Why Chris Cohan Won't Sell Before 2011.

If you're a Warriors fan, ask yourself this:

Do you want Larry Ellison's money going to Chris Cohan's pockets and David Stern's CV or do you want him getting a great deal and then spending like crazy on YOUR TEAM?  Easy answer.  Now imagine Ellison isn't the guy buying the team.  Suddenly the money ain't so funny and you damn sure want every last penny salvaged from the undeserving Cohan-Stern network and poured DIRECTLY into team operations coffers for the immense rebuilding project Cohan's destructive tenure leaves in its wake.

This week, the Warriors' announced they had hired a respected professional sports M & A organization to handle the potential sale of their unprofessional NBA organization.  The Galatioto Sports Partners group, which brands itself "The Sports Bankers," has overseen a number of pro team sales in recent years and most recently advised parties to the Charlotte Bobcats team sale.

Despite the sound and the fury of this announcement of... paying a retainer to a banking firm? ... the Golden State Warriors and the flagship whorebag radio mothpiece they fund heavily have already run creepy ads about Larry Ellison.  The spot in question, which features a mannered sale demand and some predictable excuse-making about how difficult and drawn out these mega big business deals can be, delivers a familiar message to the fans still listening to KNBR and, in turn, listening for their reason to spend more money on this shit can team.  Amounting to little more than the desperate season ticket sales push gimmick of all time, this "sale" prep announcement ad, of course, urges.......  

Patience.

The Warriors demand that season ticket holders on the fence about renewing their tickets for another season of this crap house show lock in within the next two weeks, by April 12th.  Apparently the Clippers, on the other hand, are letting their ticket holders wait until AFTER the draft lottery has taken place.  In other words, the Warriors demanded that remaining invested fans hand over money for Rowell to put into interest-bearing accounts before they even know where the team will draft.  Or before they trade that pick in a Maggette contract dump!  Or before the Clippers even hire a new coach or sign Lebron James!  The Clippers have EVERYTHING going for them now with another high draft pick, the best pick of last year's draft ready to go, millions to spend in free agency, and Mike Dunleavy gone.  But there are no answers to a thousand all-too-familiar questions in Warriorland and we slobbering masses still enjoy the hell out of watching these final 15 games as Nelson shows that those injuries and youth never mattered, he can still manufacture exciting shit ball barn burners with D-Leaguers and has-beens and the Winning Shall Inspire.  Buy tickets now!

And to top THAT,

WE'RE SELLING! YOU'RE FREE! CELEBRATE BY BUYING TICKETS NOW!!!!!

As many have by now figured out, the Warriors will still run the draft and the free agency period (in which they are complete non-factors) via Idiot's Consortium. 

Robert Rowell says "Salary Protection Wins Championships." 
Larry Riley says "Aw Shucks, we'll try like the Dickens not to suck."
Don Nelson says ~burp~ "Dammit, Willie, ante up."

Buy Tickets Now!

Chris Cohan's creepy, beady-eyed weirdo routine still has us poor fans in a strangle hold.  As it turns out, Cohan had TWO agreements in place with Larry Ellison but backed out of both!  He LIKED Ellison's bid price!  He ACCEPTED Larry Ellison's bid price!  And then, in a fit of idiocy, he sent Flunkster Dude and the PR moron brigade off to spam the forums and the airwaves to complain that Ellison was lowballing him!  Warriors beatland missed this completely and ate the cookie: Ellison is interested!  They skipped over the part Ric Bucher nailed on Gary Radnich's AM radio show: Cohan fucked up the sale already.  TWICE.  He had to cover up (through Rowell denial and Ellison baiting) by beating the winner of the stand off(s) to the punch. 

Like the Monta Ellis trade Rowell offered the Memphis Grizzlies (diarrhea of the mouth) and the failed Amar'e Stoudemire trade(s) this past year, the Cohan Enterprise failed miserably when they actually stepped foot on legit NBA business territory.  You know, the level above just efficiently stealing fans' money through media messaging and contract laundering (at least $20 million saved through various insurance-covered contracts and cash dumps this season). 

Interesting side note, Monta Ellis was fined AND suspended last season.  So he was suspended without pay for 30 games (~$3 million) AND THEN he had to pay $3 million to league-appointed charities as part of the team fine.  So in effect, as NO ONE has ever discussed until now:  Monta Ellis had $6 million taken away from him AND THEN was mercilessly slammed by the Warriors and the local fan community for two straight seasons.  Thank god he just told Marc Spears he thinks he's better than Lebron.  His agents are brilliant: adding that fuel to the Ellis Attitude Fire should get him dumped off right quick.  Damage control spinning has already begun in earnest in Warriorland.

