Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Eddy Curry: The Warren Buffet of the NBA

By now, most people have read about New York Knick’s Center Eddy Curry’s financial woes. To recap, apparently despite an eight-figure salary he still cannot meet all of his financial obligations.

Not being able to manage with ten-million plus dollars a year is almost as criminal as making ten million dollars a year to score a total of 31 points over the last two seasons. Curry’s magnificent futility as a basketball player makes Adam Morrison look like Kevin Durant.

But, the purpose of this post is not to lambast Curry’s non-playing. Rather, it’s to highlight two of the line items of Curry’s debt. First, he owes $350,000 to Juwan Howard—the same Juwan Howard who rivals Shawn Kemp for all-time NBA fecundity.

What could one really owe Juwan Howard $350K for? Odds are that Howard probably took advantage of the no-longer-young youngster in betting on something, like a game of HORSE. Curry likely assumed that his two-year hiatus from basketball served some strategic playing value, like when a star veteran gets a couple games off to rest his body. Unfortunately for Curry it just made him fatter and worse at basketball, and $350K poorer.

Second, Curry is underwater on a $500K-plus loan with an 85% interest rate. 85%? Are you serious? One would have to literally go out of his way to find an interest rate that high. Curry could have walked into a mall—any mall in America—signed up for 50 credit cards, and received no more than a 40% interest rate. He probably would have even walked away with a Visa tee shirt.

85% interest rates just don’t exist in America. Usually you only hear about them in some World Bank microfinancing program for subsistence farmers in Bangladesh, where the farmers get like $100 and have 15 years to pay it back. Perhaps Eddy Curry’s greatest achievement then is finding America’s most usurious loan. Congratulations Ed, you lose. Again.

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