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Post by gks on Jun 4, 2019 7:36:21 GMT -5
Wait give me a second..how about Managing Partners? You can be a managing partner and not own the team or business right? I am not the managing partner of my house. |
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Post by sader1970 on Jun 4, 2019 8:01:18 GMT -5
Sorry. This seems a "bridge too far" for me. I own my house. I don't own the people in it. I don't own the guy who cuts my lawn or his employees. He owns his business (a sole proprietor) but does not own the guys who work for him. No one "owns" (legally, anyway) anyone. Heck, I can recall days when I and others felt like we worked for some employers "like dogs" but no one ever actually thought we were dogs. We also sometimes said they worked us "like slaves" but no one really thought we were actual slaves - we had a Civil War that pretty much settled that issue. We had the option to quit/leave/resign and try to get a job elsewhere. Let these NBA players quit their multi-million dollar jobs if they are so offended and try to work elsewhere. Or, as some of them have done, buy an NBA franchise and become an "owner." Guess what? If they leave and sell insurance, for example, they may end up working for another owner of an agency. And for a LOT less money. Cry me a river.  |
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Post by hcpride on Jun 4, 2019 8:04:08 GMT -5
In the minds of some, a bit of education may be in order to clear up any misunderstanding regarding the use of the word 'owner' in the context of team owner or home owner, etc. In the minds of others, I suppose, a removal of the term (rather than education) is very much in order. Given today's hypersensitivities this particular outcome is altogether unsurprising.
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Post by lou on Jun 4, 2019 8:23:07 GMT -5
I guess it's up to the owners to decide what their titles will be. The Clippers & Sixers chose something else. You want to be an "owner", go for it. I worked for a couple of startups, I guess these few guys owned the company, their titles were not "owner".
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Post by Wormtown Railers Fan on Jun 4, 2019 8:25:19 GMT -5
The only education that needs to take place here would be to those that don’t understand that owning a basketball team means owning the franchise and not the people that work for the franchise. Many of whom make millions of dollars per year. I believe it is mostly upper middle class white people who believe they need to speak for the minority community and interpret what they believe owning a team means. I believe the people in that community know perfectly well what that means and this is all a meaningless feel good exercise for social justice warriors.
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Post by Tom on Jun 4, 2019 8:29:57 GMT -5
Does John Henry have 100% financial investment in the franchise? If you have a family business, even with 100% investment on your part, do you own the other members of your family that work in that business? If the answer you respond is yes, I do not want to be sitting in a room when your family has that discussion. Henry does not have 100 percent, but I believe he has more than 50 percent and it might be more accurate to say he is the majority owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball franchise. That does not in any way imply that he "owns" any employee of that franchise, be it player, front office person, or peanut salesman. I am inherently lazy and don't often refer to John Henry as the majority owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball club- I just say John Henry is the owner of the Red Sox. Frankly it never occurred to me that any reasonable person would ever infer actual human ownership from that statement. I know that I am more difficult to offend than the average person, but this one strikes me as people going out of their way to find something to be offended by My company is about 90 percent by one guy. His wife and kid have about a five percent share in their names. If I have customers in, and I see the 90 percent guy, I introduce them to "our owner". I know that words can be powerful and that many people in this county have ancestors who were literally considered property. I also know that I have never walked in my brothers' shoes. Even recognizing all that, I can't imagine anyone sincerely misunderstanding the intent of the statement |
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Post by alum on Jun 4, 2019 8:40:08 GMT -5
Considerate of the feelings of employees. There is absolutely no cost to the team other than perhaps a box of business cards. Not everyone lives in a world where they have to "win" every fight. Didn't anyone ever tell you to "pick your battles." |
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Post by WCHC Sports on Jun 4, 2019 8:48:43 GMT -5
Apparently, we're not above changing everything we say, everything we write, every picture we print, every label on our jobs, so long as there can be even the confusion of, or the impression of any impropriety or offense.
Alum, you should edit your last post because I could, however unlikely, perceive your "pick your battles" comment to SoV to be condescending, and thus, offensive. From now on, rather than quoted idiomatic expressions, you should PM a poster like SoV and explain to him how you want to encourage him to feel his best, and not fight an uphill battle in the arena of the offended, and save him from any public embarrassment. After that, I will delete this post so that any perceived offense in my message to you can be stricken from the record. I will then drive to your house with a guitar and a pitcher of lemonade and sing "Kumbaya." However, if I am not welcome at your house, then I am sorry to impose, sorry I trespassed on your property, and sorry to have disturbed you while you take a nap... I should not have assumed that you would be awake. Clearly, my insensitivity to the needs of some folks to sleep in the middle of the day due to a disability...er... "able-bodied condition" that requires a little more shut-eye demonstrates just what an awful person I am. And I am sorry I offended any other awful persons with that association.