[Update: Suspension cash goes to charity/tax write-off for the team, of course.  But the fine was never announced and may not in fact have been assessed once Ellis' Player's Union grievance stopped the official Warriors public patriarchal shaming dead in its tracks.  Forum plant morons were still free to foment Monta hatred, which continues today. Ellis definitely played the season under VOID, fine, and further suspension threat.  Rowell announced he would not be voided about the time Elis' Players' Union grievance was reviewed and Ellis' claim affirmed.  Rowell of course spun it as an act of magnanimity on his part.  Then Ellis was offered in a heavily publicized (by Rowell) trade that would have saved the team that $3 million.  Likely to still happen after all of the other money laundering schemes Rowell's run on Crawford, Jackson, Belinelli trades, etc.]

All of which is to say, as We Believe! barely scratches the surface of the days-of-yore memory banks a mere 3 years after The Dallas Series:  Chris Cohan is a gutless loser who can't close and, when he REALLY fucks up, broadcasts the fact by publicly smearing the OTHER side in whatever matter he just trainwrecked.  That's a verb now.  Update your wikisaurus.  It's fucking Cohan's verb.  It's the Cohan Verb Par Excellence. 

Cohan the Trainwrecker.

And add this one to your lexicon, too: pulling a Cohan.  Someone more clever than I can run down some preliminary mega fuck ups that shall from this day forth be called pullings of Cohans.  But you all know exactly what they'll look like: fucking brutal.  I've got a few real life Cohans pulled: 

1. Chris Webber house visit and IMMEDIATE end of his Warriors tenure way back at the beginning of the Cohan ownership. 
2. Lucked into the 2007 Playoffs, had the premier team marketing vehicle (and used it: We Believe!), but fucked it all up and were a laughing stock less than a year later.
3. Dumping Jason Richardson for strictly cash savings. $10 million TPE unused, playoffs missed.  Remember the LOUD complaints fomr Nellie and co. about 48 games to makes the Western Conference playoffs that season?  48 wins both seasons since.  Good thing they quit then instead of wasting good scotch on hard work the last two seasons. Oh and, to close the loop: Drafting Marco Belinelli and suggesting he'd replace JR.
4. Chris Webber signing and mega-publicity campaign to kill any shot at the 2008 playoffs.
5. 16 years. Make your own list. Pretty much any executive decision over that time qualifies.

Pulling a Cohan.  The Warriors Way.  Going on 20 years.  That's a Fucking Dynasty.
David Stern hates you, NBA Warriors fans.  He fucking hates you.

Upon this most recent fuck up of professional negotiating, David Stern realized he was about to lose a major gravy train and any shot at a new arena and new merchandise boon once Ellison paid the mere pennies in Oracle Scratch a comprehensive rebranding/uniform revision would cost.  So he botched the entire affair on top of Cohan's bull shit and strong armed the Sports Banking firm hiring and announcement thereof that has dominated the largely-ignored Warriors media cycle this week.  Oh yeah and Stephen Curry's ankle healed magically after Tyreke Evans' face got smashed.  Hangover's are a bitch, and Steph Curry was HUNG THE FUCK OVER in Memphis in a recent ugly Warriors loss on the road.

Anyway, the sale timeline does not change at all.  Chris Cohan is under no pressure to sell before the league knows for sure whether there will or will not be a player lockout attending CBA renegotiations next year.  He wants to sell and has for some time, that much is clear.  But he missed the Golden Opportunity and has systematically devalued the team since the 2007 playoffs.  Since then, he's piled on contracts he immediately regretted (Maggette, Ellis, Biedrins, Jackson, Nelson) and hiked prices to rates that GUARANTEE you suckers just made him more money in the last two terrible seasons than he'd made in any two season period prior.  Add the season ticket sales totals up from 2007-2009 and you're looking at one of the most percentage-profitable teams in the league.  Perhaps THIS season ticket sales dropped.  But it was sheer gravy train to this point and Rowell's canny cash dumps and vet minimum signings (paid by the league for the most part) result in no major cash hit whatsoever. 

Cohan has a long-rumored IRS debt to worry about.  Apparently, it's a major problem now.  Never before.  It dates to 1998 when the dipshit sold the cable company he bought with his inheritance and used shady tax shelters because, of course, he went bargain shopping on his financial advice.  Not buying that it pressures him in sale-relevant ways.  He's been peddling the team for years now.  He's the classic fickle fucktard.  No one takes him seriously at this point and what Stern fails to recognize is that, by publicizing this For Sale stuff NOW with a clear financial crisis on the horizon for the league and no guarantees that D League scabs will put butts in seats, he advertises an INCREDIBLE Clearance Sale on the Warriors. 

