New column: 11 Burning Questions as NBA lockout approaches

Here's my new SI column on the NBA labor crisis. While the weather is beautiful today and many folks might not be glued to their TVs, I'll be an in-studio analyst tonight on NBA TV at 6 pm and 11:30 pm eastern. I'm joining Kenny Smith to talk about NBA lockout. Hope you can watch.

New video on Dodgers Bankruptcy

Following Nathaniel's excellent work on the Dodgers situation, I have a video for Sports Illustrated channel on what's next with the Dodgers:

More on NBA Age Restriction

Age restrictions, especially in the NBA and NFL, have been a big discussion point on this blog since it began 8 years ago.  Here's the New Republic's Nathan Pippenger's take on the NBA's age limit, which requires that players be 19 plus one year out of high school.

Can the NFL sanction players for misbehavior when the NFL has locked out those players?

John Glennon of The Tennessean asks Gary Roberts and me that question, and we seem to disagree.

Bud Selig Blocks the Dodgers' Proposed Television Deal with Fox

News broke last Monday that MLB Commissioner Bud Selig elected to exercise his "best interests of baseball" power by blocking the Los Angeles Dodgers' proposed television agreement with the Fox network. In short, Selig believes that the allegedly below market value deal would mortgage the future of the Dodgers franchise by diverting much needed funds from the team to satisfy Dodgers' owner Frank McCourt's personal debts (and help resolve his on-going divorce proceedings). Many commentators have speculated that Selig's decision will ultimately result in litigation between the Commissioner and McCourt.

For those trying to get up to speed on the quite complicated facts surrounding the Selig-McCourt dispute, Larry Behrendt of the It's About the Money, Stupid blog has posted an excellent summary of McCourt's ownership of the Dodgers.

Meanwhile, for analysis regarding the strength of McCourt's possible legal claims against Selig, be sure to check out Michael McCann's prior article for SI.com, as well as Sports Law Blog's previous coverage of the McCourt saga.

Update: The Dodgers announced this morning that they have formally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Do Minimum Age Rules "Work" in Sports?

I have been curious about this question for over a decade.

Minimum age laws/rules/policies are all around us. Think of voting, driving, drinking, and military service. The U.S. Constitution even has minimum age rules for certain political offices - 25 for the House of Representatives, 30 for the Senate, and 35 for Presidency. Minimum age rules are also plentiful in sports, of course.

Dan Stone and I recently published an economics-based analysis of minimum age rules in women's professional tennis in the Journal of Labor Research. The published version can be found here. The SSRN version can be found here. We provide some background in the paper's introduction (AR = age rule):

ARs are often controversial, and understanding their effects is clearly important to policy-makers. However, analyzing AR effects is generally a challenge empirically. In most nonsport contexts, the ARs have been in place for a substantial period of time. Women’s professional tennis provides a unique environment to analyze the effects of ARs on labor market outcomes, as the major change in the sports’ age rule was made fairly recently, in 1995. This allows a meaningful comparison to be made between the groups of players that had to comply with the restriction and those that did not. Moreover, consistent with the observation by Rosen and Sanderson (2001) regarding sports labor market research in general, the availability of player-specific records and the relatively static nature of other rules of the game over the past few decades make women’s tennis an excellent context for such an investigation.

We use regression analysis (OLS and probit) to test both the short-run and long-run effects of the age eligibility rule. With our data set comprised of year-level ordinal rankings, we were also able to use panel data methods, which allowed us to control for year and age effects more precisely. We tested whether players subject to the age rule (adopted in 1995) had longer and/or stronger careers. Our study found null results. We concluded as follows:

We find very limited evidence that the AR has had any systematic beneficial effect on players’ career longevity or success. Our results suggest that sport governing bodies should (re-)evaluate the efficacy and necessity of “one size fits all” age eligibility rules.

I have been working on a couple related studies (using different methods) pertaining to NBA basketball and women's gymnastics this summer. Given the "before and after" quality of minimum age rules and a plethora of metrics to track labor market outcomes, sports is a near-ideal environment to test whether such age eligibility rules "work."

Big Day for NBA today

The NBA and NBPA will be meeting today to see if they can get a deal done on a new CBA before it expires at the end of June 30.  For related coverage, I am interviewed on NBA TV to provide legal analysis and Gabe Feldman has a piece on Huffington Post on this topic.