The Official NBA Collective Bargaining Thread vol Phased in Hard Cap

[grittyman20]

"Let's just take the owners and the NBA saying we want every team to be competitive," Wade said. "We want every team to have the same chips to start with. You tell me that corporations and business around the world that every is equal one and I'll show you a lie. You have some up here, you have some down here. That's the game. We have some huge markets. We have some small markets.

"To me, it's not about who has the most chips," Wade added. "I think it's about who manages their chips the right way. That's why I think we have a management problem. Small markets have won championships. San Antonio is a very small market and they have four championships in the last 10 years or whatever the case may be. So I don't know how you ever fix it unless you have realistic goals. It has to get a little more realistic and right now, it's not."


Wade County 

 

[grittyman20]

"Let's just take the owners and the NBA saying we want every team to be competitive," Wade said. "We want every team to have the same chips to start with. You tell me that corporations and business around the world that every is equal one and I'll show you a lie. You have some up here, you have some down here. That's the game. We have some huge markets. We have some small markets.

"To me, it's not about who has the most chips," Wade added. "I think it's about who manages their chips the right way. That's why I think we have a management problem. Small markets have won championships. San Antonio is a very small market and they have four championships in the last 10 years or whatever the case may be. So I don't know how you ever fix it unless you have realistic goals. It has to get a little more realistic and right now, it's not."


Wade County 

 

[darthska]

I'm just now chiming in on this because I just heard on ESPN that some teams might be done if the season is canceled.

Dang, man, for real? :/

Who? Clippers? Bucks? Sacto?

 

[darthska]

I'm just now chiming in on this because I just heard on ESPN that some teams might be done if the season is canceled.

Dang, man, for real? :/

Who? Clippers? Bucks? Sacto?

 

[pmatic]

I imagine the Kings and Hornets.

But I'm sure both sides don't want contraction.

 

[pmatic]

I imagine the Kings and Hornets.

But I'm sure both sides don't want contraction.

 

[dmbrhs]

If we go on the Simmons model (26-team league with 30 franchises), the four top candidates for contraction: Charlotte (NCAA country and no history of success or support), New Orleans (zero fan support), Memphis (one exciting playoff run in their 15-year history doesn't mean anything), Sacramento (just a giant mess).

And of course no side wants contraction. Players know they'll be out of jobs, and owners need to be compensated for their lost teams (don't know where that money is coming from). But in the end, on the players' end, that's life. If you can't cut it in a league with a few less teams, you didn't belong in the first place.

 

[dmbrhs]

If we go on the Simmons model (26-team league with 30 franchises), the four top candidates for contraction: Charlotte (NCAA country and no history of success or support), New Orleans (zero fan support), Memphis (one exciting playoff run in their 15-year history doesn't mean anything), Sacramento (just a giant mess).

And of course no side wants contraction. Players know they'll be out of jobs, and owners need to be compensated for their lost teams (don't know where that money is coming from). But in the end, on the players' end, that's life. If you can't cut it in a league with a few less teams, you didn't belong in the first place.

 

[duba169]

I'm done with realm that place is just full of obnoxious people spewing David stern's talking points. It's absolutely amazing how easy it was for stern to manipulate these fans

It's basically "the owners are locking out the players for the good of the league. This lockout is because of competitive balance. The players are ignorant and make too much money"

I don't quite understand how they root for the players at all the way the bash them. Can't believe he convinces people that this is about competitive balance. Just flat out amazing. And the talking heads on espn mostly repeat the same mantra

 

[duba169]

I'm done with realm that place is just full of obnoxious people spewing David stern's talking points. It's absolutely amazing how easy it was for stern to manipulate these fans

It's basically "the owners are locking out the players for the good of the league. This lockout is because of competitive balance. The players are ignorant and make too much money"

I don't quite understand how they root for the players at all the way the bash them. Can't believe he convinces people that this is about competitive balance. Just flat out amazing. And the talking heads on espn mostly repeat the same mantra

 

[cosmiccanon]

Originally Posted by DubA169

I'm done with realm that place is just full of obnoxious people spewing David stern's talking points. It's absolutely amazing how easy it was for stern to manipulate these fans

It's basically "the owners are locking out the players for the good of the league. This lockout is because of competitive balance. The players are ignorant and make too much money"

I don't quite understand how they root for the players at all the way the bash them. Can't believe he convinces people that this is about competitive balance. Just flat out amazing. And the talking heads on espn mostly repeat the same mantra

Especially the Knicks Forum, TKF and others had me riled up like a mother. Talking about "so what, if their salaries decrease by 10%, the players would still make good money". 

 

[cosmiccanon]

Originally Posted by DubA169

I'm done with realm that place is just full of obnoxious people spewing David stern's talking points. It's absolutely amazing how easy it was for stern to manipulate these fans

It's basically "the owners are locking out the players for the good of the league. This lockout is because of competitive balance. The players are ignorant and make too much money"

I don't quite understand how they root for the players at all the way the bash them. Can't believe he convinces people that this is about competitive balance. Just flat out amazing. And the talking heads on espn mostly repeat the same mantra

Especially the Knicks Forum, TKF and others had me riled up like a mother. Talking about "so what, if their salaries decrease by 10%, the players would still make good money". 

