Better revenue sharing won't solve the NBA's financial problems. As David Stern is fond of pointing out, you can't absorb a loss by splitting the money more evenly. But few would suggest the Association does a good job of splitting its $4 billion annual take between the owners and players or between the league's 30 teams.
Clearly, something must be done.
North America's other pro sports leagues have come up with a variety of solutions to the same problem.
The NFL is the undisputed king of revenue sharing, but the bulk of that league's money comes from national sources - TV contracts, primarily. Getting teams to share money they collect in their own markets, from local television deals, ticket sales and the like, is a very different challenge.
Major League Baseball teams all pay a set percentage of their local revenue into a fund that all franchises share, and lower-revenue teams get a larger portion of the proceeds from national deals and merchandising contracts, but that hasn't changed the fact that the Yankees' payroll is two-to-three times as large as most teams'. The NHL has a complicated system that takes a wide number of factors, including attendance and market size, into account.
The NBA's next revenue-sharing deal could very well combine elements from all of the above.
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