If teams can't inherently profit off something, no one will want it. The ones that kept it did so for more sentimental reasons (Minny being a prime example, New Orleans before that)
Except we know that people wanted these supposedly unprofitable teams. It shouldn't be the players that foot the bill if the league wants a team in a market that can't support it. There are a couple of things at play here.
1.) If New Orleans or Minnesota can't support a team - MOVE somewhere that can. The players have every right to complain. Instead of going somewhere else the owners claim they are losing money and the player contracts get slashed. Fans eat this up because they are dumb, and selfishly want small markets "to have a chance" even if it is bad for the NBA as a whole. I'm going to get into why this logic is pure horseshyt in a sec, but as I said before - NBA teams can not fail except for extreme circumstances. If you keep looking at the NBA as a normal business where capitalism and its principles determine what happens you'll keep missing how things work. The NBA is an Oligarchy that operates as a Franchise/Cartel structure.
2.) Back to the small market fallacy. NBA owners are not typical business owners. They aren't creating a product and improving it to sell to consumers. The product is the players and the owners get the rights to have them through pseudo-random selection. After some time, they are allowed to bid on their services. Since the NBA is one of the dream scenarios of a business owner - closed market with major costs
known up front you shouldn't even be talking about player salaries when things "fail". The owners KNOW how expensive it is.before buying the team. And in business no one "deserves" to make money. When you buy something and mismanage it then you can't blame other people. And if you're a billionaire ownership group, purposely relocating or catering to smaller markets and then crying poverty then the player salaries are not the problem. It's the choices you made to setup shop there.
Once you look at NBA teams as akin to art collections where complaining about profit is sheer stupidity, instead of treating them as everyday businesses the picture becomes very clear on what is going on. This is without even talking about the other ridiculousness that occurs with NBA owners - namely leveraging franchises for profitable ventures that the players get 0 revenue from.