NBA deputy commissioner: ‘Enormous gulf’ separates players, owners in negotiations

Fully agree.

I've got a fair number of friends up there...never heard them say anything outside of "no one cares about them"

 

League history shows that they don't. You can't make an argument for parity when half the titles have gone to 2 teams.

The league cares about losing $$. That's what this is about, not teams being competitive for titles.

 

Thread is useless without Adam Silver grin pics...

 

So the deputy commissioner was just brazenly lying when he mentioned some measure that could lead to more parity and the went on to suggest that it's good for the long-term success of the business?

 

Super post.

The owners will - and should - win this one. I think George Karl said something like - the players salaries / ego's are going to outweigh fan interest. I am in the minority, but in my opinion, it already has, and I think there needs to be a big re-set. I actually hope there is a long lockout.

To me, the whole season feels like the dunk contest. Interesting, occasionally entertaining, but ultimately devoid of the joy or transcendence or real competition.

I'd argue that though me and my ilk might be fringe - wishing for a lockout to humble the sport- fans are starting to cluster more and more around the notion that basketball is in a state of cultural decline, as baseball was in the early 1990s.

There are too many "sellouts" with big swaths of empty seat in the lower section. The 'upper middle class' teams - the Hawks of the 1990s or Bucks of the 1980s as examples - no longer exist in a meaningful, sustainable way. Youre either elite, or your the Washington Generals meant only as token resistance to a powerhouse. The precarious balance between parity and exceptionalism is totally off.

The golden goose is being greedily eaten by Anthony & James LLP. The league needs a year or even two off. Honestly, some humility would do everyone some good.

 

I never said that but would like to comment.

The new CBA is more about smaller market teams losing money. The parity issue has grown bigger since last year because of the talk of D-Howard going to the Lakers, D-Will getting traded from the Jazz because they knew he wouldn't re-sign (because he wanted to go to NY), etc, etc.

In this negotiation, the NBA cares more about smaller market teams making money than parity. That is THE bottom-line issue. But because the players can't keep rumors from flying around, parity will loom also and restricting player movement from the team that drafted them will be on the table. The trio in Miami have the NBA and fans fearful of a domino effect. That fear has been growing steadily to the point it will affect the CBA, probably in a big way. I doubt that a franchise-tag will happen.

 

I don't understand why most people take it as a given that scrub players who sit on the end of the bench for ten years should collect enough money for them and their children to never have to work again. Am I the only one who sees a problem with this?

I really think the top handful of players in the league are underpaid, but the guys who aren't driving the ticket sales and who don't really contribute all that much shouldn't be making a lifetime's worth of money for 10 years (or fewer) work, IMO.

 

For basketball, I tend to agree. I've always thought NFL scrubs were underpaid, because they trade a lifetime of health for three years in the league. But the NBA doesn't have the same impact on your health, so after you ride the pine for 5 years, there's nothing stopping you from playing in Europe, coaching, selling cars, performing surgery, running for office, or whatever. NBA players generally have healthy, normal lives after they retire.

 

You're mistaking why I wrote that - it's not to justify the money the non-stars make or to say there's an obligation to make sure Steve Novak will be set for life. It's the fact that there are well over 400 players out there, not all of them mega-millionaires, and not a soul will throw away guaranteed contracts just because the owners (or fans) want that.

It's a collective bargaining negotiation.

American cars have had an issue with Unions significantly raising the productions costs and putting them at a disadvantage over foreign companies....but that doesn't mean the union workers are going to willingly chuck what they've fought for over decades.

 

You can make an argument for any team. But this is about the bigger picture, and that's always where my interest lies.

You;re right - Philly probably doesn't deserve to be grouped with those teams because of their history, they're dead last in attendance and I see their economy in particular struggling to recover from the rec.

Steve_Francis_rules got it right with his last post. You change the individual contracts around and leave the hard cap the same, allowing Dwight and LeBron to get $30 million a year, they're still worth more to their franchises and teams will gladly shell out a lot of dough. But Luke Ridnour getting $16 million, Lowry getting $24 mil... that should not be happening. Bbig men are in a league of their own when it comes to being overpaid, but at the end of the day they are the rarest talents for size in the world.

In short, you pay a hell of a lot more for kashmere than mercerized cotton. You pay more for a platinum diamond ring encased in white gold than you would stainless steel. And that's not changing any time this century - both the owners and players know this. Contraction is the best option for a league where 1-2 players can have such an astronomical impact on a team, to the point that they're now going around in trio's.

You can only make so many concessions to pull up small market teams with little to no impact players. Take out 2-3 of these teams and both sides will find themselves more intimately intwined with each other; thus more willing to negotiate.

 

Well, I think the two issues are intertwined. The lack of parity hurts their profitability. And, the lack of profitability hurts parity too. They probably cannot effectively address one without the other.

 

the NBA will forever be a star driven league. basketball is just not that exciting for fans to drop 50 bucks to go see average players. the nfl just has the perfect formula to make money, parity matches their product. a bunch of average teams will not get fans to watch, matching melo with amare will.

i guess a hard cap can make it harder for wealthy teams to horde the stars, but I don't think it will be great for the league. they have to look at a better system of revenue sharing. just supplement the income of the have nots until the have nots get lucky and get a star.

