What I was led to believe was that the NBA lockout was much let serious and contentious than the NFL lockout. The NBA just needed to work out some issues while the NFL was at serious odds with the owners and that’s why the union decertified.
Now I’m reading that star NBA players are signing with European or other foreign teams to guarantee a paycheck for next season. I’m thinking that they probably have escape clauses, but still.
What’s the SD?
Not at all. The NFL was in great shape and well managed. The owners just wanted more pie.
The NBA on the other hand is a cluster fuck. Years of terrible management has led to a situation where teams can lose lots of money. Idiotic contracts for substandard players are guaranteed and the lottery system encourages teams to dump the season rather than fight for the eighth playoff spot.
The NFL situation was always going to work out because the owners had so much leeway. They had no incentive to kill the season. Some NBA owners OTOH would be better off if that happened.
I’m not sure where you got that impression. The NBA lockout is definity more contentious and it stands a much better chance of delaying or curtailing the season. The NFL players’ union decertified as a bargaining tactic - decertifying allowed them to sue the owners, and the lawsuit was leverage in the negotiations. The NBA has already moved to prevent the players from decertifying so that can’t happen to them, although I don’t know that it would have anyway.
I don’t have much to add to what villa said, really. The main issue in the NFL negotiations was how revenue would be divided. There were some other issues, like the length of the schedule and the rookie salary cap, but they were much less important. The NBA owners want to completely revamp the way they do business. They want to cut player salaries significantly, possibly even including asking the players to take an across the board reduction in salary like the NHL players did, set a limit on guaranteed contracts (the proposal is no more than four years, instead of the current seven years), and put in a harder salary cap that doesn’t have all the exceptions the current cap does. The players happen to like the current system: the average player salary is $5 million a season, I think, and some owners are totally unable to exercise restraint. So they’re not going to want to give that up, but since the NBA probably can’t keep doing business this way, something has to give. So this may take a while.
It’s worth noting that there was almost no serious negotiation in the NFL until several months had gone by and the stoppage was threatening the season. Before that, there was really no money on the line and urgency. The NBA hasn’t reached that point yet, but I think the consensus is that it will take longer for all sides to agree they need to start hammering out a deal.
Those contracts allow the players to return to the NBA once the lockout ends. At least that’s the case for players who are currently under contract with NBA teams.
My understanding that six of the NBA owners also own NHL teams (NFL owners are prohibited from owning other sports teams). The NHL had a lockout in 2004-05 where the owners ultimately won and got a hard salary cap (at least harder than what the NBA has). It took several years for the sport to come back but ultimately it has. That has emboldened the NBA owners.
Plus let’s face it, the NFL players are wussies when it comes to a strike. When they tried to strike in 1987, top players like Randy White, Joe Montana and Mark Gastineau could not wait to cross the picket lines and help break the strike. My best guess is that NBA players are strongly but ultimately mlb players are the strongest union sticking to their guns.
You were misled.
To add onto the others’ posts, the real issue has nothing to do with how long contracts are, or whether journeymen get $5m contracts. Despite all the teeth-gnashing about how the owners have put themselves into this situation, they would be in exactly the same place had they not handed out any ridiculous contracts at all.
The players were guaranteed 57% of basketball-related income based on the previous CBA. If the total of all player salaries is less than this 57% number, the owners have to cut the players’ association a check. Which is exactly what they did last year, despite all those horrible contracts. So if you take away all those horrible deals, the owners just end up cutting a larger check. It wouldn’t affect their bottom line in any meaningful way.
I suspect the shortening of contracts will end up being favored by both sides. For the owners, it’s a way to make sure they’re actually getting a return on their investment. For players, it’s a way to make sure the players getting paid big salaries are the ones actually contributing… since there is a salary cap, there’s only so much money to go around, so for every ineffective old guy sucking up $12m, that’s $12m that can’t be paid to younger, more capable and more productive players.