If you're a halfway decent businessman or -woman, you're waiting until the team is so heinously devalued that you can have it for nearly free and you're not letting Cohan's bitchy reactionary PR shit dissuade you from letting him kill himself yet again.  Stern wants mega millions for a good market?  Boo-fucking-hoo.  He let us waste away for going-on-20 years to this point, fuck him and the incompetent fat cat prick owners who got us all into this mess of complacent fan-screwing in the first place.

The low dollar point for the Warriors ain't now.  This desperate last chance to entice someone into thinking they can run a draft and hire a coach ain't fooling anyone who matters.  Nelson is still under contract, Maggette is totally untradeable, the draft pick is worthless, the core players are overpriced, hated, fighting with each other, lazy, flawed, out of position, or all of the above.  Why pay for the last worst year of this team's Epic Failure? Why bail Cohan out of the ONLY money losing season in the last 5?!  Let him squirm.  Let the team plummet.  Let the arena get another natural year closer to the inevitable end.  Go in for the kill when the bleeding has already got this fucker on the mat.

This is simply a stupid time to buy from a fickle loser like Cohan. The Publicize strategy Cohan and Stern settled on ensures nothing at all in terms of timeline, it simply annoys existing bidders and highlights the desperation.  Only one change matters as Cohan inflicts this ULTIMATE fan fuck over, the "I'm Selling" lie.  Cohan has to give it up.  All of it.  The myth of competence, the snarky sense of entitlement, the cocky assurance and plausible deniability PR campaigns, all of it.  Nothing changes for Warriors fans until one thing happens.

Let go, Chris Cohan.
Just let it go.
You cannot win, and you have not shown the world you're serious about selling.

You've merely reconfirmed for the umpteenth time that you are not worth treating as a legitimate business partner and that your irrational self-deluding knows no shame.  You'll even exploit the dominant Warriors fan passion, the one that wats YOU out of our lives more than even Monta Ellis, for a few stray ticket sales.

Just let it go.
The tickets will sell themselves at that point.

Besides all this, the timeline predictions from folks like Tim Kawakami and Marc Spears make no sense based upon previous team sales.  Perhaps this situation is different, and if Larry Ellison suddenly pays $500 million for the Warriors tomorrow, egg on my face.  But a fast track sale doens't make a lot of sense for a supposedly important market that should be a near-crown jewel of the league instead of a national punch line.  You do this right and you treat the most desirable bidder well.  You don't drag his or her name around in desperate false bidding war talk pointing. 

Teams that are selling in time for the upcoming draft and Free Agency signing period have been publicly for sale for months and years and have had sale discussions publicly vetted on a regular basis for some time. 

The New Jersey Nets, for example, were known to be "unofficially" for sale or in preliminary, intermediate, or advanced discussions (who knows?) as early as Spring 2008.  Frank Isola and Mitch Lawrence wrote up a comprehensive review of one significantly advanced potential sale scenario in October, 2008:  http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/nets/2008/10/27/2008-10-27_bruce_ratner_explored_nets_sale.html

The Nets were not officially sold until 2010.  And not to the parties discussed in that article.  But the public/league-mediated sale discussions DID produce a bonkers bidder.  Major considerations: Odds-on lock for the #1 pick in a two player draft, TONS of cap room for this Epic Free Agent Market, and 100% Lebron mojo in the Brooklyn market with added public spectacle value in the person of longtime Nets shareholder and prominent ownership representative AND Lebron friend, phenomenally successful and now New York-brand-setter, rapper Jay-Z. 

I'm a major Sinatra fan but I hand over New York naming rights fully to Jay-Z's sublime Empire State of Mind.

The Bobcats were "publicly" put up for sale way back in April-May of 2009, officially announced as such via typical circuitry in June after Bob Johnson hired an investment banker to manage the sale.  He'd been meeting with said banker for months preceding the public announcements.  The league and the team's ownership spent "some time" (nearly a year) trying to manufacture an operative market despite everyone knowing Michael Jordan was going to buy (and kill) the league's second-least valuable market franchise at the end of the day and he'd already devalued it to irretrievable depths while the owner ran for his life under a hail of operations losses.  Michael Jordan's easy claim on the team following some perfunctory phantom competition news went down smoothly and quickly after the team took a major value hit.  Losing and incompetence have a way of infecting even the sweet release of closure with their stink.  Losers lose, I guess.