 

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_ylt=AjTVgf4DcwLpEZoBGP7pTsu8vLYF?slug=mc-starmarkets022811

This helps establish what the NBA wants.

They do want relative parity - Stern recognized that fans that feel out of it aren't falling over themselves to get tickets. One of the reasons the NBA went to 6 divisions was so that every year, at least 6 teams could put up new "Champion" banners (worthless as they are) to point out to the fans that they were winners.

Look at how deserted the Toyota Center is today. Fan apathy is a huge problem in Houston, not even two years removed from that Lakers playoff series. We feel out of it, we walk away, business is bad. It's like that in every city.

NBA wants teams in the black, first and foremost. They recognize that parity feeds into that. But they probably value financial safeguards even moreso.

The whole point of the cap is that's the number where revenue and expenditures offset with a little profit left over for the owners, as established in '98. Unfortunately, the cap loopholes are so easily exploited that today only 6 teams are under the cap. Got to be competitive to draw fans, and to be competitive, you need a $70M payroll (or draw 3 superstars to South Beach).

They also didn't see coming 9/11, Katrina, or the major recession of 2008-2009.

The equation was off, and then revenue got slammed. Not just the ticket sales, but sponsor dollars.

This new CBA won't be a light revision or tweaking.

They probably can't get a hard cap, but a harder cap has to be coming, and possibly a drop in the cap figure (currently 51% of Revenue).

I maintain that while teams are shooting over the cap (all but 6)....they are generally scared of the tax (only 6 cross it, including us by the barest of margins). So why not:

Drop the tax line down to 110% of the cap ($64M with today's $58M cap) and make it a double tax.

Salaries remain guaranteed, making it far more likely the players sign off on it. However, the capaphobic teams should cut their payrolls dramatically and all stay very close to the actual cap line. Even the Big Guns like LA and NY are going to feel a severe pinch if they try to keep even a $80M payroll (virtually $112M with tax, compared to $111M for a $91M payroll the Lakers pay today*). The disparity should shrink and produce financial parity.

To help reign in costs, I continue to say they have to wipe out the S&T and possibly even the MLE (you at least can't allow it to remain as an annual exception for teams over the cap). They may also need to look into expanding the 125% trade rule to look at the lifetimes of the involved contracts (sending expirings for a max deal), I'd constrain it to be 300% total value.

 

I agree with this - and in a league where there are only a dozen stars bright enough to qualify you as a "have"....it's pretty much impossible to establish true parity in the NBA.

 

I debated this with someone here about 3 years ago. The top-level stars pull the wagon and keep the NBA in business while all of the other players ride in the wagon and benefit. If you removed the top 20 players from the NBA, it would crash. If you removed the bottom 200 players and replaced them with scrubs, it wouldn't matter much.

Repped your post. Dead on the money!

 

The NBA will never have NFL-level parity. This is because the importance of a star player is much greater in basketball than in football.

It's just the nature of the game, no matter how your CBA looks. Basketball involves only 12-15 guys on each roster, 5 starters and 8 or 9 rotation players. Football involves 50+ roster players, 22 regular starters (11 on each side of the ball), and numerous other subs, 4th wideouts, and 5th defensive backs, special teamers for the various packages teams run. So, one guy, even a superstar, can only do so much for his team.

So, unless you have a system where Lebron, Kobe, Bosh, Wade, Pierce, Garnett, etc. all change teams constantly, you are never going to spread the championship out as much as the NFL does. And I don't think you want to turn your stars into nomads.

That said, I don't mind some sort of reform to make the cap harder, or allowing teams to get out from a bad contract easier (one thought I had posted before is the ability to "buy out" a player's contract at 50% salary-- so teams can get out of bad contracts, but not without paying a price). If some NBA teams are really going broke under the current CBA, as a fan, I'd rather have a healthier and stable NBA to ensure there's basketball to be watched for the years to come than have the kind of ridiculous financial stuff that goes on with teams in Europe or China (teams not paying players, folding, etc.).

 

I think you point out a pretty important distinction in what we're talking about when it comes to parity. I don't think the sort of parity that you want is where all teams hover around .500 and everyone has a shot at the championship each year. I don't think that's desirable because idiosyncratic factors like injuries or hot streaks become more important than talent.

But, parity where teams have an equal chance to become good and bad is desirable. Teams will still go through talent ebbs and flows as they draft and retire stars and make clever or dumb moves in attempts to win. But, you don't have teams that enjoy perrenial success because of the owners' deep pockets or the city's glamorous reputation. Nor should small market franchises have to continually sacrifice their competitiveness for financial viability or at the whim of a star player. You would still have powerhouse teams and bottom-dwellers every season. It just wouldn't be the same teams in the same categories year after year.

I do think revenue-sharing is probably a big key to the formula for parity. But, there's probably other things they'll have to do to discourage Super Friends and the Yankees too.

 

1st, *I don't trust anything the league says in regards to this lockout. Are you saying league higher ups won't lie?

As far as parity is concerned, there is no less parity now that 5/10/15/20 years ago. The league didn't seem to mind until they started losing $$.*