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Sides far apart as lockout looms in NBA by The Sports Network
With the current collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and its players scheduled to end at midnight on Thursday, the league and its players, despite meeting twice a week for most of the past month, remain far apart on almost every major issue, including salaries, the salary cap and revenue sharing.
A last ditch effort scheduled for Thursday is set to include small groups from each side but a deal seems more than unlikely, meaning free agency will not start on Friday. The league, which has already shuddered the Las Vegas Summer League, may try to avoid locking out its players, however, since the NFL work stoppage this summer has turned that terminology into a toxic phrase that turns off fans in droves.
Commissioner David Stern has refused to speculate on what will happen if the clock strikes 12 with no deal done.
“We’re not going to negotiate in the media,” he said earlier this week. “We haven’t before, we’re not going to do it now. We’re looking forward to having our discussion with the players.”
The NBA has been steadfast through a process that has crept along for over a year, crying poverty at every turn despite certain economic indicators that point in the other direction. Stern claims The Association is losing in the neighborhood of $300 million dollars a year and that 22 of his 30 teams are operating in the red despite a massive national television contract, and impressive worldwide growth that has turned the NBA into an industry that grosses $4 billion dollars a year.
NBA players have likely never been described as middle class before but they certainly have a lot in common with Joe the Plumber these days, a deep distrust of management. NBPA chief Billy Hunter thinks Stern is using fuzzy math in an attempt to rein in salaries and make other radical changes to a CBA that has made his constituents rich.
Stern often cites slowing ticket sales in some markets and a hit in both television ad sales and merchandising revenue during what has become a rather stubborn recession to back his claim. Hunter, on the other hand, points to the league’s overall increase in ticket sales and a much increased television audience for the NBA Playoffs to bolster his case.
Recent empirical evidence supports both.
The leagues does take in an obscene amount of gross revenue but the players currently get 57 percent of the bottom line, a number that dwarfs most normal businesses.
The Golden State Warriors and Detroit Pistons, not exactly marquee franchises in the league over recent years, both sold for record prices. The league, however, has to take over the financially troubled New Orleans Hornets.
As both sides prepare for the first work stoppage since the 1998-99 lockout, the rest of us are left digging for the truth.
Not the owners’ truth that has a bunch of billionaires intent on carving out a new system that guarantees profitability for each and every franchise. Or the players’ truth that says that the owners should resolve any problems they have through enhanced revenue-sharing that will enable “small-market” teams to succeed. That’s funhouse mirror type stuff clouded by the perceptions and interpretations of biased individuals with a horse in the race.
We are digging for the truth that Winston Churchill once called “incontrovertible.”
“Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is,” Churchill, the British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War, once said.
The real truth here understands people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase and run an organization probably shouldn’t be asked to lose more money on an annual basis. It also understands that the talent is the engine that fuels the NBA’s $4 billion dollar empire.
The real truth is draped in compromise, something very foreign in the world of millionaires versus billionaires.
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