Is the NBA lockout morally offensive, or a simple reality of collectively bargained business? The Hook digs into the ethos of labor stoppages, and how David Stern is doing it all wrong.
Aug 5, 2011 - One of the basic facts about the NBA lockout that there is no path around is that the NBA's owners and commissioner have locked out the players. They took action. They are the folks with the power to shut down the sport and they are the folks with the power to bring it back. They are the ones seeking massive change, massive concessions from players. The players all say that they want to work, many of them claiming to be dismissed that as the NBA seeks record profits the owners have prevented the players for doing their job.
There's no way around this: it's true. The owners instituted the lockout because they claim to need major concessions from players in order to save the league.
But did the owners and David Stern have any other option?
As an American, the idea of a lockout is morally offensive. This is something I've personally struggled with in covering the lead-up and consummation of the lockout. To tell someone under contract that they cannot work until their class of workers agrees to massive cuts in pay is, to me, un-American. It's legal bullying. It's just wrong, and it's what the NBA has done to its players.
At the same time, a real part of collective bargaining is that collective bargaining agreements end. That's part of the deal: workers get to negotiate general conditions of employment, but only for a term, at which point the conditions are re-assessed and the agreement re-negotiated. This is one of the drawbacks of working in a field where job conditions are collectively bargained: those conditions can change with the wind. (Ask public employees in Wisconsin, who dealt with a problem much greater than "changing conditions.")
Think of the CBA like a player's contract. A player -- or his agent, in most cases (word to Gilbert Arenas) -- negotiates a salary over a term with a team. There are other details in there: trade kickers, promo appearances, bonuses, etc. But at its core, the player's contract lays out how much the player will get paid and for how long.
The NBA's collective bargaining agreement lays out how much players will get paid in the aggregate over the length of the agreement. There are tons of other details, many of which legislate how that pay is spread around (maximum contracts, rookie scale, minimum and maximum team salaries). But at its core, the CBA lays out how much the players will get paid and for how long.
Right now, the team (the NBA) doesn't want to re-sign the players unless it gets a steep, steep discount. So we have impasse. But how does someone like me -- someone ethically repulsed by the game of "big wallet takes little wallet" a lockout emulates -- come to grips with the "this is business" reality of the situation?
Maybe it won't work for everyone, but my particular ideology can be managed by reminding myself that owners don't really have any other option.
As the league has argued ad nauseum, you can't "revenue-share" out of losses. If the NBA is losing money in the aggregate -- which it claims it is -- then even serious revenue sharing won't fix things. If you took $50 million from the Lakers and Knicks and give that to the Kings and Pacers, you'll still have $300 million in leaguewide losses. They'll just be shifted.
We've learned that lengthening the negotiation term doesn't help. The NBA and players' union started negotiating in 2009. Extraordinarily little progress was made by June 30, 2011. None has been made since. So the NBA could not have realistically offering to extend the existing CBA one year and negotiated a new deal in the interim. It would have just delayed the inevitable a year, and piled up another season of aggregate losses, further emboldening the owners to push for serious reform. "Entrenchment" is the word that comes to mind.
The only other option here is a lockout, a raising of the stakes to push both sides to the table (via the courtroom, possibly). Lockouts are sad, stomach-churning affairs ... but they are legitimate paths to compromise ... just like strikes. That's ultimately how I learned to accept the lockout as a legitimate option for the NBA: there was no other option. If you've read my work a bit, you can probably guess that I find labor strikes totally legit options in most cases. Well, why shouldn't the guys writing the checks have the same option?
That doesn't mean that the owners are being reasonable altogether, because they are not. They are being, in a word, ridiculous. The entrenchment is sickening; the idea that moving from a proposal that cut all salaries (current and future) by a third to a proposal decoupling salary from revenue so that owners can capture all future growth of the league is "progress" is insulting. If I were a player, I would be laughing as hard as they are at the owners' stance as of August 5, because it is pathetic. Guaranteed profits? You can't complain about the Eddy Currys and then ask players to give back money so that Donald F'n Sterling can be assured a profit every season.
But let's separate the issues as this issue dives into the courtroom: the owners have the right to lock out the players, but they do not have the right to mislead fans about the conditions of the league or about the actions of the players. They do not have the right to get whatever they want. They do not have the right to guaranteed profits just because the league makes a lot of money. They do not have the right to attack the union for making procedural threats when the entire basis of the league's lockout intimidation since 2009 (or earlier) has been based on procedural threats.
The lockout was unavoidable, yes. But based on what's happened to date, the NBA is doing it all wrong.
The Hook is a daily NBA column written by Tom Ziller that runs on SBNation.com Monday through Friday. See the archives.
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decoupling salary from revenue is so, so illegal (like actually illegal)
I would have stronger feelings about this lockout if two things were true: one, the players union was actually able to keep its members in line. Right now they have no leverage because most of the players, particularly the mid level guys, did not prepare for a lockout particularly well, and may have to swallow a bad CBA. It’s a rough lesson, but an important one (and one that more people could listen to): listen to your accountant and save up for a long period without work in a collectively bargained work environment.
