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https://www.nba.com/2011/news/features/david_aldridge/10/17/morning-tip-labor-update/index.html#
She's a bit long:
One of my favourite journalists. The interesting nod to Kevin O'Connor as pretty much the new Sam Presti, or and R.C Buford. Hopefully the long meeting tonight fares well.
She's a bit long:
NEW YORK -- I sincerely apologize.
With all the tweets you have to read these days, I don't recall the author of this particular one, written last week, and it would take way too long to find it. So, my apologies.
But this guy -- pretty sure it was a guy -- had it nailed. "Now is the time," he wrote, "when everybody who hates the NBA becomes an expert on the NBA." They are coming out of the woodwork now, people who troll pro basketball websites to say, over and over, how much they prefer college basketball, and this is why. Everything David Stern said he wanted to avoid at all costs -- the millions in salaries and revenues lost, the cutting of part-time employees on teams around the league and the thinning of the league office itself, the ease with which people have, again, cast his players in the worst possible light, greedy and thuggish, stereotypes on speed dial -- has now come to pass, in brutal, nasty and short fashion.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, damage-wise, if the lockout continues, and at some point, the graph line of whatever the league's owners ultimately get in these negotiations is going to cross the line of the disgust that diehard fans feel, and the disinterest that potential fans will express by spending their money and time on other pursuits, and the lousy play that will accompany whatever shank of a season ultimately is played in 2011-12.
The commissioner and the executive director of the players' union have been at this for two years now, two years of talking about how pleasant and different these negotiations were compared to 1998, and they pick last week to break out the language of conflict and no surrender, and the season bleeds away, and they both point accusatory fingers at the other.
Here's what's driving me crazy hearing about the "gulf" that exists between the two sides. Take amnesty -- the ability of a team to nuke a "toxic" contract such as Eddy Curry's and get it off of its books. The league and players agreed to this in 2005, and several teams took advantage. Now the sides are talking about allowing it again -- maybe with the twist that the contract would not only be removed from luxury tax consideration, but come off the cap altogether, giving teams that are jammed up more room to operate.
This is what Billy Hunter said on WFAN about the union's amnesty proposal: "One of the things we've come up with in the negotiations is what we call a 'stretch' provision. And a stretch would allow a team to now stretch the money, the payment, over a long period of time. So if they decide to cut a guy, they can pay him over 10 or 12 years as opposed to paying him all in one lump sum."
And this is what Stern said on WFAN the next day about the league's amnesty proposal: "We've said if you have a player who's not performing, rather than get stuck with him and thereby not allow yourself to improve, you can waive him and you can spread his payments over twice the length of his remaining contract, plus one. And it will count against your cap in that way."
That is not a gulf! Or a lake. Or a creek, even. That's an eddy you can hop over in your sneakers.
So now it is up to a mediator named George Cohen, seemingly respected by anyone in sports who's ever had a conflict in the last two decades, to try and draw a royal flush, make the 7-10 spare. It's late in the game now, very late, because the whispers are that the owners are ready to administer the coup de grace to this season if the players don't take 50 percent, and the players are adamant that 50 percent is out of the question.
The commissioner was vociferous in his defense of his owners during our conversation in New York last Thursday.
"People say, 'Well, they bought a sports team; they should expect to lose money,'" he said. "No, they shouldn't. Because when you spend the amounts of money that these teams now cost, and the losses pile up because the players' salaries have gone up from a billion that we were arguing about in 1999 to $2 billion plus, I'm not going to say. 'Oh, we shouldn't make a profit; the goal here is to break even.' Wrong."
No one disagrees with that. Even Hunter doesn't disagree with that. His argument is that the players alone shouldn't provide the margin by which teams can be profitable.
There is another leg to the league argument, of course, and that is that it must alter the CBA to ensure that more teams can have a chance to win titles. Some folks agree with that contention, saying the league has become a collection of haves in Miami and L.A. and Chicago whose advantages will only grow with time because of their ability to go into the luxury tax year after year to acquire and to keep players.
This argument, though, ignores six decades of history.
The Lakers and Knicks and Celtics have always had a leg up on their competitors. The NBA has always been a league of dynasties, with few teams able to break through and challenge the hegemony of the dominant franchises.