 

[duba169]

The general forum in much worse.It's 50 50 on the Knicks forum.

It's kind of crazy how much activity there is on the Knicks board over there tho.

 

[duba169]

The general forum in much worse.It's 50 50 on the Knicks forum.

It's kind of crazy how much activity there is on the Knicks board over there tho.

 

[pmatic]

Speaking of competitive balance;

Stern's Misguided View of Competitive Balance

Competitive balance. I haven't quite decided if this is just a red herring in the league's fairly straightforward quest to wring money out of the union, or if David Stern and Adam Silver are sincere in their misguided belief that their salary cap wish list will result in a significantly more competitive league.

As many others have pointed out, the NBA is not the NFL. There are several factors that allow for more competitive balance in the NFL (or something that masquerades as competitive balance, at any rate) and I'm not convinced that the salary cap is in the top 10. For one thing, an NFL roster is 45 (53 including inactive players) while that number in the NBA is 12 (and 15). More importantly, there are 24 "starters" in the NFL (counting a punter and a placekicker) compared to 5 in the NBA - the point is, one player can have a much more significant impact in the NBA than in the NFL just by sheer numbers (Peyton Manning notwithstanding).

http://

There's a second numbers game at work here as well - with only 16 games in the regular season and a single elimination playoff format, of course you're going to have more variance in your eventual champion than with an 82 game season and best of seven playoff series.Bernoullitells us that if Team A is better than Team B and has a 60% chance of winning any meeting between the two, then Team B still has a 40% chance of winning a single playoff game. But Team B's chances of winning four games in a seven game series drop to less than 29%. And of course this difference is compounded through multiple playoff rounds - that 40/60 underdog is almost three times as likely to advance through three rounds of a single elimination playoff than to make it that far through multiple best of seven series. Simple randomness would dictate that there would be a wider variety of winners in the NFL playoffs based strictly on format. If the end game is to have a wider variety of teams winning NBA championships, Stern can shorten the season and play one and done playoffs. Heck, I seem to recall Philadelphia winning game one of the Finals against a far superior Lakers team back in 2001. Of course the Lakers came back to win the next four, because they were the better team, but a single game Finals that year would have given us a different NBA champ - yay competitive balance!

I'm not going to suggest that money has nothing to do with winning in the NBA - there is clearly some correlation. The last four NBA champions have been at least $7 Million over the luxury tax threshold, after all. But we always have to remember that correlation does not equal causation. And it seems fairly obvious that there are confounding variables here, at least one of which is far more important than spending money.

From Howard Beck'srecent articleon the subject in the New York Times:

Over the last six years, the life of the previous labor deal, the 10 highest-spending teams averaged 48 wins a season. The 10 lowest spenders averaged 34 wins. The gap was more stark last season, with the top 10 spenders averaging 50 wins and the bottom 10 averaging 32.


But back to that correlation-causationconundrum, are teams winning because they spend, or are they spending because they win?

The NBA is a superstar-driven league. And while the last four NBA champs all had a luxury tax bill, they also had something more important - an MVP on their roster. In fact, for 20 of the last 21 seasons in the NBA, the champion has had an in their prime MVP on the team - only the 2004 Pistons managed to win a ring without one.

Moreover, three-fourths of those title teams had superstar players they actually drafted - only the Celtics (Kevin Garnett), the Heat (Shaquille O'Neal) and the Lakers (O'Neal again) acquired their MVP level talent via trade or free agency; of course those guys were matched with some pretty solid home grown talent in Paul Pierce, Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant.

NBA General Managers are not all as dumb as they are sometimes portrayed. They know what wins in the NBA. You can make the playoffs, maybe even win a series or two, with a team of solid players. But if you hope to win it all, you have to have that next level guy, that super-maga-star, first team all NBA, legit MVP candidate in his prime. And if you don't have that, you might as well still be rebuilding.

But if you do have that guy, then you do what you can to put the team around him that will allow you to make a title run. So yes, the Lakers have won titles and have spent money to do so - but they also had Kobe Bryant on their roster, so they knew they had a chance to win.

And here's where Stern is really missing the boat - in a star driven league, where the indispensable element to a championship team is the individual player as opposed to the collective or the system, you actually want a salary system in place that allows teams the flexibility to spend more when they are in a position to win. The San Antonio Spurs play in one of the smallest markets in the NBA, but they were blessed with two can't miss first overall picks ten years apart. Knowing that they had a team that could compete for a championship, the Spurs have chosen to pay the luxury tax three times in the seven seasons it's been in place in order to keep the core of their team together as long as they have a chance to win. Stern and others like to point to the Lakers and the Mavericks as what is wrong with the current system - without acknowledging that a hard cap system would have long ago broken up Duncan, Ginobili and Parker. Is that really what the NBA needs?

