The mysterious veil has been lifted.  Details of the much talked about revenue sharing plan have finally emerged and….I’m actually not against it.  Instead of trying to follow another league’s model, the NBA’s planning committee has tailored a plan to address the financial needs of smaller market NBA teams and doesn’t “over-tax” the larger ones.

Thanks to John Lombardo of the Sports Business Journal Daily, we now have some idea of how teams will split revenue generated from ticket sales, parking, concessions, and local television deals.  Here are some notable excerpts from the editorial,

the new plan is rooted in a philosophy of including locally generated dollars from the big-market, high-revenue teams to be spread among the low-revenue teams.

Sources said that the core of the plan calls for all teams to contribute an annually fixed percentage, roughly 50 percent, of their total annual revenue, minus certain expenses such as arena operating costs, into a revenue sharing pool.

Each team then receives an allocation equal to the league’s average team payroll for that season from the revenue pool. If a team’s contribution to the pool is less than the league’s average team payroll, then that team is a revenue recipient. Teams that contribute an amount that exceeds the average team salary fund the revenue given to receiving teams.

Each team’s total top line revenue already includes shared national revenue from TV and sponsorship at roughly $30 million for each team. So, obviously, teams with high local revenue will contribute the most into the new system as the amount of shared revenue grows from $60 million last season to roughly $200 million when the plan is fully implemented.

Now that the general guidelines are layed out, how does it apply to the actual NBA teams?  Well,

It’s anticipated that 15 of the 30 NBA teams will receive revenue from the new plan.  The neediest teams, Milwaukee, Memphis, Charlotte, Sacramento, etc are expected to receive $16 million.  By comparison, teams can currently receive a maximum of 5.8 million this year.

Now you may be thinking the plan will punish the bigger markets but there are indeed limits to how much money that can be “taken” from these big market teams.  No team can contribute more than 50 percent of its total profits and profit level will be determine by audits just like the salary cap.

While it remains to be seen if this change will help with the competitive balance, at least all of the markets will have a better chance to make up for SOME of their losses.

You can read the article in it’s entirety here.