Ozzie und Daniel Silna waren Besitzer eines erfolglosen Teams einer längst untergegangenen Liga. Dann kamen sie auf den cleversten Vertrag der amerikanischen Sporthistorie. Nun will die NBA sie aus dem Deal herauskaufen.

It was 1 in the morning. They were flummoxed by a safe. Jordan hadn't opened it in years, and he couldn't remember the combination. Everything else stopped as this consumed him. After 10 failed attempts, the safe would go into a security shutdown and need to be blown open. None of the usual numbers worked. Nine different combinations failed; they had one try left. Jordan focused. He decided it had to be a combination of his birthday, Feb. 17, and old basketball numbers. He typed in six digits: 9, 2, 1, 7, 4, 5. Click. The door swung open and he reached in, rediscovering his gold medal from the 1984 Olympics. It wasn't really gold anymore. It looked tarnished, changed -- a duller version of itself.

A University of Washington graduate whose football team had the best defense in the country at the time, Costacos came up with the idea of making a "Purple Reign" T-shirt to honor the team, featuring a lineman in a purple jersey falling from a cloud in the sky. Costacos printed up the shirts, traveled to a road game at Stanford one fall weekend and sold them in the parking lot. The idea was brilliant. By the end of the first week, he later estimated he had sold 20,000. An idea was born. Along with his older brother, Tock, he parlayed those T-shirts into series of sports-themed posters that, like that first T-shirt, played on pop culture. Together, they created one of the most influential businesses in the history of sports marketing. Its lasting impact eventually would extend all the way to a New York City art gallery, where, 25 years later, those posters were viewed as art and sold for thousands. At one show Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White bought the entire gallery collection.

Twenty years after The Dream Team dominated unlike any other sports team in Olympic history, NBA TV's behind the scenes look at the squad brought back many moments of nostalgia. The documentary entitled The Dream Team, narrated by Edward Burns, began by looking at the history of Olympic basketball, including how the Soviet Union team won the gold in 1972 and 1988 just when it seemed like the Americans'amateur players were good enough to win the gold every year.

You know who else was funny? Manute Bol, God bless him. He would knock down a 3, and I’d give him some kind of look as we were running back. He’d catch my eye and he’d hold up one crooked finger and say, in his broken accent, “No. 1 center in league — Manute Bol.”

The images are just as striking almost a decade later. A cup splashes off Ron Artest in the closing moments of a blowout win against the Detroit Pistons. He leaps into the stands at the Palace of Auburn Hills and into sports infamy. Mayhem follows. Players fight fans, fans fight players, a chair is thrown, bottles are tossed — in seconds, the invisible wall that separates athletes and spectators is demolished; the social contract of arena behavior is left in shreds. What happened that night went well beyond nearly $10 million in forfeited paychecks and 146 games lost in suspensions.

Michael Jordan claimed the NBA Slam Dunk 1988 championship after beating Dominique Wilkins. Needing 49 points to capture his second straight slam dunk title, Jordan headed to the opposite end of the floor to the delight of the Chicago fans. They knew what was coming. A la Dr. J., Jordan took off running, lifted off from the free throw line, double clutched in midair and slammed it down for the perfect score and the slam dunk title. "I looked up into the box seats and came across the guy who started it all, Dr. J," Jordan said. "He told me to go back all the way, go the length of the floor, then take off from the free-throw line. And I did it."

In those days it was rare for sophomores to make varsity. Herring made one exception in 1978, one designed to remedy his team's height disadvantage. This is part of the reason Mike Jordan went home and cried in his room after reading the two lists. It wasn't just that his name was missing from the varsity roster. It was also that as he scanned the list he saw the name of another sophomore, one of his close friends, the 6'7" Leroy Smith. Over the next three decades Jordan would become a world-class collector of emotional wounds, a champion grudge-holder, a magician at converting real and imagined insults into the rocket fuel that made him fly. If he had truly been cut that year, as he would claim again and again, he wouldn't have had such an immediate chance for revenge. But in fact his name was on the second list, the jayvee roster, with the names of many of his fellow sophomores. Jordan quickly became a jayvee superstar.

Bear with me now. The RDA dates back to 1959, and was maybe Bill Veeck's biggest hustle in a long lifetime of hustles. Veeck argued to the IRS that professional athletes, once they've been paid for, "waste away" like livestock. Therefore a sports team's roster, like a farmer's cattle or an office copy machine or a new Volvo, is a depreciable asset.The underlying logic is specious at best. As Fort points out, a team's roster at any given moment isn't actually depreciating. While some players are fading with age, others are developing and improving. But the Nets don't have to pay more taxes when a player becomes more valuable. And in any case, the cost of depreciation is borne by the athletes themselves, when they pass their primes and lose their personal earning power.