Most of you guys have a pretty misguided or ridiculous notion of what constitutes success.
It's no different than anyone "living comfortably within their means." Two people with drastically different salaries usually end up with about the same amount of disposable income, because people buy the houses and cars that they can afford.
Business and sports leagues are the same way: Pushing the envelope on what they can pull off, because that's how you grow and expand and make conditions better.
In the NHL, the San Jose Sharks showed a loss for like 10 of 12 seasons, but the losses were always $2 to $15 million, and they spent almost all their cap space in that time. If the goal is "Show a profit" just don't spend to the cap and they're "a success."
But signing those last two free agents to make their team better puts them at risk of not having the revenue to show a profit, but the idea is that the expense makes their product more attractive and brings in more revenue.
From little league, college sports, WNBA, the big four leagues... they're SPENDING just beyond what they can afford to do... simply because they can. If the NBA was trying to make the maximum amount of PROFIT possible, they'd have a hard cap and stay in 3-star hotels. they stay in 4 or 5 star hotels... BECAUSE THEY CAN. Because it's "better."
As I told AintLifeGrand about taking actual charters, the college sports team I was working for wanted to charter to some road games that were harder to get to (connecting flights) on weekdays.
Flying commercial was "wasting" 2 full days for a Wednesday road game. All the time bussing to/from airports, having connecting flights made it a 60-hour trip, missing three days of classes. Chartering meant a 32-hour trip, classes Tues & Thurs.
It's just BETTER. It cost a lot more money, but "Let's just do it and we'll find away to pay for it" was the winning strategy. PLAYERS liked it, we could sell it to boosters and recruits that we were Big Time. We won more games, got better recruits, sold more tickets and created more revenue and it ended up paying for itself.... so they started chartering MORE, which meant they needed more revenue to pay for that.
Pushing the envelope and spending more than you can afford isn't a sign of business failure. It's a sign of leadership trying to grow the thing.