It’s time for the NBA owners to own their baggage:
Admit you were wrong. Change your proposal. Spare us a lockout.
As the league teeters on a possible work stoppage, certain if an agreement isn’t reached by July 1, the owners’ proposal seems stuck in irrationality. It’s about as good an idea as ferret legging in flaming trousers.
The plan’s revenue division — a 50/50 split of net profits, not the gross money pools players currently earn from — is laughable, as are other radical suggestions. Whether or not a 57 percent players’ share is unfair, given that athletes don’t bear billion-dollar investment risks, owners OKed it in CBAs past.
Kind of undermines the ‘poor us’ argument.
You’d understand if they tried to roll in gradual changes. If they skimmed the top of the revenue pool incrementally, amounting the $900 million owners are after (or something close) over time. If they scaled back max contract years and percent raises, rather than slashing major sports’ shortest deals by two years, and possible pay increases 66 and 75 percent, depending on where players sign.
Compromising like that might sway players on guaranteed contracts, the only sensible component of the owners’ deal. It’s more-than-ridiculous that teams can’t cut underperforming or complacent players without eating the brunt of mega deals that Rashard Lewises and Eddy Currys and Eric Dampiers don’t live up to.
NBA players would support that how NFL veterans pushed for a rookie wage scale. It’s simple: Athletes want other athletes to earn their money. But they also want that money available for those deserving, another casualty of the lockout their proposal heads toward.
Yet the owners plan to stick by that offer — Commissioner David Stern backed the plan during a Game 6 halftime interview on ESPN Radio. Kind of baffling, tanking the league at its most opportune time in history.
Consider the risk: shelving a viewership like these past NBA Finals, the second-highest TV draw since 2004 and the best-rated individual game (Game 6) in 11 years. Cutting off your nose to spite your face is one thing. Doing so hours after walking out of plastic surgery, another entirely.
That was a gift, as is the current NFL lockout. Who knows how long ’til the wave of national fan interest crashes, or NFL players and owners ink a deal. If October rolls around without football, there will be sports enthusiasts and corporate sponsors for the taking. A lobotomy patient would keep himself in that running.
He also wouldn’t bat at star alignments like those Miami, Boston and LA have, the Knicks and Bulls covet, and the league should love. Pulling for a hard salary cap, the centerpiece of the proposal, would be passing on story lines and interest.
That’s currency in sports business, and a contradiction in owners’ justifications for the proposal.
If 22 of 30 teams are hemorrhaging cash like ownership claims, why risk a lockout, a long and litigious and money-leeching process? The NFL owners avoided a lockout at all costs in the hours before the NFL’s CBA expired Mar. 4, bending some $500 million toward players, to shield its $9 billion profit potential from losses.
The NBA makes around $3.8 billion.
In other words, it doesn’t have the money to lose — nor does it a $4 billion nest egg like NFL owners did with TV contracts that would execute even without games to broadcast. That means NBA owners wouldn’t be able to pay off big-ticket obligations (stadiums and the like) like NFL owners would.
(It should be noted, NFL owners lost that stash in a court ruling that voided those contracts, and have been more-than-approachable since. Given it never made similar moves, the NBA never had an excuse to be so bold and stubborn and, frankly, stupid.)
One of two scenarios is true: Either owners are full of it, lying to justify going after more money (not good for business). Or they are on the brink of insolvency, something missed games of ticket sales and ad revenues exacerbates, maybe to the point that the league folds (worse for business).
How’s that for a future?
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