A recap:
1950-1960: Minneapolis Lakers, four of 10 titles
1960-1970: Boston Celtics, nine of 10 titles
1980-1990: L.A. Lakers, five of 10 titles; Celtics three titles; Detroit Pistons, two titles
1990-2000: Chicago Bulls, six of 10 titles; Houston Rockets, two titles
2000-2010: Lakers, five of 10 titles; San Antonio Spurs, three titles
You'll notice the 1970-1980 decade is missing. That was the only period in league history that can truly be considered democratic. Eight different teams won championships: the Celtics, Knicks, Bucks, Lakers, Warriors, Blazers, Bullets and Sonics. That would seem to be the kind of parity the league is now seeking. And the league was so popular that its Finals games had to be shown on tape delay. To be fair, there were other factors at play then -- the league was overwhelmed by the perception of white fans that its black players were all on drugs, for one. But the bottom line is the bottom line -- in the most egalitarian 10-year stretch in league history, no one watched on television, and people hated the on-court product.
In the NBA's 60-plus years of existence, seven franchises: Boston, the Lakers, the Bulls, the Spurs, the Philadelphia/Golden State Warriors, the Syracuse/76ers franchise and the Pistons -- have won a combined 53 titles. Read that again: seven of the league's franchises have won more than 80 percent of the league's championships. If you're judging competitiveness by championships won, the NBA has never been competitive.
Personally, I'm fine with that. The NBA is no different from baseball (the Yankees have almost one-fifth of all of baseball's world championships in their storied history), or hockey (the Canadiens have one-fourth of the National Hockey League's titles in the Stanley Cup era) or the NFL, where the Steelers, Cowboys, 49ers and Packers have almost half of the league's Super Bowl titles since 1966.
But maybe the league doesn't literally mean compete for championships. Maybe it is referring to having the opportunity to make the playoffs on a regular basis.
Since the last lockout (1998), though:
• The lower-budget Spurs have made more postseasons (13) than the Lakers (12);
• The Jazz have been in more playoffs (9) than the Knicks (5);
• The Pacers have been in more playoffs (9) than the Bulls (6);
• The Hornets have been in just as many playoffs (8) as the Celtics.
But that's not the point, the league argues. The point is that smaller-revenue teams can't spend the kind of money necessary to build championship-caliber teams. They have two choices, each bad: go more and more into hock to keep the players they have, or give those players away for pennies on the dollar to the big boys, like Memphis had to do with Pau Gasol, and fall further behind.
Of course, it was the Gasol trade that allowed the Grizzlies to rebuild in three short seasons, to the point where they made the playoffs this season, beat San Antonio in the first round and almost beat Oklahoma City in the second. And OKC has managed to put a pretty good team around Kevin Durant without breaking any banks; to the contrary, the Thunder have structured contracts with Nick Collison and Kendrick Perkins that go down in the years to come, not up, freeing up funds that can be used to extend Durant and Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka.
How did Sam Presti do this? Ouija board? Short-selling on the stock market?
He did it the same way R.C. Buford did it in San Antonio, and the way Joe Dumars did it in Detroit when he built a champion in 2004 out of parts other teams didn't care for, and the way Donnie Walsh did it in Indiana for, oh, 20 years, and the way Kevin O'Connor does it in Utah this morning. Draft the right guys. Sign the right guys. Trade for the right guys. And pay the right guys the right amount of money.
"Dance with me here," the commissioner said Thursday. "You're smarter than I am, as a general manager, and you have $45 million of salary. And I'm not so smart, I have $110 (million), but I hire a decent general manager. Over time, do you think you could compete with me?"
Do the big market teams have a financial advantage? Yes. They always have. But states with no income tax have an advantage over states that do. And states near water have an advantage over states that are landlocked. And states with mountains have an advantage over states that are flat, not that there's anything wrong with flat.
It is not easy to build a contending team in a small market. But it is not unknowable. It does not require magic or spending seven years in medical school.
For its part, the union sticks to 53 percent, insisting that the owners wouldn't really torch a season for three lousy percent (the same three percent it cannot possibly give up, by the way), and it continues to hold out that it can preserve some form of the mid-level exception, and argues that the supertax will destroy free agency movement among the big spenders.
The star players have reiterated 53 percent to their rank-and-file brethren, including at last Saturday's exhibition game in Miami featuring LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.
"That's what we was basically trying to tell them," Wizards guard John Wall said Saturday night, after the D.C.-Philly exhibition in Washington. "If you're going to start losing money and losing games and worrying about that, then you might as well just take the 50-50 deal now. But if you can wait out and take it, then go with that 53 percent. But if you're going to start complaining after these two weeks, then you might as well just take the 50-50 and don't lose no money or no games. That's the main thing. When we was talking, we said we've got to stick with this, and if they come asking us, that's the number."