Wizards are SOLD as of now but that sale was already assured via Abe Pollin's sad passing and longstanding, strong relationships with minority owner Ted Leonsis.  Leonsis had exclusive purchasing rights and used them.  The Verizon Center is part of Wizards assets, their payroll is looking dandy for this FA class, Gilbert Arenas may still be voided in time for big signings, and the Wizards Shaun Livingston Tank Brigade is on its way to better lottery odds than the Warrior team that manufactured its lost season through bad player relations, lies, and false injury reports while Washington was legitimately dysfunctional in the wake of Pollin's passing and Arenas' Annual Solstice Day Shoot Out.

These things tend to look a certain way and take a certain amount of time when they're really going down. And when they're really working through the circuitry that engenders league approval, they involve, to be sure, firms like Galatioto Partners.  But they also tend to have clear extenuating circumstances and acknowledged histories of development that do indeed draw the crazies from outside the NBA information exchange (say, Russia or China) with monster bids.  They do NOT come when the team flexibility situation is at its worst and the next season is under the cloud of a player lockout that will make you no money in the immediate future.  Ask any savvy 2010 Real Estate vulture and he or she will tell you, there are plenty of clearly hopeless situations still being clung to by irrational buffoons in deep, deep denial.  You know when you're dealing with one and you don't waste your time with them.  Their product is never worth OVERpaying for.

So the bull shit talk about Stern wanting the Warriors to go for a fat price is all hot air.  A good businessman knows full well that desperation on the eve of no team play is the best time to pounce and that a complete restructuring of league contract rules is the time to arrive with major capital mojo and a major chance to take the lead amongst owners with all Don Nelson questions answered and paid for by the sucker you just cleaned out.

Chris Cohan isn't selling because he doesn't have the stones to admit when he's licked (we'd be done with him by now if he did).  And Larry Ellison isn't buying because he'd be a complete idiot if he did right now.  David Stern seems like he's due for retirement.  Trying to fuck with Larry Ellison seems like a fine sign of his demented, overblown sense of importance.  This play was a major fail.  The new mega tycoon owners and Michael Jordan can safely stage his ouster now.  Beautiful.  Those poor players don't like sport coats anyway.  So let them take them off and listen to mood music entering the arena again.  PLEASE.

To wrap this up and get the weekend kicked off, a bit of recap and loose additional thoughts on the Week that Wasn't in Cohan Faux Sales Talks:

This team will try to make a bigtime trade in this offseason because it's worth zero right now.  If they had any moment of "we won't just rent a big name" last offseason, it was in direct consideration of the rental not affecting sale price positively THIS offseason because ROWELL had already screwed the cap situation up so heinously with the then-in-house Stephen Jackson problem, etc. Even moving Biedrins and change wasn't going to fix the rest of the payroll enough to play on this FA market.  But no one's listening since half the league is in on the 2010 FA pool (including the Sacramento Kings, who are about to boat race the Warriors hardcore.  Are they for sale?!  New arena!).  So the Warriors will have to try again at the next trade deadline.  Until then, they don't have any improvement of assets to point to and can only find new ways to make money while killing the product.  Rowell's a clever thief.  I'm sure Cohan's bottom line will be just fine.  Most expensive concessions in the league, no outhouses, ramped up parking ticket prices MID SEASON,  etc.  They're the best in the business at stealing the fans' money, even in times of crisis.  Cohan's kids won't starve.  BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

What sort of moron would bail them out NOW to NOT PLAY on this FA market?!  And what sort of a moron thinks the pieces on the roster make the Warriors a player in this S&T market?! Not Larry Ellison. Maybe the idiot accomplice best friend of Cohan and co., Mr. Fitness Club Lamorinda Mark Mastrov. Ugh.  That would be a fucking disaster. 
 
We've all accepted that this week's Big News only re-confirms that Cohan is being a stubborn moron about the price.
Like I said a while ago. Let's make it a fun game now!  How much do you think he'll sell for?!

To reiterate, Bucher laid a solid gold egg many of you don't seem to want to acknowledge:

COHAN BACKED OUT OF AGREEMENTS TWICE!

Like heavily publicizing mega offers to Arenas and Brand (let that sink in for a moment) and then throwing $50 million at Corey Maggette, this staged public announcement is pure PR fodder. Cohan's no closer and this was the only way he could think of to troll Ellison's life since Larry ain't returning calls any more. Stern's job interview with Ellison is not off to a good start.

Stern and Cohan are on the brink of completely blowing this.

No Sale before 2011.