The Nuggets Rule The NBA

Congratulations to the Denver Nuggets; they are the NBA Champions for 2023.  Their victory last night in Denver was not an aesthetic presentation of the game of basketball, but the Nuggets won despite:

• Shooting only 5 for 28 on 3-point attempts
• Having only one player score more than 16 points

The Heat use their tenacious defense as a calling card and that defense is a big part of why and how the Heat made it to the Finals.  However, last night in the fourth quarter, it was the Nuggets that played the better defense holding the Heat to only 18 points in that quarter.

Some have characterized this season and this series as a “coming-out party” for Nikola Jokic.  Well, if you want to advance that metaphor just a tad, consider that Jokic should no longer be any sort of a mysterious entity in the world of basketball.  He was “on display” for the entirety of the NBA Playoffs and should have erased any doubt about his status as a dominant force in the game of basketball.  And in case you had not noticed, he will only be 29 years old in the middle of the next NBA regular season.

Moving on …  Normally, when the sports world intersects with government at just about any level of jurisdiction, the result is “less than totally satisfactory”.  Today we have the potential for two such intersections and at first glance one of them might be positive and the other is almost assuredly going to be sound and fury signifying nothing.  Let me begin with the one that might turn out to be a plus.

A recent memo from the Internal Revenue Service indicates that donations by boosters to NIL Collectives may not be tax deductible for those donors.  NIL Collectives take donations from alums and boosters and put them in a pool, and they use the total money to allocate it across sports and teams as a “recruiting tool”.  Wink!  Wink!!!  They are “buying” a team not “recruiting” one.

According to an IRS memo, these Collectives do not deserve status as a 501 (c) (3) organization because the Collectives exist to carry out “a substantial nonexempt purpose – serving the private interests of student-athletes.”  I have favored the idea of eliminating the tax deduction for any sort of donation to a college Athletic Department for decades and indeed there have been some loopholes closed around the margins of that fundraising system, but if this sort of thinking takes root at the IRS, it might advance the cause significantly in future years.

Notice that I said this intersection of sports and government “might be positive” and not that this is the “dawning of an age of enlightenment”.  The people who stand to be most affected by this sort of change to the tax code have deep pockets and lots of government influence going for them.  In addition, many politicians would prefer to hit a hornets’ nest like a pinata rather than mess with the football or basketball program at a major school in their jurisdiction.  So, I cautiously mention this as being potentially positive – – until I read somewhere that the idea has been tabled for further study.

The other intersection of sports and government is a grandstanding play.  Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and he has plumbed the depths of the repercussions caused by the merger of the PGA and LIV Golf and concluded that there are “serious questions regarding the reasons for and terms behind the announced agreement.”

Obviously, Senator Blumenthal is not a regular reader here because the reasons for the agreement and the terms behind the agreement can be summarized as was presented here last week:

• Money talks and bulls[p]it walks.

The Subcommittee has demanded documents and communications between the parties leading up to the announcement of the merger.  Senator Blumenthal has said he wants to know how this “jointly operated commercial entity will be structured and governed”.  Really?  This commercial entity simply replaces a previous commercial entity that has operated a golf tour for the last 94 years.  This is not an entity that moves the needle on the US economy; this is not an entity that produces materials critical to the National Defense; this is an entity that organizes golf tournaments.  Moreover, this entity that organizes golf tournaments enjoys tax-free status because the architects of the US tax code have convinced themselves that the PGA Tour is a charity fundraising entity.  Ponder that for a while …

Senator Blumenthal also used the fact of this merger of golf organizations to express his dismay at Saudi Arabia’s human rights record calling that record “deeply disturbing”.  However, that human rights record must have been insufficiently disturbing a month ago before this merger saw the light of day because back then the Senator was not investigating diddley-doodle about LIV Golf as a stand-alone entity operating golf tournaments at various places in the US.  It took this merger to deepen his level of “disturb” to the point that he decided to investigate something.

There is a lot of hand-wringing these days about existential threats to mankindsuch as these four:

1. Climate change
2. Artificial Intelligence run amok – – think HAL 9000
3. Pandemics
4. Water shortages

• Memo to Senator Blumenthal:  Those are important and potentially dangerous things that need to be controlled and managed.  Not a single one of those threats will be mitigated or exacerbated in the least by who or what organizes golf tournaments.
• Investigate that …

Finally, I wonder what George Carlin might say about the tax-exempt status of NIL Collectives and/or Senator Blumenthal’s investigation into such deeply disturbing matters.  Here is one of Carlin’s observations that might give me a hint:

“If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………