NBA: No Basketball Allowed

Atlanta is home to the hapless Hawks. Fortunately for the owner, the game part is largely irrelevant. I had suspected this for a while, but Ken Sugiura's article in today's AJC piled on quite nicely. The gist of the article is that, rather than put together a team that wins, you can just give away tickets to celebs and people will pay to gawk at them. This assertion seems to be backed up by Bernie Mullin, Hawks parent company's president and CEO. Bernie is good for a few quotes. What's Bernie hawkin'? It's not basketball.

We don't sell wins and losses.

What do you sell, Mr Mullin?

We sell NBA entertainment.

Ah. What is this "NBA entertainment"?

We really feel that when movie stars and the cutting-edge industry artists like Usher and Ludacris and OutKast and Bow Wow and all those guys are here, we feel it makes a statement about our product and our brand.

If you're a celeb, you can get four free tickets to Hawks home games. Go and have a good time -- you'll be well taken care of. Don't take my word for it though, take Big Boi's (remember Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik?):

On the floor, everything's taken care of.

Well, almost everything. I'll let Ken tell the story:

Boxer Evander Hollyfield once wanted a Chick-fil-A sandwich, but since there is no kiosk in Philips and food can't be brought in, he had to settle for a burger at the Bank of America Club.

Poor Evander. Maybe Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik will cheer him up.