Germany. The articles I wrote appeared in journals, magazines, and newspapers while my books analyzed the business, economics, finance, and operations of leagues and teams in professional baseball, basketball, football, ice hockey, and soccer. Besides these experiences, I was a captain in the United States Air Force and stationed for one year in South Vietnam. Furthermore, I trained as a long-distance runner, won many age-group awards, and competed in five marathons, including races in Boston and New York City. After 35 years of fulltime teaching, I retired from Pfeiffer University in Charlotte, North Carolina. I currently live in Tega Cay, South Carolina.
This book examines the employment arrangements of professional athletes in the Premier League football competition, the National Basketball Association competition and rugby union played at an international level. It describes the organisation and regulatory frameworks of these three professional team sports and highlights the legal, economic and regulatory factors that influence the final form of an athlete’s working conditions. It provides a comparative analysis between the sports on issues such as the role of collective bargaining, wage regulation, salary caps, nationality restrictions, eligibility, player movement and the acquisition of a player’s intellectual property. It discusses the approaches adopted in each sport for balancing the interests of labour and management, the problem of controlling private regulatory power in professional sport, and considers the extent to which legal or government intervention is required in an athlete’s employment relationship. National law can assist players in a domestic league to secure an involvement in the determination of working conditions but it has a more limited effect in a competition organised by an international governing body. This book argues that social regulation through soft law processes at an international level may benefit athletes, consumers and sport globally. It provides a useful case example for comparison with the organisation of other professional team sports in Europe, North America and Australasia. This book is important reading for scholars and practitioners in the fields of international sports law, employment law, competition law, European law and human rights law. It is also highly recommended for students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels taking modules and courses in Sports Law or Sports Business Management. Dr. Leanne O’Leary is a dual-qualified solicitor, Senior Lecturer in Law and member of the Centre for Sports Law Research at Edge Hill University in the United Kingdom. This book appears in the ASSER International Sports Law Series, under the editorship of Prof. Dr. Ben Van Rompuy and Dr. Antoine Duval.