Two: the majority of organizations were not losing an absolute ton of money. Most NBA teams post an operating loss. Right now the gate sucks, and for the most part the tv contracts look like they were negotiated by a bunch of drunk squirrels (the only saving grace being the national contract negotiated by the league office). While I don’t think we should make excuses for the owners, I think the next CBA should have measures enforcing competence on front and back offices (like, say, relegation and promotion). Relegation also adjusts for market size and keeps mid to bottom level games interesting.
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by Londonjoe on Aug 5, 2011 9:35 AM EDT reply actions
Don't Understand What You Mean
How is decoupling salary from revenue illegal? The salary at my job is completely independent (decoupled) from the revenue my company takes in. No matter how much (or little) they make, I get the same salary.
Maybe I am mis-interpreting your statement?
by Craig from Az on Aug 5, 2011 1:30 PM EDT up reply actions
line item deducting salary from revenue for tax purposes is variously legal and illegal
according to a convo with a tax lawyer today.
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by Londonjoe on Aug 5, 2011 1:42 PM EDT up reply actions
Relegation is a great idea
that I do not ever see happening.
by ajanzen on Aug 5, 2011 9:51 PM EDT up reply actions
Nope. The only way the owners could radically alter the new CBA was enforce a lockout if for nothing else but cosmetic purposes. Hell the NFL instituted a 4 month lockout just because they had nothing to lose by imposing it. Nothing ventured nothing gained yanno?
I’ll take this a step further. Since when is any business guaranteed a profit? It’s not. If this was a situation to what was facing the NHL in 2004, I could understand that. NHL players had won salary battles using NBA players, ironically, as the template.
This is not the NHL situation where you have a niche league that is only popular in, realistically, area’s where you have lots of ice and/or snow.
Basketball is a world game that is literally popular in all corners of the world. The NBA is the best basketball league in the world. The situation is drastically different.
Thus, the owners are upset that they aren’t making profits beyond revenue sharing. If you’re making profits, why do you need revenue sharing? You really wouldn’t. If you were making profits above & beyond costs, than, what’s the point? Essentially that’s what the NFL lockout was about when you strip all the other brouhaha bs out of the deal.
The NBA has teams losing money, and teams like the Pacers that are in serious trouble right now. The Pacers I could believe are losing 20 million a year. They have poor fan support (as far as I can tell) right now, were supposedly losing money in better years where fan support was abundant, and probably don’t have an amazing TV deal. Am I crying for Herb Simon? No, but I could see how the Pacers are losing money. They even asked the city of Indianapolis for money. In a terrible economy for the city of Indy, they still gave it to the Pacers. This was not done in 2007 but in 2010. Things were drastically different then.
Then you have teams like the Kings who have cash poor owners who have literally taken a Palms size dump on Sacramento as owning major cash sucking properties in the 2 hardest hit big real estate markets in the US is not good luck any way you slice it. But the Maloofs are gamblers right? Still, they need revenue sharing long term if they are to remain owners. And even if they aren’t, no owner would wish to own a team in Sacramento without revenue sharing and a swanky arena (which is not an issue for this post but which is also certainly a given).
I could keep going realistically, but you get the point.
That’s been the problem with this lockout (and all lockout’s really) from the beginning: It’s really posturing from beginning to end from a PR standpoint. Nothing more. Nothing less. The big market owners won’t give in on revenue sharing until they feel threatened. The owners that are legitimately losing money won’t give in unless they have a great likelihood of a real profit in the future. The hard cap owners are what they are, but they have their own battles at play.
Meanwhile the players are going to go where they are going to go. Some will have money issue’s down the road, but that’s the way it always is in the best of times. The majority of the union can afford to retire right now off their earnings to date.
The fact that the NBA has responded to “possible” threats is extremely telling. What it tells me is that Billy Hunter and the player agents aren’t really that far apart (after all, they want the same thing don’t they?) and that rift between agents/Hunter was a planned leak to force the NBA to make a PR mistake.
I’d say that’s worked to a tee so far.
Right now the NBA has done everything in it’s power to scare the players, but the truth is the NBA has always had a winning war on the surface that when you strip away the surface nonsense with the real issue is one of little substance and mostly talk on the owners side. The players know it. Now that fans are starting to get wind of this, the owners are becoming desperate.
This is not 1998. Social media, blogs and the world, let’s be honest, has significantly better access to what’s going on than we did in 1998. Rhetoric will eventually be stripped away while some attempt at searching for the truth is had. Many have found it already, and many others will continue to be aware of that reality moving forward.
But, the NBA has only had one chance of not losing the entire season: the money making owners. They are going to have to decide if they want a season, and even if they have made that decision, I don’t expect much news of this to leak until late September after certain things have already been decided. By then, it will be obvious if there is a season of reasonable length or not.
I can’t believe that the NBA expects the fans, media, and the players to believe they are willing to cancel an entire season after a season where fan interest was up, where teams have shown restraint (as Billy Hunter has noted) in recent years for whatever reason, and where the reasonable tweaks are already there.
But with so much dead time between July 1st and October 1st, all this nonsense was already certain to fly around. I’m just wondering why we live in a world where it’s necessary to posture to avoid a worse fate in the future.
No mistakes in the tango, Donna. Not like life. Simple. That's what makes the tango so great. If you make a mistake, and get all tangled up, you just tango on.....
by pookeyguru on Aug 5, 2011 7:16 PM EDT reply actions 1 recs
Nice take.
by Tom Ziller on Aug 6, 2011 9:23 AM EDT up reply actions
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