If there was some give from owners on the system, you hear, if the "supertax" could be eased or modified, there are more than a few players who'd be willing to talk about 50-50, or at least something well below 53. Which begs the question: Are the owners looking to make a deal, or bust this union?
"It ain't really about the number 53," Wall said. "That's a great number; that's where we want to stay. But it's about the system, how they try to do the system -- hard cap, extra two years on your rookie contracts. For the young guys, that's really hurting. Like I said, we want to play basketball. But it comes to the money at some point. And the veteran guys have played years. They say, 'We'll take 50-50,' because they've already made what they needed. They're not thinking about us. So we're just really thinking about the young guys."
But 50-50 is a hard lift for Hunter, maybe impossible at the moment. His problem is that he doesn't have a couple of months to hold out and, maybe, work that revenue sharing fissure among the owners out into the open.
If the players were to swallow 50-50, though, no matter what they got on the system side, it would be criminal for the owners not to accept, and would provide overwhelming evidence that this is less a negotiation than a shakedown. That would be a $280 million per year giveback by the players compared to the previous collective bargaining agreement, $1.96 billion over the life of a seven-year deal -- and that doesn't even count the escrow system that has returned another billion from the players to the owners in the last six years. The league says it lost $300 million last year. It would get 93 percent of that back from the players in a 50-50 split.
The frustration among players is growing.
"We've just gotta get something done, man," Kevin Durant said Saturday. "It's starting to get out of hand."
"Hopefully, we get something done, man, and hopefully the owners help us out a little bit," Durant said. "We kind of went off of what we wanted to do and we gave up some things, sacrificed some things. And I feel like they ain't helping us out. They ain't meeting us halfway with it. I mean, I think we're not willing to do anything just to get a deal but we want to get a deal. I think we want to stick at 53, but they gotta do something. It's like they're not leaving off of, I think, 47. They're not leaving off of that. And in a negotiation, you've got to give a little and take a little, I think. They've gotta help us out. I've heard a lot of people say we're fighting to get more money, and it's not like that."
No, they are fighting for principle, and that may be worse if you want to see basketball. The players have a pair of threes and the river is about to show. They could fold the hand, take their big losses and live to fight another day, wait until the time when they have the leverage and the owners do not. Or they could stay in and fight and go Mutually Assured Destruction with the owners. They would survive that. So would the owners. So would the game. But it would take a long time for fans to forgive. Or forget.
Two years, and they're still trying to spin everyone like they're Tai Babalonia.
There are a lot of smart people in the room. That's the problem. There have been dozens of proposals, counter-proposals, good ideas, not so good ideas, but there has always -- there had always -- been the notion that there was a solution out there.
And now ... I just don't know. I don't know if there's a willingness to solve the problem, rather than win the fight.
Interesting tidbit from Lawrence Katz, the lawyer handling the union's National Labor Relations Board case against the NBA. In discussing possible decertification by the union, Katz said he believes that the NLRB -- which would handle any decertification vote by the union if such a vote were authorized by union members -- would not approve the vote.
"They would block any decertification petition," he said.
The decert talk has cooled in recent weeks, but if union members decided they wanted to dissolve the union, they would need 30 percent of their members to sign a petition declaring they want an election to decertify. The NLRB would then hold a hearing to determine if an election was warranted. If it approved, the election would proceed, and a simple majority of union voters voting yes would decertify the union. (A tie would also mean decertification, because the union would not have received a majority of votes.)
Yet Katz says the union's pending complaint against the NBA would make decertifying an impossibility.
"The vote on decertification is a vote controlled and run by the NLRB," he said. "In my opinion, they could not process the petition for a vote because of the pending petition."
Meanwhile, the union's complaint with the NLRB against the league grinds on, just as the league's NLRB complaint against the union and its lawsuit filed in federal court in New York continues.
The union filed the complaint in May, claiming the league was not negotiating in good faith on a new collective bargaining agreement. The complaint was amended in July after the league canceled the Las Vegas Summer League. The complaint has been investigated by the NLRB's New York office and has been passed on to the Washington, D.C. bureau.
No date for a decision has been announced; if the NLRB decides to file the complaint against the NBA it could then ask a judge to end the lockout.
What team(s) benefits most from a shortened season?
I am, officially, sick of writing about BRI and the "system." So let's speculate. When this lockout ends, who will be most prepared to take advantage of it? Perhaps it's better to start with who will not benefit from it.
