NBA Fails To Learn Another Lockout Lesson, And It’s A Bit Frightening

A major bargaining session between NBA owners and union leaders won’t be held until August at the earliest, reports CBS Sports’ Ken Berger. That means that the league is on the exact pace it was in 1998, when the lockout lopped off two months and 32 games of basketball. Awesome! The worst part is that in 1999, in assessing what they had done, commissioner David Stern and union head Billy Hunter acknowledged that they should not have dragged their feet at the lockout’s start, that failing to get to the table on time hurt the sides’ ability to find a workable deal.

Of course it did. Juries don’t typically come to a verdict by dissolving for a period of time. NBA teams don’t come to contract agreements with players by avoiding them. To hash out an agreement, you need to at least be talking.

It might not be the league’s fault this time: Stern and deputy Adam Silver were pretty clear back on June 30 that they were open to setting up staff meetings for the first week of July and could have a bargaining session by the middle of the month. Are union officials slowing down the process? And are they doing so in hopes of exacting a win at the National Labor Relations Board? No reports have indicated that, but it’s the clue staring me in the face.

NBA.com’s David Aldridge reported this week that the NLRB could soon announce whether it agrees with players that the league has negotiated in bad faith; resolution of that complaint was expected to take much longer. The union is basically stuck until this matter is resolved, and though it’d really only be a P.R. win, it seems fairly important to the union. The union can’t decertify and move to file anti-trust litigation against the NBA until the NLRB decision is handed down, unless it wants to light the NLRB claim on fire. If it did so, it’d be following a similar playbook -- not identical, but similar -- to the NFL’s union.

But here’s the difference: the NFL and its union had lots of time to work out a deal, and spent lots of time to work out a deal. We’re not getting that yet in the NBA, and that’s what will solve this issue. Minor court victories follow the path to inertia, and -- as we learned in 1998 -- that’s something that doesn’t help save a season.

I understand the union has to use the courts to spook the NBA and keep the negotiations true. I just wish there were actual negotiations to worry about. Get this fixed, please.

There is little I love more than Basketball-Reference.com’s NBA Elo Player Rater. It’s something like a massively collective NBA player ranking system that asks you to vote for the better of two players who typically have nothing in common but being in the same general range in the Elo system. B-Ref has the full breakdown; just know that’s adapted from a chess master ranking system, and once offered me the chance to compare Dave Corzine and Ruben Patterson. This system is not to be f--ked with.

We will periodically visit with the Elo Player Rater here in The Hook in a feature dubbed Battleground Basketball!. Today, our lucky battle is, strangely enough, Lionel Hollins and Jason “White Chocolate” Williams. And yes, as a matter of fact, Lionel Hollins has been Jason Williams’ coach on multiple occasions, including last season!

Let’s break it down.

Hollins is a slightly better regular season scorer, Williams has the assist advantage by a decent margin. Neither was a great shooter or terribly efficient scorer. Williams has a better PER, largely due to his great assist rate and smaller turnover rate. Hollins was definitely the better playoff peformer. It’s close!

So we have to turn to the intangibles. Mmm ... catch a whiff of those intangibles! ... What do you mean you can’t smell them because they are not tangible? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Williams is White Chocolate!

Tie goes to the kid with WHIT EBOY tattooed on his knuckles, the man we can blame for Hedo Turkoglu’s drawl: Jason Williams. Disagree? Cast your vote in the poll at the end of the column.

(How awesome is the Elo Player Rater? After casting my vote for J-Will, the next pairing was Swen Nater vs. Ricky Sobers. Better than fiction.)

AAU basketball is a playground for the malevolent; it’s been that way for time immemorial, predating the NBA’s 2006 age minimum mandate. It’s not exactly rare to read about men like David Salinas, the AAU coach who was also an investment banker with clients who included NCAA coaches and whose AAU players happened to frequently wind up committing to those programs at which coaches chose Salinas to manage their investments (weird!) and who last week apparently committed suicide. AAU as an institution has a noble aim -- competitive youth basketball that allows prospects to show off their skills against better competition than most school leagues provide -- but it’s really, really messed up.

The NBA age minimum didn’t create this problem. Not even close. But it forces prospects -- high school kids -- to parlay with the scavengers, and because kids now have to go to college, overseas or the D-League for a year before entering their name in the NBA Draft, the power of AAU predators has only grown. Basically, the NBA empowered the David Salinases of the AAU by forcing almost all top basketball prospects through the NCAA machine.

Don’t get it twisted: the age minimum was a great business move for the NBA. The league can now keep its nose out of the high school circuit -- most teams still do have stringer scouts at major H.S. tournaments, of course -- and even pay less attention to AAU events, knowing that there will be a year of college or international tape to watch. Without question, the age minimum has saved the NBA money. The data shows that teams haven’t exactly avoided busts at a higher rate, but all the same, the NBA as a business has benefitted. I suppose I should know by now that that’s all that matters, right?

The Hook is a daily NBA column by Tom Ziller. See the archives.