NBA Merchandise and Income

Throughout the past couple of years merchandise from ticket sales and selling jerseys has been a huge source of income in the NBA.  Unbelievably, the Chicago Bulls had the most ticket sales during the 2015-2016 season.  Within the past month, the big story inthe NBA was Kobe Bryant going on his fair well tour. Within one month the Lakers' Staples Center sold over 1.2 million dollars of Kobe Bryant merchandise.  Since the NBA has so much money, from world around fans, the NBA has a lot of money to spend.  The average NBA referee makes over $150,000 a year.

Research Questions

While researching the NBA I have found some some interesting topics to talk about.

Why do some teams have a larger salary cap than other teams?

What happens when NBA teams want to trade their draft picks during the lottery?

Why does the NBA now allow women referees?

How does the NBA scout players so deep in the draft?

How many players are drafted each year from the draft?

Why is the salary cap for each team massively rising?

How much percentage of sales profit does the NBA make off of selling merchandise like jerseys?

Billion Dollar Ball Blog 2

Yesterday Gilbert Gaul, the author of Billion Dollar Ball visited our school and talked about his book and other college sports topics.  Mr. Gaul put countless hours of time and dedication to write this book, by visiting division one schools from across the nation and setting up interviews with the schools.  It took him many weeks to try and get an interview with Nick Saban, the head football coach of Alabama.  Mr. Gaul sent countless emails and letters to the Alabama headquarters, and one day he got a call back that he can not talk with Saban but he could get an interview with some of the athletes and the athletic director.  He could only do this all under some circumstances from the athletic director, he could not ask any athletes about anything related to tax.  He used this interview as a huge start up for his book and helped him get to where he is today.

Mr. Gaul also talks about how college head coaches are making a substantial amount of money compared to the school's chancellor or professors.  When he set up interviews with all of these world renown schools he found out some very intriguing information about the student athletes.  The athletes are all taking very similar courses, and when Mr. Gaul looked into these classes he realized that they were the easiest courses offered on campus.  He also noted that the big time athletes being recruited to Princeton, Harvard, etc. for sports, they do not have the required GPA and SAT scores needed to apply at that school.  But because they are athletes, the school does not worry about that aspect.  Overall, I think Mr. Gaul was very influential to our class and I learned many new things I never knew before about his book and Gilbert Gaul himself.