Could NBA players really create their own league?

During the recent NBA lock-out between the NBA players and the team owners one idea that was continually kicked around was the idea of the players leaving the NBA to create their own league. This is a fascinating idea since the NBA revenue is driven by its Players marketability and popularity in most cases a fact with which players are familiar. Thus I wanted to conduct a 5-forces analysis on the NBA to see how feasible it would be for players to create their own league.

Barrier to Entry - Extremely High - The players would need to come up with huge capital investments to put together a team, secure an arena lease and market the new league. Making the team and marketing would be easy for the players due to their vast popularity but getting capital together for an arena, staffing the teams with support (GM, coaches, office staff, arena crews), and arranging scheduling and travel costs is really expensive. Even though the players make millions of dollars from their current NBA contracts the owners who are Billionaires with sufficient capital often loose money running their NBA teams. Additionally most cities do not have multiple NBA quality arenas and most of those are already contracted out to the resident NBA team increasing the difficulty in securing a regular arena to host games in.

Supplier Power - High In this instance I would argue that the players are both the suppliers and the Product if the Players decided to quit the league (NBA or new players league) would struggle to continue to put a decent product on the court. Many NBA analysts have said that the fans want to watch certain players and if those players are not playing they won't watch. The league also has to negotiate TV contracts giving companies like ESPN, TNT, and Fox power

Buyer Power - High, the fans pay for the league through ticket sales, merchandising, and TV ratings. if the Fans are unhappy revenue falls

Rivalry - Low currently the NBA has no rival league and even if the players create their own league the NBA would still have the most money and while they may struggle at first eventually they will be able to out-last the player league

Substitutes - High - The NBA or a player's league would have to compete directly with College Basketball, the NFL, and Professional baseball. The high popularity of these other sports gives buyers/fans even more power because the fans can (and have in the past) switched to other sports when they didn't like the NBA. This will be true for a new player's league as well.

Overall I don't think the players could realistically run a viable league. They are great athletes and many have some business knowledge but I believe that they do not understand the amount of time or money it takes to run a pro-basketball team let alone an entire league. We are all much better off that the NBA and the players settled the lock-out instead of the players creating their own league.