Entering Day 134, we’re as close as possible to reaching the end of the NBA lockout as possible without quite being totally there. We may have been duped before over the last month or so into believing the NBA and National Basketball Players Association had come to this point, but it wasn’t like this.
“There comes a time when you have to be through negotiating, and we are,” NBA commissioner David Stern said late Thursday night in New York after nearly 24 hours of negotiations over two days.
What has the end of negotiating produced? A “last, best” offer from the owners to the union that the players will have to decide over the coming days if they’re willing to accept. Stern’s next offer, if this one isn’t accepted by Tuesday, will be much worse.
“It’s not the greatest proposal in the world,” NBPA executive director Billy Hunter said. “But I have an obligation to at least present it to our membership. So that’s what we’re going to do.”
A few observations as things will continue to unfold on Friday, with likely plenty of frustration expressed among the players to counterbalance the optimism that there will be a season starting next month:
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- The players were never going to win this negotiation. Dropping down to a 50-50 split of the league’s estimated $4 billion pot of income from their 57 percent spot in the last deal is a huge concession by itself. The currently offered deal will also change free agency, through the luxury tax and changes to the mid-level exception, in an attempt to limit it and prevent teams from spending their way to a championship – which the league hopes will keep the playing field more level for its smaller-market teams. No, the players won’t like it. But they’d like contract rollbacks, a hard salary cap and 47 percent of the income even less in Stern’s next deal.
- The possibility of a 72-game season is the bait for the players. As if he’d had it planned all along, Stern said Thursday that a 72-game season could start on Dec. 15. The All-Star Game would still happen, the playoffs would move back a week, and the missed paychecks for the players would be kept at a minimum – one missed paycheck. The basketball, no matter what, won’t be as good, the injuries will be more, and the general feeling won’t be great due to likely player animosity over the deal and general disgust among the general public that billionaires and millionaires would dare squabble publicly over money in this kind of economy. In multiple conversations I’ve had recently with cursory NBA fans, their frustration has been directed at the players, not the owners. It’s a disappointing perception but one that is important to understand. The players’ best chance to change it is by playing – and to play, they’ve got to accept the deal.
- The players aren’t unified and many won’t like the deal that’s been presented to them, and that’s what will make this a dicey process over the coming days. There are plenty of players that simply want to play. That includes guys on the bottom end of the pay scale, such as rookies who haven’t yet seen a paycheck, and veterans like Kobe Bryant, whose window for another NBA championship closes further with every passing day and has expressed publicly his desire to reach a deal. There are also those, such as a player-side source who texted the following to me on Wednesday: “KB24 needs to shut it.” There is a significant effort in place to try and keep the union membership together as a whole and fight further through decertifying the union and seeing if that can shift the bargaining leverage in their favor. Either way, a lot of discussion between the players and their agents will now happen. What it produces remains to be seen. If it produces a vote for the deal, then the start of the season will come quick – that feeling is definite this time around. If the players decide it’s not worth it, well, then things are no different than they’ve been for the last month but you can almost certainly count out NBA games on Christmas.
