ShaY wrote:Damnit thats soem crazy offers , I really don't know how true is that.
Lakers 4 Life I am not questioning you , just the reports.
While Scola was a great player in europe he never lead a team to a euroleague championship.
That money is just unreal.
Not really. Panathinaikos is owned by two brothers and they each make like 250-300 million euros just from their stock holdings in one bank (about $400-480 million dollars a year.) Plus the Panathinaikos soccer revenues for the club are somewhere around $1 billion a year. They can afford it. The team is just a toy for them, like the Mavs with Cuban or the Blazers with Allen.
Any big European basketball club like Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, CSKA, Efes Pilsen, Fenerbahce, Milano, Dynamo Moscow, TAU, Olympiacos, Panathinaikos, Khimki, UNICS any of those rich clubs could afford those types of contracts easily.
The difference is in the amount of teams willing to give them. That's pretty much just CSKA, Panathinaikos and Olympiacos at the moment although FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, TAU, Khimki, UNICS, Dynamo Moscow all of the big Russian and Spanish clubs are starting to really up their budgets.
It's just a cultural thing why the NBA has paid more than the Euroleague. FC Barcelona spent $262 million last season on salaries for their soccer players. But they have only been allocating about $40 million for their basketball club. Because in Europe soccer is so far above all the other sports. So it's just different than the US where you have 3 major team sports. In Europe there is just one. But some of these rich owners over there want to spend the big money on basketball too.
Panathinaikos and Olympiacos in Greece would spend anything. And the owners of Dynamo Moscow and CSKA no end to what they could spend. Make Paul Allen look poor. It's just a new era where some of the owners now are spending the big money on basketball to try to rival the NBA.