One of the basic facts about the NBA lockout that there is no path around is that the NBA’s owners and commissioner have locked out the players. They took action. They are the folks with the power to shut down the sport and they are the folks with the power to bring it back. They are the ones seeking massive change, massive concessions from players. The players all say that they want to work, many of them claiming to be dismissed that as the NBA seeks record profits the owners have prevented the players for doing their job.
Was There Any Way Around An NBA Lockout?
Is the NBA lockout morally offensive, or a simple reality of collectively bargained business? The Hook digs into the ethos of labor stoppages, and how David Stern is doing it all wrong.
There’s no way around this: it’s true. The owners instituted the lockout because they claim to need major concessions from players in order to save the league.
But did the owners and David Stern have any other option?
As an American, the idea of a lockout is morally offensive. This is something I’ve personally struggled with in covering the lead-up and consummation of the lockout. To tell someone under contract that they cannot work until their class of workers agrees to massive cuts in pay is, to me, un-American. It’s legal bullying. It’s just wrong, and it’s what the NBA has done to its players.
At the same time, a real part of collective bargaining is that collective bargaining agreements end. That’s part of the deal: workers get to negotiate general conditions of employment, but only for a term, at which point the conditions are re-assessed and the agreement re-negotiated. This is one of the drawbacks of working in a field where job conditions are collectively bargained: those conditions can change with the wind. (Ask public employees in Wisconsin, who dealt with a problem much greater than “changing conditions.”)
Think of the CBA like a player's contract. A player -- or his agent, in most cases (word to Gilbert Arenas) -- negotiates a salary over a term with a team. There are other details in there: trade kickers, promo appearances, bonuses, etc. But at its core, the player's contract lays out how much the player will get paid and for how long.
The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement lays out how much players will get paid in the aggregate over the length of the agreement. There are tons of other details, many of which legislate how that pay is spread around (maximum contracts, rookie scale, minimum and maximum team salaries). But at its core, the CBA lays out how much the players will get paid and for how long.
Right now, the team (the NBA) doesn’t want to re-sign the players unless it gets a steep, steep discount. So we have impasse. But how does someone like me -- someone ethically repulsed by the game of “big wallet takes little wallet” a lockout emulates -- come to grips with the “this is business” reality of the situation?
Maybe it won’t work for everyone, but my particular ideology can be managed by reminding myself that owners don’t really have any other option.
As the league has argued ad nauseum, you can't "revenue-share" out of losses. If the NBA is losing money in the aggregate -- which it claims it is -- then even serious revenue sharing won't fix things. If you took $50 million from the Lakers and Knicks and give that to the Kings and Pacers, you'll still have $300 million in leaguewide losses. They'll just be shifted.
We’ve learned that lengthening the negotiation term doesn’t help. The NBA and players’ union started negotiating in 2009. Extraordinarily little progress was made by June 30, 2011. None has been made since. So the NBA could not have realistically offering to extend the existing CBA one year and negotiated a new deal in the interim. It would have just delayed the inevitable a year, and piled up another season of aggregate losses, further emboldening the owners to push for serious reform. “Entrenchment” is the word that comes to mind.
The only other option here is a lockout, a raising of the stakes to push both sides to the table (via the courtroom, possibly). Lockouts are sad, stomach-churning affairs ... but they are legitimate paths to compromise ... just like strikes. That’s ultimately how I learned to accept the lockout as a legitimate option for the NBA: there was no other option. If you’ve read my work a bit, you can probably guess that I find labor strikes totally legit options in most cases. Well, why shouldn’t the guys writing the checks have the same option?
That doesn’t mean that the owners are being reasonable altogether, because they are not. They are being, in a word, ridiculous. The entrenchment is sickening; the idea that moving from a proposal that cut all salaries (current and future) by a third to a proposal decoupling salary from revenue so that owners can capture all future growth of the league is “progress” is insulting. If I were a player, I would be laughing as hard as they are at the owners’ stance as of August 5, because it is pathetic. Guaranteed profits? You can’t complain about the Eddy Currys and then ask players to give back money so that Donald F’n Sterling can be assured a profit every season.
But let’s separate the issues as this issue dives into the courtroom: the owners have the right to lock out the players, but they do not have the right to mislead fans about the conditions of the league or about the actions of the players. They do not have the right to get whatever they want. They do not have the right to guaranteed profits just because the league makes a lot of money. They do not have the right to attack the union for making procedural threats when the entire basis of the league’s lockout intimidation since 2009 (or earlier) has been based on procedural threats.
The lockout was unavoidable, yes. But based on what’s happened to date, the NBA is doing it all wrong.
The Hook is a daily NBA column written by Tom Ziller that runs on SBNation.com Monday through Friday. See the archives.