1) Teams with new coaches. Beware the three-game win streak early in the short season; it will be the ultimate in fool's gold. There will be many nights when superior talent simply wins out because no coach has been able to spend much time with his players this summer and there will be nights of horrendous defense. But that will change, even with a sprint to the playoffs; ultimately, teams that know one another through years of shared experiences will turn the corner.
Makes it tough for: Toronto (Dwane Casey), Detroit (Lawrence Frank), Minnesota (Rick Adelman)
2) Young teams. With next to no practice time available in the next few months the already steep learning curve for rookies, undrafted free agents and other newbies will be near impossible to navigate with a short schedule. In 72 hours, you could be guarding Steve Nash, Tony Parker and Jason Kidd, with no rest. If you're new to class, it's going to make for a great education. And a lot of losing.
Makes it tough for: Cleveland (two first-round picks), Washington (ditto), L.A. Clippers
3) Older teams. There are only so many jumps in a pair of legs, and when those legs get north of 30, making them go back-to-back-to-back can take them places they don't want to go ... like an MRI tube. Forget off days between playoff games; there may be a couple dozen off days all year in a truncated season.
Makes it tough for: Boston, San Antonio, Dallas, Lakers
4) Teams in transition. Even good teams that have a lot of new pieces will find it hard to incorporate them in such a short period of time.
Makes it tough for: Denver (lost Kenyon Martin, Wilson Chandler, J.R. Smith, acquired Andre Miller), Milwaukee (traded for Stephen Jackson; traded away John Salmons and Corey Maggette), Portland (traded Miller, Rudy Fernandez; uncertain about Greg Oden's role or his future)
And that leaves teams like the Heat, Bulls, Magic, Thunder and Hawks -- teams with young stars and veterans who've been together for at least a little while. Who knows if I'm right? One sprained ankle changes everything, of course. And Kobe is itching for another run. But I suspect these are the kinds of teams that are going to be around in late May. And if I write one more sentence about luxury tax thresholds, I'm gonna be sick.
You can have George C. Scott. "Patton" wouldn't have worked without the riveting performance of Mr. Karl Malden as Omar Bradley. From Gueipin Xi:
I watch your reporting all the time. But I have to disagree with you on your last report regarding the importance of "Superstars".
They are in general terribly over-rated. As a matter of fact, every championship is won by a team effort. I can list the examples, and you probably know more than every one of us.
I think that's one of the problems with NBA. The players (especially "superstars") got too much ego and paid too much, and they do not work or think like a true team (with the owners, in this case). When they do the opposite, they usually win a title, like coach Rick Carlisle said in the last season, "stay humble and stay hungry".
Thanks for your attention to my comment as a basketball fan.
No question, teams (or "organizations," as former Bulls GM Jerry Krause infamously put it a few years ago) win championships. But just about every team that's won a title in the last 30 years has had a superstar lynchpin. Maybe you'd say the '04 Pistons didn't have a bona fide supe, but that's about it. The Celtics started with Larry Bird; the Lakers with Magic; the Pistons with Isiah; the Bulls with Jordan; the Rockets with Hakeem; the Spurs with Duncan; the Lakers (again) with Shaq and Kobe. You have to have a great player as your foundation, and then you build out, adding the role players and glue guys that can take a team the rest of the way. And, frankly, under the current system, one could argue -- and Dwyane Wade has -- that the game's superstars are underpaid. How much would LeBron have gotten last summer on a truly open market? A hundred and fifty million?
Should five percent appear too small/Be thankful I don't take it all. From Dan Lea:
When teams go over the salary cap and have to pay luxury tax, where does the money to pay the tax come from and who is it paid to? Just curious.
You're mixing up terms a little, Dan -- the cap limit is not the same as the luxury tax threshold -- but I think I understand your meaning. When teams exceed both the cap and the tax threshold they have to pay a dollar in penalty for every dollar they exceed the tax threshold. The money comes from the teams that exceed the threshold and is either distributed to teams that stay under the threshold (each team under receives a 1/30th payment from the pool), or is kept by the league for "league purposes" that could include investments in new projects or payments to teams that are losing money as part of the NBA's current revenue sharing plan.
Longtime NBA reporter and columnist David Aldridge is an analyst for TNT. You can e-mail him here and follow him on twitter.
One of my favourite journalists. The interesting nod to Kevin O'Connor as pretty much the new Sam Presti, or and R.C Buford. Hopefully the long meeting tonight fares well.
