Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Were Orlando Magic Season Ticket Holders Deceived by Billy Donovan's Hiring?


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Darren Rovell has an excellent post on his CNBC Sports Business Blog regarding whether Orlando Magic fans who purchased season tickets while Billy Donovan was a willing head coach have a legal right to demand a refund from the Magic (Howard blogged about Donovan's situation earlier this week).

Rovell interviews Duke law professor Paul Haagen, who I blogged about last September in regards to the Faculty Associates Plan at Duke University, for his story:
Assuming the 200 fans that bought season tickets in the 24 hours surrounding Donovan’s hiring bought the average seats -- $40 per game for $1,800 a season -- that would mean that the Magic would have to refund $360,000. I called the team this morning and asked them if they were refunding tickets. A ticket representative told me that nothing had been determined yet.

Duke law school professor Paul Haagen told me earlier this week, he thought the team would have a case if they didn’t give the fans their money back. “I suspect that they intend to hold those ticket holders into their contracts and they’re not intending to release them,” Haagen told me. “They didn’t in fact guarantee that Billy Donovan would be the coach when they announced that he would be the coach.”

Now that’s interesting. Haagen is basically saying that there wasn’t any legal language that tied Donovan to season ticket contract. I’m not a lawyer, but I think this is good enough.

Have fans ever before demanded a refund because they were upset about a coach quitting so quickly? Neither Rovell nor I are aware of that happening. But I do recall the one day when Bill Belichick was, in his words, "HC of the NYJ." However I don't recall any Jets fans claiming that they bought season tickets because Belichick was, at least for several hours, going to take over for Bill Parcells as head coach. Rovell does cite a Canadian case where a fan of the Ottawa Senators unsuccessfully argued that he would not have bought season tickets for the 1999-2000 season had he known that Alexi Yashin would not be part of the team (Yashin held out for the entire year). That case was dismissed because it was impossible to prove that the fan bought the seats because of Yashin.

Along those lines, would any Magic fan spend thousands of dollars on Magic seats merely because of Billy Donovan's hiring? I suppose it's possible, as they may pay that money to see a star player even if his team stinks. But I suspect fans bought those seats because they were excited about Donovan, a good possibly great coach, coaching promising young players like Dwight Howard and Jameer Nelson on a team with a ton of salary cap space to spend on free agents. In other words, they were probably buying into the situation that Donovan was a part of; whether he was an essential part seems hard to establish. That is particularly true in a "players league" like the NBA, where coaching does not appear as meaningful to a team's win/loss record as it does in other leagues, most notably in the NFL, although that point is debatable.

There may be several other possible reasons against Magic fans enjoying a legal right to a refund. How about when a team markets a player to prospective season ticket holders and then trades him? Say the Lakers trade Kobe Bryant later this summer--will fans who purchased season tickets thinking that Kobe would be part of the 2007-08 Lakers team be able to demand a refund? The sensible answer would seem to be no. As Paul Haagen notes, teams can't guarantee future rosters or even coaching and management staffs. Change and turnover are the nature of modern sports teams.

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