The NBA and NHL have suspended their seasons due to the coronavirus, and the vast majority of teams in those two leagues have not said that they'll be paying part-time arena staffers who work game nights.
In the absence of their bosses doing the right thing, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kevin Love each announced that they were donating $100,000 to their teams' arena staffs while play is suspended. Zion Williamson went even further, saying he'd cover a month of wages. (Love's Cavaliers later said that they'll pay arena staff as if games are still going on, while Antetokounmpo's Bucks said that they'll match the $100K.)
Those donations have been widely lauded, and they should be. But their necessity serves as proof that NBA and NHL owners are the most vile skinflints on the planet, operating towering profit machines on the backs of precarious ushers and bartenders.
Keeping those people afloat would be even cheaper than you think. Christopher Ilitch, who has the maximum amount of staff to cover with NBA, NHL, and MLB spring training dates lost, announced Friday that he was putting aside $1 million to pay staff for remaining Pistons and Red Wings regular-season home games plus Tigers spring training. Ilitch's family owns the Red Wings and Tigers, plus the arena the Pistons play in.
A million bucks! That's it! (There are only four Red Wings and eight Pistons games left in the regular season.) The maximum amount of home games an NBA or NHL playoff team could have is 14. Even giving every team the maximum playoff run would mean it would cost the billionaires who own those teams around $3 million to pay hourly staffers, and that's if they owned baseball, basketball and hockey teams. Dion Waiters made $12.1 million this season.
Comcast, which owns the arena where the Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers play, said it would pay its employees no matter what. Mavs owner Mark Cuban said the same, but with a catch.
"They get paid by the hour, and this was their source of income," Cuban said. "So, we'll do some things there. We may ask them to go do some volunteer work in exchange, but we've already started the process of having a program in place."
How good a deal that turns out to be depends on whether or not that volunteer work would involve risks to which Cuban is unwilling to expose players, the more valuable employees.
Still, any check is better than no check. And as of Friday, cases like this are the exceptions, not the rule. Professional sports is run for billionaires on the backs of workers that are disposable in a crisis. Coronavirus is just reminding us of that.
