New York Knicks owner James Dolan leveled continued criticism of the NBA’s revenue sharing policies, outlining a denunciation of a possible 8% league office cut of the new $74.6 billion media deal and a national television and streaming package that renders the league’s regional sports networks as “unviable,” according to a letter shared with the NBA’s board of governors and obtained by ESPN on Monday.
Dolan has been a consistent critic of the league’s revenue sharing policies that distribute money from local media rights and sponsorship deals in high-earning big markets to smaller-market teams. In a November letter to the board of governors, Dolan resigned his positions on the league’s influential advisory/finance and media committees, ESPN reported. He previously launched an unorthodox lawsuit against the Toronto Raptors that questioned the objectivity of commissioner Adam Silver.
In the letter shared on Monday, Dolan outlined new objections based on a league proposal shared with owners about the dispersion of revenues in the newly negotiated $74.6 billion media deal.
“The NBA has made the move to an NFL model — deemphasizing and depowering the local market,” Dolan wrote in the letter. “Soon, your only revenue concern will be the sale of tickets and what color next year’s jersey will be. Don’t worry, because due to revenue pooling, you are guaranteed to be neither a success nor a failure.
“Of course, to get there, the league must take down the successful franchises and redistribute to the less successful. This new media deal goes a long way to accomplishing that goal.”
Dolan outlined his criticism of what he called the league’s plan to retain “$6 billion (or 8 percent) of the total-NBA related fees” without “sufficient justification … nor transparency into how it arrived at the sum, how these fees will be allocated or to what extent the league will utilize this purported revenue growth to incur new and incremental costs and further expand the league’s ever growing expense level.”
Dolan made a comparison to the league retaining $15 million (0.5%) in the league’s current media deal for the 2024-25 season and expressed dissatisfaction with an increase of $358 million in 2025-26 under the league’s proposal, according to the letter.
Dolan cited issues with proposed revenue sharing in the league’s sponsorship and local television packages too, according to the letter. According to Dolan,…
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