... how is anyone supposed to make money running a small-market NBA team?

They win titles with low payrolls. What could be better than that?

But they still need ongoing public subsidies? 

Last week an article in San Antonio explained that the team is asking for more than $100 million new tax revenues to upgrade their five-year-old building.  

P Nussbaum of SuperSonicSoul, a big NBA fan living in a city with its own stadium dilemma, is mad. He writes:

For those of you too lazy to read the article, it boils down to this:

The Spurs got a $193.5 million stadium from the city of San Antonio five years ago. Now they want $164 million to upgrade the ancient edifice because "without new sources of revenue, [the Spurs] cannot pay the player salaries that would allow the team to keep winning."

In other words, the great seers of San Antonio, who can forecast a player's ability to succeed with phenomenal accuracy, who can tell that an obscure Argentinian and an unknown Belgian would vault them to heights unforeseen in the NBA, do not possess the ability to make a profit in a five-year-old stadium when they are the reigning NBA Champions?

This tells me two things:

1. The NBA structure must be horribly out of whack if the NBA Champs are struggling financially with a stadium that is a year older than my pre-school aged daughter; and

2. No matter how much money the City of Seattle throws away on a new Sonic Arena, within 5-10 years that building will be insufficient to meet the team's needs.

Call me a cynic, call me an oversimplifier of unbelievably complicated situations, but I am slowly reaching the boiling point for this arena situation. As far as I'm concerned, the NBA and their owners and their messed-up system can go jump in a lake. If you took all the sales taxes paid towards arenas and stadia in the past two decades, you could probably build a home for every poor family in the United States. Instead, we as citizens continue to subsidize these lying blackmailers out of fear of "losing our team." And yet, these owners and leagues continue to peddle flim-flam schemes that would make the Music Man proud, pawning one city off another, using one city's new toy arena as a threat to extort a new arena for themselves.

At what point do we say enough is enough?