Isn’t the NBA a soft cap, though?
Interesting point. Thing is, the owners want to cut this number. They don’t want to pay 57 percent of their revenue toward salaries under the next deal. I don’t know if they have given a percentage, but they say player salaries need to come down by a total of $750 million to $800 million or so.
Since the players union represents both effective young guys and ineffective old guys, I don’t see why they would want that. It seems to me that players are usually going to prefer guaranteed contracts since that’s money on the table.
That adds an interesting dynamic that was not present in the NFL or MLB negotiations (not sure about the NHL); NFL players have nowhere to go, and neither, effectively, do MLB players, but if NBA players can play in Europe and make a couple million dollars instead of ten million dollars, that’s some serious leverage.
The NHL has a lot of European players, and they’ll move back and forth from the NHL to European leagues sometimes. There is probably some strategic value in the fact that some NBA players can go overseas and I think the union is actively encouraging it because they want it to look like they have other options. But it’s just for show. The bottom line is that there are a whole bunch of reasons most NBA players aren’t going to play in another league.
I’ve heard that something like 22 of the NBA’s 30 teams are currently losing money. Is that true? If so, then the owners seriously need to lower the amount of money they spend on talent. Nobody likes to take a pay cut, and since the players have a union, this might take a while.
Simple. just open the books and prove it. You can not claim you need to cut salaries because you are losing money and then refuse to prove it.
Agreed. Though in this case unlike the NFL, many teams may actually be losing money and be able to prove it.
I’ve heard some people saying maybe they should cut out some of the smaller franchises and accept that they aren’t viable. That sounds good to me. Without NFL style revenue sharing, those small market teams aren’t ever going to amount to much.
Paul Allen owns the Portland TrailBlazers of the NBA and the Seattle Seahawks of the NFL, so NFL owners can own other teams. Allen owned the Blazers for a long time before he bought the Seahawks.
The NBA is the only league I know of where the owners have in the past opened the books and received substantial concessions from the players; IIRC (can’t find an immediate reference) that was a part of the 1983 negotiations that led to the salary cap in the first place.
Um… from a thread about this last week:
While I expect the owners are trying to put the worst possible face on things and trying to make it sound like excessive salaries are the root of all their problems, I think the current salary system is not sustainable.
Might it be that if you own another team, you can buy an NFL franchise, but if you own an NFL franchise, you cannot buy another team? Like Orthodox priests and marriage. Well, except there aren’t many Orthodox priests in the market for NFL franchises, to the best of my knowledge.
According to Wikipedia, “NFL rules prohibit team owners from either outright ownership or a majority share of another sports team outside its home market if they play in the same city as another NFL team.” So it’s no problem for Allen.
And they’re not even that hardcore on that rule. Kroenke owns a majority of the St. Louis Rams Rams + Denver Nuggets and Avalanche.
But they’re “forcing” him to sell the Nuggets/Avalanche… to his son, Josh. He turned over day-to-day control to his son in 2010, and must sell his controlling interest by 2014. So they’re enforcing the rule, but they’re doing it extremely slowly.
Yeah, I was in a hurry when I made my post so I neglected to mention that the most significant item in the negotiations is the percent of BRI guaranteed to the players. The owners want to slash it to like 50% which doesn’t sound that bad but will knock down player salaries by approximately 12% across the board.
The idea is that if the players are guaranteed the same total income, you wouldn’t be leaving any money on the table by shortening the length of maximum contracts. For certain individual players I could see why this might be unpalatable; star players tend to be paid more for longer than a comparable mid-range player. But shortening max contracts while guaranteeing the same total group income would make player salaries into more of a meritocracy. The players who are contributing would be paid more.
A couple times in the past, the owners claimed they would not pay huge salaries to middle of the road players. But one owner would always break ranks. They are often their own worst enemies. Since they have proven the can not handle it by themselves, they want to make rules to prevent it. Please protect me from myself.