And what of the current darlings of the NBA, the Oklahoma City Thunder? Another small market team, they are often presented as a franchise that rebuilt the right way. There's much uncertainty as to whether the Thunder will be able to afford to keep their core together - they've already got $21M tied up in Kevin Durant and Kendrick Perkins, with Russell Westbrook poised for free agency in a year, and James Harden and Serge Ibaka the year after that. A hard cap would eliminate that uncertainty - it would be a given that they could not possibly keep all five of those players. Is that what Clay Bennett wants? Is that what David Stern wants? Under the current system, Bennett would have the option of exceeding the cap, at least for a time, to chase a ring.

This is why Stern's go to competitive imbalance example, "the Lakers spend twice as much as the Kings" is so disingenuous. As Tom Ziller has repeatedlypointed out, the Kings' salary was $45M last season because there was absolutely no reason for it to be any higher. The Kings are rebuilding, and with 2010 Rookie of the Year Tyreke Evans along with the most talented center to enter the NBA in some time DeMarcus Cousins, who's to say that the Kings aren't the next Thunder? If Evans and Cousins turn out to be great, let's wait and see what the Kings' team salary looks like when they re-sign them both before we decree that the current system is hopelessly broken.

Of course what would help all of this, no matter how you approach it, is more and better revenue sharing. If the Lakers shared more of their embarrassment of LA market riches with the Thunder, then we probably wouldn't have to wonder whether Westbrook and Harden and Ibaka were going to be in Oklahoma in 2013 - of course they would, because who in their right mind would break up that team if it were economically viable to keep it together?

Some things are broken, that much is true. The Mavericks have been above the salary cap every season of it's existence. Mark Cuban finally got his ring last season, but clearly the intent was not to create a system where some owners simply exist at a different salary level on an ongoing basis. Meanwhile, in an irony so stunning that it single-handedly calls into question the entire premise of money buying wins, the Knicks had nine consecutive losing seasons while spending more than any other team, before posting a winning record last season when they dropped below the luxury tax threshold for the first time ever - a perfectly inverse relationship between money and wins in New York for an entire decade. As I've argued before, I would beall for an aggressive luxury taxthat increases based on seasons spent above the threshold - but I feel it remains in the interest of the league to allow teams to exceed the threshold as easily as they do today for a season or two at a time.

You may be interested to know that in the seven seasons in which a luxury tax has been applicable, 21 out of 30 NBA teams - more than two-thirds - have taken advantage of it's existence at least once. Only four teams - the Mavericks, Knicks, Lakers and Celtics - could really be said to be abusing it, exceeding the threshold five or more times each. That leaves 17 teams that have exceeded the luxury tax between one and three times since it was instituted - including cap hawksDan Gilbert (three times) andRobert Sarver (three times). (Apparently the opportunity to spend a little more was a good thing when it meant trying to keep LeBron James happy or searching for that final championship piece to the puzzle.)

And what of the nine teams that have never been above the tax threshold? Well, with the exception of the Hornets and Chris Paul (and let's face it, New Orleans is a special case not least because they are now owned by the league), none of them have had a first team All-NBA player beyond his rookie deal. In other words, there has not been a reason to spend, because there hasn't been a superstar to build around. Market size does not seem to be a major factor in willingness to spend - big market teams like the Bulls, Hawks, Wizards, Warriors and Clippers have never paid the luxury tax, while Utah, San Antonio and Orlando all have.

We might assume that if the system remains more or less as is, the Derrick Rose Bulls and Kevin Durant Thunder would start paying the tax in the near future - maybe even the Blake Griffin Clippers. Because money alone doesn't buy championships, but it does help once you have a superstar to build around.


Link

Edit:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

[pmatic]

Speaking of competitive balance;

Stern's Misguided View of Competitive Balance

Competitive balance. I haven't quite decided if this is just a red herring in the league's fairly straightforward quest to wring money out of the union, or if David Stern and Adam Silver are sincere in their misguided belief that their salary cap wish list will result in a significantly more competitive league.

As many others have pointed out, the NBA is not the NFL. There are several factors that allow for more competitive balance in the NFL (or something that masquerades as competitive balance, at any rate) and I'm not convinced that the salary cap is in the top 10. For one thing, an NFL roster is 45 (53 including inactive players) while that number in the NBA is 12 (and 15). More importantly, there are 24 "starters" in the NFL (counting a punter and a placekicker) compared to 5 in the NBA - the point is, one player can have a much more significant impact in the NBA than in the NFL just by sheer numbers (Peyton Manning notwithstanding).

http://

There's a second numbers game at work here as well - with only 16 games in the regular season and a single elimination playoff format, of course you're going to have more variance in your eventual champion than with an 82 game season and best of seven playoff series.Bernoullitells us that if Team A is better than Team B and has a 60% chance of winning any meeting between the two, then Team B still has a 40% chance of winning a single playoff game. But Team B's chances of winning four games in a seven game series drop to less than 29%. And of course this difference is compounded through multiple playoff rounds - that 40/60 underdog is almost three times as likely to advance through three rounds of a single elimination playoff than to make it that far through multiple best of seven series. Simple randomness would dictate that there would be a wider variety of winners in the NFL playoffs based strictly on format. If the end game is to have a wider variety of teams winning NBA championships, Stern can shorten the season and play one and done playoffs. Heck, I seem to recall Philadelphia winning game one of the Finals against a far superior Lakers team back in 2001. Of course the Lakers came back to win the next four, because they were the better team, but a single game Finals that year would have given us a different NBA champ - yay competitive balance!

I'm not going to suggest that money has nothing to do with winning in the NBA - there is clearly some correlation. The last four NBA champions have been at least $7 Million over the luxury tax threshold, after all. But we always have to remember that correlation does not equal causation. And it seems fairly obvious that there are confounding variables here, at least one of which is far more important than spending money.

From Howard Beck'srecent articleon the subject in the New York Times:

Over the last six years, the life of the previous labor deal, the 10 highest-spending teams averaged 48 wins a season. The 10 lowest spenders averaged 34 wins. The gap was more stark last season, with the top 10 spenders averaging 50 wins and the bottom 10 averaging 32.


But back to that correlation-causationconundrum, are teams winning because they spend, or are they spending because they win?

The NBA is a superstar-driven league. And while the last four NBA champs all had a luxury tax bill, they also had something more important - an MVP on their roster. In fact, for 20 of the last 21 seasons in the NBA, the champion has had an in their prime MVP on the team - only the 2004 Pistons managed to win a ring without one.

Moreover, three-fourths of those title teams had superstar players they actually drafted - only the Celtics (Kevin Garnett), the Heat (Shaquille O'Neal) and the Lakers (O'Neal again) acquired their MVP level talent via trade or free agency; of course those guys were matched with some pretty solid home grown talent in Paul Pierce, Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant.

NBA General Managers are not all as dumb as they are sometimes portrayed. They know what wins in the NBA. You can make the playoffs, maybe even win a series or two, with a team of solid players. But if you hope to win it all, you have to have that next level guy, that super-maga-star, first team all NBA, legit MVP candidate in his prime. And if you don't have that, you might as well still be rebuilding.

But if you do have that guy, then you do what you can to put the team around him that will allow you to make a title run. So yes, the Lakers have won titles and have spent money to do so - but they also had Kobe Bryant on their roster, so they knew they had a chance to win.

And here's where Stern is really missing the boat - in a star driven league, where the indispensable element to a championship team is the individual player as opposed to the collective or the system, you actually want a salary system in place that allows teams the flexibility to spend more when they are in a position to win. The San Antonio Spurs play in one of the smallest markets in the NBA, but they were blessed with two can't miss first overall picks ten years apart. Knowing that they had a team that could compete for a championship, the Spurs have chosen to pay the luxury tax three times in the seven seasons it's been in place in order to keep the core of their team together as long as they have a chance to win. Stern and others like to point to the Lakers and the Mavericks as what is wrong with the current system - without acknowledging that a hard cap system would have long ago broken up Duncan, Ginobili and Parker. Is that really what the NBA needs?

And what of the current darlings of the NBA, the Oklahoma City Thunder? Another small market team, they are often presented as a franchise that rebuilt the right way. There's much uncertainty as to whether the Thunder will be able to afford to keep their core together - they've already got $21M tied up in Kevin Durant and Kendrick Perkins, with Russell Westbrook poised for free agency in a year, and James Harden and Serge Ibaka the year after that. A hard cap would eliminate that uncertainty - it would be a given that they could not possibly keep all five of those players. Is that what Clay Bennett wants? Is that what David Stern wants? Under the current system, Bennett would have the option of exceeding the cap, at least for a time, to chase a ring.

This is why Stern's go to competitive imbalance example, "the Lakers spend twice as much as the Kings" is so disingenuous. As Tom Ziller has repeatedlypointed out, the Kings' salary was $45M last season because there was absolutely no reason for it to be any higher. The Kings are rebuilding, and with 2010 Rookie of the Year Tyreke Evans along with the most talented center to enter the NBA in some time DeMarcus Cousins, who's to say that the Kings aren't the next Thunder? If Evans and Cousins turn out to be great, let's wait and see what the Kings' team salary looks like when they re-sign them both before we decree that the current system is hopelessly broken.

Of course what would help all of this, no matter how you approach it, is more and better revenue sharing. If the Lakers shared more of their embarrassment of LA market riches with the Thunder, then we probably wouldn't have to wonder whether Westbrook and Harden and Ibaka were going to be in Oklahoma in 2013 - of course they would, because who in their right mind would break up that team if it were economically viable to keep it together?

Some things are broken, that much is true. The Mavericks have been above the salary cap every season of it's existence. Mark Cuban finally got his ring last season, but clearly the intent was not to create a system where some owners simply exist at a different salary level on an ongoing basis. Meanwhile, in an irony so stunning that it single-handedly calls into question the entire premise of money buying wins, the Knicks had nine consecutive losing seasons while spending more than any other team, before posting a winning record last season when they dropped below the luxury tax threshold for the first time ever - a perfectly inverse relationship between money and wins in New York for an entire decade. As I've argued before, I would beall for an aggressive luxury taxthat increases based on seasons spent above the threshold - but I feel it remains in the interest of the league to allow teams to exceed the threshold as easily as they do today for a season or two at a time.

You may be interested to know that in the seven seasons in which a luxury tax has been applicable, 21 out of 30 NBA teams - more than two-thirds - have taken advantage of it's existence at least once. Only four teams - the Mavericks, Knicks, Lakers and Celtics - could really be said to be abusing it, exceeding the threshold five or more times each. That leaves 17 teams that have exceeded the luxury tax between one and three times since it was instituted - including cap hawksDan Gilbert (three times) andRobert Sarver (three times). (Apparently the opportunity to spend a little more was a good thing when it meant trying to keep LeBron James happy or searching for that final championship piece to the puzzle.)

And what of the nine teams that have never been above the tax threshold? Well, with the exception of the Hornets and Chris Paul (and let's face it, New Orleans is a special case not least because they are now owned by the league), none of them have had a first team All-NBA player beyond his rookie deal. In other words, there has not been a reason to spend, because there hasn't been a superstar to build around. Market size does not seem to be a major factor in willingness to spend - big market teams like the Bulls, Hawks, Wizards, Warriors and Clippers have never paid the luxury tax, while Utah, San Antonio and Orlando all have.

We might assume that if the system remains more or less as is, the Derrick Rose Bulls and Kevin Durant Thunder would start paying the tax in the near future - maybe even the Blake Griffin Clippers. Because money alone doesn't buy championships, but it does help once you have a superstar to build around.


Link

Edit:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

[doublejs07]

Javale says some dumb things, but lets not pretend like dudes like Amare haven't been saying dumb %!@! also. (Boycott the lockout...form their own league, etc...)

C'mon now...

I get the whole solidarity piece, but, I think that most of the guys standing behind Fisher don't have the slightest clue about what's going on.

 

[doublejs07]

Javale says some dumb things, but lets not pretend like dudes like Amare haven't been saying dumb %!@! also. (Boycott the lockout...form their own league, etc...)

C'mon now...

I get the whole solidarity piece, but, I think that most of the guys standing behind Fisher don't have the slightest clue about what's going on.

 

[me no pass]

Originally Posted by CosmicCanon

DubA169 wrote:
jadande J.A. AdandeJaVale McGee on NBPA meeting: "definitely some guys in there saying that they’re ready to fold. But the majority are ready to stand strong"31 seconds agoUnion already starts to crumble SMH.

 @ some of these players. 
It's one thing, if you have child support/divorce payments. However, if you don't have that, you should have been saving your money for this. It's a shame, the players will probably end up taking a 48 - 50 BRI deal, just because some people wouldn't save their checks.

these dudes knew about it for years. YEARS!

 

[me no pass]

Originally Posted by CosmicCanon

DubA169 wrote:
jadande J.A. AdandeJaVale McGee on NBPA meeting: "definitely some guys in there saying that they’re ready to fold. But the majority are ready to stand strong"31 seconds agoUnion already starts to crumble SMH.

 @ some of these players. 
It's one thing, if you have child support/divorce payments. However, if you don't have that, you should have been saving your money for this. It's a shame, the players will probably end up taking a 48 - 50 BRI deal, just because some people wouldn't save their checks.

these dudes knew about it for years. YEARS!

 

[pmatic]

The moment the talks fell apart

David Stern, Billy Hunter, Derek Fisher, Adam Silver, Spurs owner Peter Holt, union lawyers Ron Klempner and Jeffrey Kessler ... with various others dropping in from time to time, that crew of seven had met more than 40 times and for untold hours over the last two years. None of them had had good summers.

But all those hours in rented conference rooms, all those dishes of hotel mints, rows of water glasses and catered lunches, had not been a total waste of time. They had led to some things. The league had dropped its insistence on a hard cap, for instance. The players had offered to hand over something close to a billion dollars in future earnings.

And more importantly, by last Tuesday, there was a deal in the air.

Both sides were still keeping their best offers secret ... but those in the room say they were getting a sense where things were headed. You can tell a hell of a lot about where things are headed, Stern says, "if you listen."

"We thought we could live," union head Hunter said later on WFAN, "with the deal we were close to making."

On October 4, the NBA's negotiators entered a midtown Manhattan hotel with more than a little glimmer of hope.

There would still be issues to deal with, like the luxury tax, cap exceptions and the length of contracts. But even the hardest-bitten journalists in the hallway allowed it could, finally, be deal day.

The league's negotiators had four things going for them:

• A memory of Kessler suggesting, about a month earlier, in another hotel, at another meeting, that the players might go for something like a 50/50 split of basketball revenues.
• Out of a meeting with owners in Dallas, little consensus about what Stern could offer the players, but nevertheless an agreement among owners to empower the league's labor committee to negotiate with players "on all points."
• The league's labor committee, more than a third of the league's owners, including those from the Lakers, Knicks, Celtics and Spurs -- assembled in New York ready to deal.
• The scheduled November start of the regular season around the corner.

What happened next will one day be studied by students of labor, business, race relations and more.

Nobody disputes that Stern and Silver talked to Fisher and Kessler in the hallway, bringing up what they thought would be music to Kessler's ears. His offer, of splitting basketball-related income down the middle ... maybe it was time to see if the two sides could sell that to their respective groups.

Stern was confident he could talk enough owners into it, and as for the players ... Kessler was their pit bull. And this was his idea!

Having floated their big idea, the offer so sweet it just might get them in trouble with their owners, the league officials were excited to know they at least had a victory in the bag. They'd have a long night of dealing with systems issues ahead of them, but maybe, just maybe, this long summer of meetings could be wrapped up. Maybe the season would be intact.

Denied

As Stern has recounted a dozen times since, not long after what was supposed to have been the hallway conversation that saved the season, something odd and wholly unexpected happened. There was a knock on the door where Stern was selling his owners on the idea. The players wanted to talk.

When they convened, instead of the union's head, Hunter, or their negotiating committee of Maurice Evans, Bonner, Roger Mason, Theo Ratliff, Etan Thomas and Chris Paul, representing the players were Fisher, Kessler, and three superstars who had been to very few of the meetings at all: Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Kobe Bryant.

A bad sign: Pierce was still wearing his backpack.

The players had two pieces of news that shocked the league: 50/50 was not good enough. And there was nothing further to discuss.

"We had a large group of owners," remembers Silver, "who had flown in and were prepared to negotiate around the clock."

More importantly, they had made an aggressively good offer, the NBA's leaders thought, the one that might get them in trouble with their owners but surely not with the players.

And players who hadn't even been in the talks, and who seemed not to be on the same page with the crew that had endured more than 40 meetings, had been the ones to reject the best offer the league was likely to have, and to end the best day of negotiations prematurely.

What in the hell was going on? How had they so misread the situation? And where was Billy Hunter? Who spoke for the union? Should the league have been negotiating with Kevin Garnett all along?

Later the league would suggest that the talks had fallen apart because the union happened to have some particularly strident players show up that day.

Maybe it's as simple as that. Or maybe it's much more complicated.

Patently false

Here's one explanation of why the players rejected that 50/50 offer. Perhaps they never made it.

The union's vice president's, Spurs forward Matt Bonner says "Kessler definitely didn't offer 50/50. There's no way."

Bonner points out that it had been a "huge ordeal" to convince players to agree to take only 53 percent, after a dozen years of earning 57. "That was a huge point of contention. Talking to all these veterans and all-stars, they were upset we went down to 53. We had to sell them on that. I'm pretty certain Kessler didn't have the authority to offer 50, and nobody in the room would have agreed to that."

Another union official allows Kessler may have said something in the weeks prior that could have been misunderstood as offering 50, but "it's patently false," he says, that Kessler made anything like a proposal. "There's a lot of discussion back and forth that takes place particularly in the small group meetings. It's a complete mischaracterization to say that whatever happened constituted any kind of formal proposal at that point."

In either case, nothing here can be considered remotely good news for basketball fans. The moment when it seemed like negotiators may have been all together at the same number was the most optimistic of the entire process. That it may have always been a misunderstanding, or more importantly that owners seem to genuinely have no interest in going higher than 50, and players genuinely no interest in going below 53, makes this look bad -- before even touching the thorny issues of the luxury tax, raises and cap exceptions.

Stern said on Friday that he's not sure if he can even get his owners to go for 50 anymore. Meanwhile, I asked Bonner if he thought the owners would to higher than 50, and he said "I hope so, for the sake of the season."

Now it's no longer a story of what Hunter and Stern may be able to hash out in a hotel. Now it's about big groups of owners and players, all across the globe, who are not close to seeing eye-to-eye, but do have final say.

"System changes"

There's another thing that could be happening, too.

Remember The Decision? That night in July something happened that angered basketball fans like nothing else. It can be framed as LeBron James being egotistical, or cowardly, or whatever else. But it can also be framed as a young black man just being sick of doing what old, white guys tell him to do.

There was a playbook for free agency, a procedure, some decorum. And James tossed it. No, after earning Dan Gilbert the sun, the moon and the stars he does not also owe him a phone call. No he doesn't have to let some other, whiter, older entity control the production of his announcement. No he doesn't have to stick to the story line of local hero, or even player. He really does have the power to play GM, to assemble a super team, and that's what he would do.

The message to a lot of fans was that James just got it all wrong. But the message to a lot of players was that James did what 1,000 players have been dreaming of doing for years -- he acted fully empowered -- and it's hard to say he failed at it. He made his millions, and the Finals. His team is intact. His business life is sound. He'll be contending for championships for years.

It's a business revolution with young black men, basketball players, in the corner offices. A new way of doing things, long overdue, and happening now.

And maybe that's what Stern encountered in that hotel room in New York: A new generation of fully empowered players who no longer believe they have to conform to much of anything.

Just three days earlier, with James in attendance, James' teammate Dwyane Wade had yelled at David Stern. "You're not pointing your finger at me," Wade said, sources told ESPN The Magazine's Ric Bucher. "I'm not your child."

On Friday, a role player for a middling team got a surprise phone call, from just about the biggest name in the sport -- somebody who had never called him before. The message: Hold firm at 53. We're not caving. Hang in there. It wasn't the only call of its kind, and when you talk to players now there is religious fervor, around the number 53, and around not giving owners any freebies on the other issues.

Owners are indignant that they have endured dreadful losses that must be righted. Players, meanwhile, are indignant that compared to the old CBA every concession to date has come from them. The issues are sounding more religious than ever, and it's doubtful that, at the moment, anyway, either Hunter or Stern is capable of rallying his followers to build a bridge to the other side.

And if it's driven by players' blossoming and deep-rooted self-determination, then they can't be expected to budge. I just hope, for the NBA's sake, that they chose the correct line to draw in the sand.
Link

 

[pmatic]

The moment the talks fell apart

David Stern, Billy Hunter, Derek Fisher, Adam Silver, Spurs owner Peter Holt, union lawyers Ron Klempner and Jeffrey Kessler ... with various others dropping in from time to time, that crew of seven had met more than 40 times and for untold hours over the last two years. None of them had had good summers.

But all those hours in rented conference rooms, all those dishes of hotel mints, rows of water glasses and catered lunches, had not been a total waste of time. They had led to some things. The league had dropped its insistence on a hard cap, for instance. The players had offered to hand over something close to a billion dollars in future earnings.

And more importantly, by last Tuesday, there was a deal in the air.

Both sides were still keeping their best offers secret ... but those in the room say they were getting a sense where things were headed. You can tell a hell of a lot about where things are headed, Stern says, "if you listen."

"We thought we could live," union head Hunter said later on WFAN, "with the deal we were close to making."

On October 4, the NBA's negotiators entered a midtown Manhattan hotel with more than a little glimmer of hope.

There would still be issues to deal with, like the luxury tax, cap exceptions and the length of contracts. But even the hardest-bitten journalists in the hallway allowed it could, finally, be deal day.

The league's negotiators had four things going for them:

• A memory of Kessler suggesting, about a month earlier, in another hotel, at another meeting, that the players might go for something like a 50/50 split of basketball revenues.
• Out of a meeting with owners in Dallas, little consensus about what Stern could offer the players, but nevertheless an agreement among owners to empower the league's labor committee to negotiate with players "on all points."
• The league's labor committee, more than a third of the league's owners, including those from the Lakers, Knicks, Celtics and Spurs -- assembled in New York ready to deal.
• The scheduled November start of the regular season around the corner.

What happened next will one day be studied by students of labor, business, race relations and more.

Nobody disputes that Stern and Silver talked to Fisher and Kessler in the hallway, bringing up what they thought would be music to Kessler's ears. His offer, of splitting basketball-related income down the middle ... maybe it was time to see if the two sides could sell that to their respective groups.

Stern was confident he could talk enough owners into it, and as for the players ... Kessler was their pit bull. And this was his idea!

Having floated their big idea, the offer so sweet it just might get them in trouble with their owners, the league officials were excited to know they at least had a victory in the bag. They'd have a long night of dealing with systems issues ahead of them, but maybe, just maybe, this long summer of meetings could be wrapped up. Maybe the season would be intact.

Denied

As Stern has recounted a dozen times since, not long after what was supposed to have been the hallway conversation that saved the season, something odd and wholly unexpected happened. There was a knock on the door where Stern was selling his owners on the idea. The players wanted to talk.

When they convened, instead of the union's head, Hunter, or their negotiating committee of Maurice Evans, Bonner, Roger Mason, Theo Ratliff, Etan Thomas and Chris Paul, representing the players were Fisher, Kessler, and three superstars who had been to very few of the meetings at all: Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Kobe Bryant.

A bad sign: Pierce was still wearing his backpack.

The players had two pieces of news that shocked the league: 50/50 was not good enough. And there was nothing further to discuss.

"We had a large group of owners," remembers Silver, "who had flown in and were prepared to negotiate around the clock."

More importantly, they had made an aggressively good offer, the NBA's leaders thought, the one that might get them in trouble with their owners but surely not with the players.

And players who hadn't even been in the talks, and who seemed not to be on the same page with the crew that had endured more than 40 meetings, had been the ones to reject the best offer the league was likely to have, and to end the best day of negotiations prematurely.

What in the hell was going on? How had they so misread the situation? And where was Billy Hunter? Who spoke for the union? Should the league have been negotiating with Kevin Garnett all along?

Later the league would suggest that the talks had fallen apart because the union happened to have some particularly strident players show up that day.

Maybe it's as simple as that. Or maybe it's much more complicated.

Patently false

Here's one explanation of why the players rejected that 50/50 offer. Perhaps they never made it.

The union's vice president's, Spurs forward Matt Bonner says "Kessler definitely didn't offer 50/50. There's no way."

Bonner points out that it had been a "huge ordeal" to convince players to agree to take only 53 percent, after a dozen years of earning 57. "That was a huge point of contention. Talking to all these veterans and all-stars, they were upset we went down to 53. We had to sell them on that. I'm pretty certain Kessler didn't have the authority to offer 50, and nobody in the room would have agreed to that."

Another union official allows Kessler may have said something in the weeks prior that could have been misunderstood as offering 50, but "it's patently false," he says, that Kessler made anything like a proposal. "There's a lot of discussion back and forth that takes place particularly in the small group meetings. It's a complete mischaracterization to say that whatever happened constituted any kind of formal proposal at that point."

In either case, nothing here can be considered remotely good news for basketball fans. The moment when it seemed like negotiators may have been all together at the same number was the most optimistic of the entire process. That it may have always been a misunderstanding, or more importantly that owners seem to genuinely have no interest in going higher than 50, and players genuinely no interest in going below 53, makes this look bad -- before even touching the thorny issues of the luxury tax, raises and cap exceptions.

Stern said on Friday that he's not sure if he can even get his owners to go for 50 anymore. Meanwhile, I asked Bonner if he thought the owners would to higher than 50, and he said "I hope so, for the sake of the season."

Now it's no longer a story of what Hunter and Stern may be able to hash out in a hotel. Now it's about big groups of owners and players, all across the globe, who are not close to seeing eye-to-eye, but do have final say.

"System changes"

There's another thing that could be happening, too.

Remember The Decision? That night in July something happened that angered basketball fans like nothing else. It can be framed as LeBron James being egotistical, or cowardly, or whatever else. But it can also be framed as a young black man just being sick of doing what old, white guys tell him to do.

There was a playbook for free agency, a procedure, some decorum. And James tossed it. No, after earning Dan Gilbert the sun, the moon and the stars he does not also owe him a phone call. No he doesn't have to let some other, whiter, older entity control the production of his announcement. No he doesn't have to stick to the story line of local hero, or even player. He really does have the power to play GM, to assemble a super team, and that's what he would do.

The message to a lot of fans was that James just got it all wrong. But the message to a lot of players was that James did what 1,000 players have been dreaming of doing for years -- he acted fully empowered -- and it's hard to say he failed at it. He made his millions, and the Finals. His team is intact. His business life is sound. He'll be contending for championships for years.

It's a business revolution with young black men, basketball players, in the corner offices. A new way of doing things, long overdue, and happening now.

And maybe that's what Stern encountered in that hotel room in New York: A new generation of fully empowered players who no longer believe they have to conform to much of anything.

Just three days earlier, with James in attendance, James' teammate Dwyane Wade had yelled at David Stern. "You're not pointing your finger at me," Wade said, sources told ESPN The Magazine's Ric Bucher. "I'm not your child."

On Friday, a role player for a middling team got a surprise phone call, from just about the biggest name in the sport -- somebody who had never called him before. The message: Hold firm at 53. We're not caving. Hang in there. It wasn't the only call of its kind, and when you talk to players now there is religious fervor, around the number 53, and around not giving owners any freebies on the other issues.

Owners are indignant that they have endured dreadful losses that must be righted. Players, meanwhile, are indignant that compared to the old CBA every concession to date has come from them. The issues are sounding more religious than ever, and it's doubtful that, at the moment, anyway, either Hunter or Stern is capable of rallying his followers to build a bridge to the other side.

And if it's driven by players' blossoming and deep-rooted self-determination, then they can't be expected to budge. I just hope, for the NBA's sake, that they chose the correct line to draw in the sand.
Link

 

[everysingletime]

Originally Posted by DoubleJs07


I get the whole solidarity piece, but, I think that most of the guys standing behind Fisher don't have the slightest clue about what's going on.

This.

 

[everysingletime]

Originally Posted by DoubleJs07


I get the whole solidarity piece, but, I think that most of the guys standing behind Fisher don't have the slightest clue about what's going on.

This.

 

[everysingletime]

Originally Posted by DoubleJs07


I get the whole solidarity piece, but, I think that most of the guys standing behind Fisher don't have the slightest clue about what's going on.

This.