Seriously... these guys BUY a team from an individual or group, as an individual or part of a group. In most cases, they are not the founder, they are not elected to an executive position or board chair. In nearly all cases that I am aware of (Packers social ploy aside) these are not publicly traded companies/securities. They may SELL the team. It denotes from a commercial and common sense standpoint a sort of ownership of the asset (certainly not necessarily the people it employs). I buy a car. It doesn't matter who built it, who helped me finance it, who services it, what gas I use... I have the title. I own the car. I am the owner. I am not the Executive Vice President of my 2017 Jeep Grand Cherokee, or the Senior Chief Executive of Automobile Operations of my 1972 Corvette.
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Post by lou on Jun 4, 2019 8:56:41 GMT -5
Let me see if this helps. Maybe these very smart "owners" are starting to make a smart business decision...
About 33% of NBA fans are white, and about 23% of the players are white. So their may be a lot of people out there who are actually offended by the title of owner.
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Post by Wormtown Railers Fan on Jun 4, 2019 11:01:58 GMT -5
.
PS By the way I truly don't understand the problem with "social justice". [/quote]
I have zero problem with the term social justice. Wanting social justice is the default position of 99.9% of the people in this country. However, I have a big problem with so called social justice warriors. They label any speech they don’t agree with “hate speech”. They want to ban hate speech and they want to determine what is hate speech. They don’t debate, they don’t listen and they don’t learn from others. Just look at their behavior on some of our college campuses. These are the people that want to determine the proper use of speech in our society. Every day terms we use in our normal dialogue with others they want to find offense, like calling an owner of a team an owner. If we don’t have our language to use as intended then what to we have? Sorry, I will not cave in to these people.
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Post by gks on Jun 4, 2019 11:15:02 GMT -5
The owners own the team....the players are employees. They are under contract, and get paid quite well, to work for the owners of the team. When the contract is up they are free to go and work somewhere else or even in another field. To compare this to a stain in American history is absolutely ridiculous and irresponsible....and I'll throw pathetic in to.
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Post by rgs318 on Jun 4, 2019 11:18:27 GMT -5
I can remember a Black NBA player referring to a multi-million offer he turned down as "slave wages." I can understand his point. but NOT his choice of words. They seem to show a shocking lack of knowledge of history and culture.
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Post by longsuffering on Jun 4, 2019 11:55:31 GMT -5
The feelings of the players. "What's in a name? That what we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -William Shakespeare The wads of cash smell just as sweet whether you are called an owner, a chairman, a general partner or a Governor. Maybe small gestures of respect like this by owners in the NBA have led to no kneeling for the anthem. Not using the term owner will not change a page of history but it's nice to see a league and players cooperating with each other, even informally in this case. |
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Post by alum on Jun 4, 2019 12:55:02 GMT -5
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Post by sader1970 on Jun 4, 2019 13:14:23 GMT -5
OK, we're all on the sidelines here (please identify yourself if you are an NBA owner or player). I am OK with owners calling themselves something else if they want to (but according to Webster's dictionary, they'll still be actual owners). That's their business. They just shouldn't be coerced into something to satisfy political correctness.
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Post by dadominate on Jun 4, 2019 16:03:48 GMT -5
... and go broke. this era of unfettered identitarianism will go down in infamy. it has already become a blatant laughing stock to most, especially when out of range of the obnoxious stench of the PC police and professional victims. |
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Post by sader1970 on Jun 4, 2019 16:37:33 GMT -5
mm67, I understand and appreciate that you are doing your usual job of going the extra mile to try to understand how someone else feels. An admirable quality that I would do nothing to discourage. First, try to understand, then to be understood.
I perhaps didn't phrase my analogy well enough. I wasn't trying to equate my hiring a lawn care proprietor with my ownership. I was trying to say, his employees are his employees yet he is still the owner of that lawn care company.
As to "working us like slaves," I can only tell you that I hired and promoted many minorities (yes, numerous African-Americans included) in my career because they were the best qualified for the position. I cannot recall specifically when the phrase was used which employees were working with me at the time but with 20/20 hindsight, their racial or ethnic or gender make-up would have made no difference. I don't think I worked with anyone in my career who had any less than 4-5 generations separating them from slavery. Something like 35 +/- years ago, I was in charge of putting together my company's diversity plan and, yes, the team I assembled was purposely diverse to get a wide perspective on the subject (including LGBT folks long before that was "popular"). The plan was considered so good that the larger national corporation adopted our plan almost whole cloth. I listened then and I listen now. That said, I respectfully believe this is a tempest in the teapot. But, since I don't give a rat's behind about the NBA, except Malcolm, they can do whatever the heck they want.
I've already said much, much more than I care to on the subject since I really don't have any skin in the game.
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Post by thecrossisback on Jun 4, 2019 21:11:26 GMT -5
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard if I am the NBA owners or the Warriors owner, I would tell him to go fry ice.
For once the NBA players should not get their way.
Can we please worry about something more important than this.
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