I read that article too. I also thought it wasn't reasoned particularly well.
First of all, let's just say that the legal situation is for everyone involved a "best guess" kind of scenario. No one really knows how that would go down. There's simply very little precedent and the major sports leagues all have different antitrust backgrounds which they draw from. Larry Coon and others speak about this in a much more authoritative way than is actually possible.
Part of this is that everyone is mixing up different legal proceedings and potential legal proceedings. There is an NBAPA suit alleging that the owners have been negotiating in bad faith because they always intended to lock the players out to create leverage. That lawsuit is primarily concerned with the negotiations prior to the lockout and alleges that the owners engaged in surface bargaining. To be honest, I think the players are probably correct in that assessment. Whether or not the owners have made "concessions" is immaterial to the issue of whether or not they engaged in surface bargaining (and gregbroncs here is engaging in a semantics game as to what constitutes a concession; under his rubric if the owners demanded the player's play for minimum wage and then moved that up to $10/hr he would call that a concession). Either side can bargain as hard as they want to as long as they are not engaging in stall tactics designed to never reach an agreement. In fact, it is effectively the statutory policy of the united states that deadlocks at the bargaining table are broken through the economic pressure of a strike or a lockout rather than any objective test as to whether either side is objectively correct. However there is some credible allegation that the lockout was promised at least two years ago and there is no indication that the owners have ever seriously attempted to resolve the issue prior to the expiration of the previous CBA. All the discussion of "leverage" underlies a pretty significant fact: that the owners have always known that running the clock was to their advantage and they've been doing pretty much nothing else until the last month or so.
There is also an NBA countersuit alleging fundamentally similar theories against the players union. The facts (in this case the direction of concessions) simply do not support the assertion that the players are engaging in surface bargaining. This is especially relevant given that they have proposed agreements that appear to substantially worsen their position vis a vis the last collective bargaining agreement which cuts against an assessment of surface bargaining.
The last is the decertification issue. Here there's a lot of noise from heads indicating that they understand how it will play out but I don't think that's entirely clear. I'm frankly kind of amazed, for example, that players haven't tried to do something in Canadian courts to take advantage of the NBA's operation in Toronto and more union-friendly laws. The lockout itself would likely be illegal under Canadian law for example because the league didn't go through the mandatory government mediation process prior to locking out employees of its Canadian franchise.
You're looking at a single factor as if it's the only factor. Keep in mind that it's questionable whether the existence of European leagues even matters as to the reach of American anti-trust statutues (many of which specify the impact of the restraint of trade as being exclusively US in scope as opposed to global in scope.
Franchises are not really business competitors. The Lakers don't want to drive all other teams out of business. In fact they are worthless unless they have other teams to play. Athletic competition and business competition are separate. The reality is that they are one entity now. Even in the "separate" model that applied in American Needle v. NFL (which came about because of specific anti-trust exemption legislation enjoyed by the NFL that the NBA doesn't have access to) the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the teams operated as a cartel that was subject to anti-trust enforcement.
All we really know is that decertification would be a long process and that it risks fundamentally blowing up the league as we know it. It's a double-down move by the players that is designed to attack franchise values and should be taken seriously by the owners. How it would play out along the background of everything else is a little unknowable and the resolution of such questions is effectively immaterial because legal resolution wouldn't occur until after a second NBA season was in jeopardy which would effectively be a threat to the league's existence in its entirety. As a result, the conflict will be over before the decertification issue fully resolves legally or the league (and as a result probably jazzfanz) will cease to exist. That's pretty much where we're at.
