Rumors

Rich Paul appeared on the “Rich Eisen Show” and responded to Falk’s claims. “I just thought that was very unfair and a little beneath David Falk for a number of reasons,” Paul said Thursday. “We can’t have revisionist history, and we all want to determine who’s the GOAT and who’s the best and so on and so forth. But I just thought that was a little beneath David to say that.”

New York Post

To no one in the room’s surprise, Falk quickly answered Jordan when asked who his G.O.A.T is. Asked for No. 2, he said either Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Kobe Bryant. Is LeBron James in his top 10? “Probably,” Falk said, before delivering the quote of the day: “I really like LeBron,” he said. “But I think if Jordan had cherry-picked what teams he wanted to be on and two other superstars, he would’ve won 15 championships.”

Sports Business Journal

Falk reminisced on the prosperous early days of the Jordan Brand, but he also remembered the difficult times representing the Bulls star, like navigating the scandal after Jordan was found to have paid infamous scammer Slim Bouler tens of thousands of dollars after gambling on the golf course in the early 1990s. Falk said he believed Jordan was going to fire him after confronting him at a lunch meeting about publicly apologizing for the incident. But, as Falk recounted, “[Jordan] apologized to his parents. He apologized to the owner. He apologized to his teammates -- and it was over,” Falk said. “If you think I wanted to have a confrontation with Michael Jordan -- hell, no. But if you want to have a relationship with someone like that, or Mike Krzyzewski, or John Thompson, they have to know, at all times, when they ask you for your advice, that you’re never going to flinch, you’re not going to B.S. them, and you’re going to tell them exactly what you think.”

Sports Business Journal

Falk was clear he has not spoken to his former client since it was announced Jordan will appear as a “contributor” on NBC Sports’ NBA coverage. But asked if he believed MJ would be good on air, he offered a blunt prediction. “I’ll be surprised if he’s [Jordan] on three times,” Falk said. “It’s just personal. I haven’t asked him.”

Sports Business Journal

Evan Turner, who played in the NBA from 2010 to 2020, has defeated his former agent, David Falk, in a breach of contract dispute decided by a Delaware judge last Friday. Delaware Superior Court Judge Patricia A. Winston granted Turner’s motion for summary judgment in a case that turned on whether Turner had to pay Falk a share of proceeds from his sale of stock from an endorsement deal with Chinese shoe company Li-Ning.

Sportico

Winston explained that stock vesting is when compensation to Turner for his services to Li-Ning actually occurred.  “Upon vesting,” the judge wrote, “Turner received the Stock as payment for his efforts encouraging people to buy Li-Ning shoes.” In contrast, money that Turner received from selling stock was “not due to any marketing efforts,” Winston wrote. She also noted that “party intentionally sitting on its contractual rights does not toll the statute of limitations,” meaning that a failure to sue is not a justification to extend the period for suing.

Sportico

Alonzo Mourning: Listen—the owner of the team, George Shinn—you know, he paid (Larry Johnson). And I was next up, you know? My agent said, “Hey, I can get you this with five different teams. You just got to choose which team you want to play for.” I said, “No, I want to stay in...”—I wanted to stay in Charlotte. And David Falk said—he said, “I don’t think Charlotte’s going to pay you this number.” And I said, “Well, you know, I’ll take less money to stay.” So we started having conversations with George Shinn. And he said—uh, and these were his exact words: “You’re not worth that.”

YouTube

Patrick Ewing on Space Jam experience "Michael and I had the same agent, David Falk. So when they talked about doing the movie, they brought me in. I thought it was a great opportunity. We went out to LA. For our scenes, me, Charles, Larry, Muggsy, and Shawn, it took about a month to do. We were out there for a month. It was a lot of fun. We would play pickup ball after the shoot was over, go out to dinner, play pool, talk trash. Michael, being one of the biggest trash talkers, was always riding Charles and myself because we hadn't won anything yet. It was a great experience. I enjoyed the opportunity to be around those guys, learning from them and just being around all those people in the movie. It’s funny, today, more people know me from that movie than from being a player. I'll be going through the airport, and a little kid will say, 'Aren't you the guy from Space Jam?' They don’t say, 'Are you that great player?' They say, 'Are you the guy from Space Jam?'"

YouTube

Sirius XM NBA: Should superstar players in the NBA be paid more? 🔊 Longtime NBA Agent David Falk thinks so @EvCoRadio | @JumpShot8 pic.twitter.com/FY511ms10Y

Twitter

Blockbuster trades involving Lillard and Harden are surely coming. Watching it all unfold from a distance, David Falk—the NBA’s original super-agent and longtime confidante to Michael Jordan—sat back and heaved a sigh. Not out of envy, but ennui. “I find it sort of a little bit boring,” Falk, now semi-retired from the agent business, told me last week. And it was hard to argue the point. For all the splashy headlines and gaudy numbers, not much of consequence actually happened. No franchise-altering stars changed teams. Nor, even, did any second-tier stars. Most of the movement was by role players. The NBA’s balance of power didn’t shift in any perceptible way.

GQ.com

Blame the stars, whose newfound habit of forcing trades has supplanted old-school free agency. And blame the NBA’s increasingly complex and constraining economic system, which has practically strangled free agency (especially for the highest tier of players) into submission. Whatever the culprit, it’s gotten to the point where I sometimes wonder: Are we seeing the death of free agency as we knew it? “I don't think free agency is dying,” said Falk, whose client list in the 1990s included Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, Juwan Howard and Dikembe Mutombo, among others. “I think that as the rules become more and more restrictive, it’s more and more difficult to be creative.”

GQ.com

“The nature of being an agent, it's become so restrictive that it doesn't require a lot of skills,” Falk said. “Mathematically, only 30 percent of the contracts are negotiated. And I think that most players really don't need agents today.” In his own prime agenting years—before the rookie scale, before max contracts, before luxury-tax penalties became a de facto hard cap—Falk took pride in bending the system to benefit his clients. One example: Inserting an early-termination option (the first of its kind, Falk said) in a 10-year deal for Ewing with the Knicks, allowing Ewing to become a free agent after six years if four players were earning more than him by then. But in today’s NBA, Falk said, “Seventy percent of all the contracts are prenegotiated. There are no negotiations.”

GQ.com

“The system becomes so clogged by a whole group of grossly overpaid players that don't bring in revenues, don't sell tickets, don't sell concessions,” Falk said. “They're good players, but they're artificially overpaid, because of the foolish restraint in the system.” “How do you differentiate Curry from Klay Thompson?” Falk continued. “How do you differentiate Giannis [Antetokounmpo] from Middleton? How do you differentiate [Jayson] Tatum from [Jaylen] Brown? You know, that's the whole point. They created a system where it's like gross homogenization. For me, that took all my excitement away from being in this business because you can't differentiate yourself.”

GQ.com

“I don't think free agency is dying,” said Falk, whose client list in the 1990s included Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, Juwan Howard and Dikembe Mutombo, among others. “I think that as the rules become more and more restrictive, it’s more and more difficult to be creative.”

GQ.com