Catching up with Links

* Marquette Law and University of Virginia School of Law sports law professor Gordon Hylton, who is also a distinguished legal historian, has written an outstanding essay titled Walter Kowalski: A Forgotten Man in the Legal History of Sport. Kowalski was a minor league player whose 1951 lawsuit against Organized Baseball (an alliance that included the big leagues and most of the minor leagues) and the antitrust exemption for baseball reached the United States Supreme Court along with the action filed by fellow minor-leaguer George Toolson in 1953. Gordon's essay discusses Kowalski's career along with the details and significance of his legal challenge. A must read.

* USA Today's Michael McCarthy has an excellent preview of the upcoming NBA labor crisis.

* The Super Bowl ticket lawsuit continues, but as Eric Aasen of the Dallas Morning News writes, don't expect it to go anywhere.

* Both Celtics Blog and Celtics Life write about Celtics backup center Nenad Kristic, who will become a free agent on July 1, thinking about signing with a Russian team before other NBA players turn to the international market should the NBA lockout out the players.  Looks like Kristic (who is from Serbia) might be trying to beat the lockout labor market -- a market that could see NBA players competing for a finite number of slots for American players in international basketball leagues.

* Dan Fitzgerald of the excellent Connecticut Sports Law Blog writes about the possibility of Hartford, like Winnipeg (which will get the Atlanta Thrashers after losing the Jets several years ago), getting another NHL team.  I hope Hartford gets another shot - it would be good for New England hockey and restore Hartford's hockey rivalry with the Rangers, Islanders and Bruins.

* Lews and Clark Law School professor Tung Yin has a provocative piece titled A Modest Proposal for Dealing with Corruption in College Sports.  Here's an excerpt:

Here’s my proposal for addressing those two points completely:

1. Schools can pay their student-athletes whatever they want, but they must report the wages transparently, with no under-the-table payments. 
2. In order to normalize the impact of high wage vs. low wage teams, as well as to take into account the “student” side of student-athletes, all game scores will be adjusted by the Wage Differential Ratio and the SAT Score Differential Ratio.

The Wage Differential Ratio

We will consider the minimum wage paid to a student-athlete to be $10/hour, even if the player in question actually receives less than that.

During every game, there will be a time-weighted average salary for each team. The more minutes that a given player is in the game, the more his salary counts towards the team’s average salary. We then take a ratio of the two teams’ average salary, and adjust the game score accordingly.

For example, say that at half-time, rich USC has a time-weighted average salary of $150/hour, while poor UCLA has a time-weighted average salary of $25/hour. The ratio is 6:1, so we would multiply UCLA’s score by 6 for the adjusted half-time score.

To read the rest of Professor Yin's article, click here.

Posted in: