BDL 25: On the possibility of another NBA lockout

Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 11:39 PM

Adam Silver and lead players' rep Chris Paul. (Getty Images) — Adam Silver and lead players’ rep Chris Paul. (Getty Images)

The NBA offseason has brought many changes to rosters, coaching staffs, and the list of championship contenders. As we draw closer to opening night, it’s time to move our focus from the potential impact of each offseason event and onto the broader issues that figure to define this season. The BDL 25 takes stock of, uh, 25 key storylines to get you up to speed on where the most fascinating teams, players, and people stand on the brink of 2016-17.

The NBA and the league’s players union will have numerous and substantial reasons to opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement on Dec. 15, when such a decision to opt out or in is due, and there will be an NBA lockout in 2017. That much, barring a lightning-quick series of negotiations, is nearly certain.

[Follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball]

What isn’t certain is whether or not the league will lose any games during the 2017-18 season due to a labor impasse. Beyond that, what is also certain is that any loss of game action – and the subsequent revenue earned by the league, its players, its partners, and all the tangential and too-often overlooked silent members of the NBA’s vast economy – would act as a significant and needless blow. Especially in the wake of record revenue, and with interest in the league at an all-time high.

The league has locked out its players four times before. In 1995, during the summer and deep into September. Briefly in 1996, when the two sides failed to come to an agreement on the sharing of unanticipated television revenue. And, infamously, in 1998-99 and 2011. Those two lockouts cost the league 48 games in total, while crunching the remaining games played in the 1999 and 2011-12 seasons into too short a span to stave off both injury and sub-standard play.

In both cases, despite the advancements made in the CBA negotiations (for both sides; though mainly for the league and its owners), the work stoppage wasn’t worth the grandstanding. This cannot be argued away, even by David Stern’s most ardent supporters.

Stern is gone now, stepping down as commissioner in 2014 after a 30-year run in favor of Adam Silver. Silver has earned high marks from both players and ownership groups alike in his short run as commissioner, but each side is well aware that Silver repeatedly acted as the league’s top snarling dog during the contentious negotiations during the 2011 lockout. Neither faction in this expected showdown is without its respective strains of intelligence, so don’t expect the players to view Silver as their buddy heading into discussions, and the owners won’t expect the commissioner to act as their blind lapdog.

With that in place, it is Adam Silver’s actual job to act as a representative for the owners’ whims, no matter how fanciful (these are men that wear foam fingers on the sideline, employ Billy King, seek out vice-presidential nods, and buy the Sacramento Kings) or out-of-touch. These aren’t just cruise ship owners, these are cruise ship fleet magnates who have long lost touch with reality. If you think your team’s highest-paid player couldn’t name the going rate for a 2017 Honda Civic, wait until you get a load of the guy that owns the team he works for.

There is a precedent for a quick and tidy end to things.

In 2004-05 the NBA enjoyed a bit of a rebirth with the dissolution of the Kobe and Shaq Lakers, the freed-up offense in the wake of increased hand-checking laws, the ascension of the Seven Seconds or Less Phoenix Suns, and a wide-open playoff bracket filled with several championship contenders.

Still, few could have recognized the rebirth at the time.

This was the year of the Malice in the Palace. Kobe’s Lakers fell into injury-plagued oblivion while still on national TV an inordinate amount of times, and Shaq’s Miami Heat also fell victim to injury deep into its playoff run. The Suns fell in the Western finals, while that year’s NBA Finals produced a terrifyingly dull seven-game series between the defensive-minded Detroit Pistons and San Antonio Spurs.

Still, even in an era that felt light years past the 1998-99 negotiations, the league and its players found a way to settle their CBA differences by the final week of those Finals, agreeing to a new deal before the offseason even hit. Still flush with its victory in 1999, cutting what would have been a dreary post-Michael Jordan 1998-99 season nearly in half while securing maximum contracts, contract length rules, and a luxury tax, the NBA agreed to let its players earn 57 percent of basketball-related income in 2005 without losing a game or even a day of the offseason.

By 2011, after players like Drew Gooden and Josh Childress earned a whole lot of money, the 30 different NBA owners (with their 30 different year-to-year and summer-to-summer visions) dug in. After a summer of alternating postures, both sides shamed themselves in failing to negotiate in good faith until it was too late to cost everyone way too much.

More than a decade past that 2005 settlement, and the league’s rebirth, it would seem that the league and its players would be keen to settle things even before the Dec. 15 deadline hits. With new NBPA chief Michele Roberts taking over and with Silver more than confident in his ability to not let ego get in the way of securing what is best, it would appear that a league flowing swimmingly would not want to fall into the temptation of letting things fall by the wayside in a summer that slips away far too fast, as was the case in 2011.

The issue here is that there is still too much ground to cover.

Michele Roberts, executive director of the NBPA. (Getty Images)

In 2011 owners were livid that the players – how dare they!! – would attempt to configure employment settings as they saw fit in the form of using leverage and good timing to construct superteams: LeBron James and Co. in Miami, during the 2010 offseason, Carmelo Anthony forcing a trade to New York (featuring a healthy Amar’e Stoudemire) in Feb. 2011, and whatever was to potentially become of the Deron Williams-led Brooklyn Nets in the years that followed.

The Heat didn’t win the championship in 2011, though. Chicago had the best record in the league, Dallas took the title, while outfits in Boston, San Antonio and Oklahoma City acted as championship contenders. Kobe was still near his prime with Pau Gasol and a healthy Andrew Bynum around, the Denver Nuggets would ascend to great things eventually, and Dwight Howard was still wreaking havoc in Orlando. In a good way.

The LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers are the defending champions, but the list of championship contenders seems far slimmer in 2016-17 with the 73-win Golden State Warriors adding Kevin Durant while decimating their chief Western rival in Oklahoma City along the way. There are challengers and the chance for surprises, but teams in Boston, Toronto, Portland and Utah just don’t seem as menacing as those that struck a pose in 2011.

As such, the league’s owners will once again try to lay down a rather un-American (with the full support of many American fans) set of rules that will dissuade superstar free agents from heading where they see fit; though it remains to be seen (in a CBA setup that already goes far out of its way, monetarily, to encourage players to stay with their incumbent teams) just what more the owners can argue for besides the usual brand of lip service.

From there, the idea of a hard salary cap will once again be floated, as will the idea of un-guaranteed contracts. The implementation of both will lead to massive roster turnovers and needless chemistry shakeups from season to season, but these are NBA owners we’re talking about – they can be talked into anything during the summer if it scratches their competitive itch.

From there, the usual suspects will re-emerge. Discussions about the NBA’s age limit will hit, with the NBPA potentially pushing back on its own previous statements on raising the ceiling in order to secure (in the NBA’s argument, at least) another year of paid service for its veteran workers and increased visibility (read: free labor and grooming, as unsatisfactorily led by the NCAA) for its incoming rookies due to an extra year spent on CBS during the month of March.

Both sides will need to determine how, exactly, average players and rookies will be dealt with in the realm of mid-level exception contracts and rookie scale deals (the latter acting as the best value in pro sports).

Now that the cap is set to shoot over $100 million, the idea of a “mid” player making around $5.6 million a season seems like an attack on the NBA’s middle class of players. Especially when a player like Mike Conley – always very good, far from average but far from a superstar and never an All-Star – is set to make Michael Jordan-level money in 2016-17.

With the record-setting 2016 offseason in place, the owners will have heaps of ammunition to use as it sets to battle with the players. Silver and his crew will likely demand some form of reparations in the wake of the NBPA’s refusal to “smooth” out the increase in revenue (and subsequent rise in salary cap levels, as mandated by the CBA). If the NBPA wanted to reward those lucky enough to be free agents during the 2016 offseason with that boon, the owners could argue, than that particular advance on future earnings should be given back in the form of other concessions.

Chief among them will, once again, come in the form of that basketball-related income.

The 2011 CBA established that players will receive half of the basketball-related income (BRI) that the league as a whole earns, which seems fair on a very skeevy surface. Owners have myriad options in hand to obfuscate the direct definition of BRI, as many have stakes in team arenas or sweetheart deals with local television partners that allow for millions upon millions of dollars to essentially go unreported when it comes time to stroke out the laundry list of ingredients to go in this particular pie, pre-50/50 split.

The NBPA is aware of this, and even disregarding the sort of thinking that went into giving the players 57 percent back in 2005 (read: we pay to see the players, not the owners), they’ll have ample reason to insist on an increased share of that pie even with the league going great guns and Solomon Hill making $12 million a year to play for a team with a rather unsteady ownership group.

No amount of preliminary research from the NBPA’s side will be enough to shake the NBA owners’ core beliefs regarding what really constitutes BRI in a negotiating setting quickly, and without blowback. If the players union pushes, it will essentially be demanding the owners change both their way of doing business, and their line of thinking regarding how they work through what is essentially a 30-team strong cadre of vanity projects run by owners who have made their millions and billions elsewhere.

The stalemate that results will not be resolved with alacrity. The NBA will once again report that several teams in strong markets (and with a history of solid on-court play) are losing money, but they’ll also attempt to prevent the NBPA from having a say in how the owners develop their agreements regarding revenue sharing; as was the case in 2011. This time around, you can be sure that the NBPA will use its right to audit several NBA teams’ finances in anticipation of the staredown, something Michele Roberts’ predecessor apparently felt no such need to do.

All of this makes the more fanciful expectations of the NBPA – that a superstar (in this case, Chris Paul and LeBron James)-led faction will argue for the abolition of max contracts, killing the middle class – seem like small potatoes. Frankly, if anything, outside of the fact that they’d be given up paychecks as a result, the players have a series of sound arguments for going on strike.

This wins no hearts, from the same sports fans that continually side with management in labor discussions while wondering why those lucky millionaires can’t hit a free throw/lay down a sacrifice bunt/catch a pass while wide open. The NBPA is well within its rights to think big in this scenario, though, and the NBA and its owners will no doubt respond in like kind.

It’s up to Michele Roberts and Adam Silver to not so much tone down the rhetoric, but to remain sensible as things come to a head.

It all starts with discussions, already in place. The crimes of a too-silent 2011, in this regard, cannot be repeated.

Previously, on BDL 25:

Chris Bosh’s increasingly hazy career prospects

Kevin Durant sets about winning back our love

Stephen Curry’s search for an encore, and for invincibility lost

The NBA, social activism and a change we need to see in 2016-17

The Trail Blazers, and the promise and peril of ‘pretty good’

Will the Pistons ever get into gear?

Introducing the (maybe) thoroughly modern Grizzlies

Is the new-look Indiana Pacers core worth fearing?

It’s time for Anthony Davis to resume blowing our minds