The NBA has officially cancelled games in the upcoming season.
Not preseason games or exhibitions, but real games; the opening two weeks’ worth.
After meeting for in excess of 15 hours over the weekend, a deal could not be struck by the Monday deadline between the NBA and the NBPA.
Unlike their NFL counterparts, there was no eleventh hour salvation; instead fans are left with the cold reality that – as of right now – there is no National Basketball Association.
Chris Sheridan is a former lead NBA writer for the AP and ESPN, and one of the most respected voices in the basketball world, and he’s been here before.
Sheridan covered the 1998-99 NBA lockout and remembers the extent of the damage caused by that work stoppage.
He spoke to Liam Quinn about how ‘stupidity’ and ‘greed’ have left the league in a devastating position.
LQ: Lockout coverage has been relatively limited in Australia, what would you say are the main factors?
CS: Number one, money. Players have been 57 percent of the money for 15 years now, and the owners were only getting 43 percent. The owners want a 50/50 split.
Operating expenses have tripled or quadrupled but franchise values over those years have also doubled, tripled or quadrupled, but it comes down to the owners wanting it to be an easier, profitable business.
Also, they want to make some rules changes, so that the richer teams don’t have an advantage over the teams that don’t make as much money. For instance, for the Lakers, it’s like minting money. The amount of money they make from their ticket sales, TV deals and radio deals in Los Angeles.
Whereas a team like the New Orleans Hornets, they play in a smaller, poorer city – there’s not a Fortune 500 company there and there’s not a lot of corporate dollars being pumped in – so their revenues are nothing like the Lakers revenues.
The NBA has a system where you can spend as much money as you want to get the best players, but you have to pay a penalty called a ‘luxury tax’. If the Lakers want to spend 100 million dollars on player salaries, they have the freedom to do that.
The owners want to change that to give the smaller market teams more of a level playing field, when it comes to competing for a championship and be profitable.
They need a bigger piece of the pie, financially.
But that’s a lot for the players to accept – to give back money like that – because they’re the product. There wouldn’t be an NBA without them. The players are willing to give back some of the money, but not as much as the owners are asking for.
LQ: During the entire situation, you’ve been one of the few optimistic voices regarding the lockout. Has that changed?
CS: I was appalled by the level of stupidity that I saw from wise men.
I know a lot of these guys, from Commissioner Stern to Deputy Adam Silver and their equals on the Players Union side, and they’re not stupid guys, but they just did a stupid thing.
I was of the opinion that the owners were going to push this as long and as far as they could, and reach as deep into the players wallets as they could. But, when the time came to get the deal done, they would. It makes sense to keep the NBA going and not have an interruption to the upward growth the league has been on the last several years, but especially the last three years.
A lot of my contemporaries stopped watching Basketball about 10-12 years ago when Michael Jordan retired from the Bulls, and once you tune out for a few years it’s very hard to go back. All the players will have changed; you don’t recognize people and you’re just not up to speed. As a consequence, you don’t come back.
But they’ve all been watching the last two or three years.
The Celtics and Lakers meeting in the Finals, LeBron James’s free agency, the subsequent the super-team in Miami and the way they flamed out in the Finals; these are very compelling storylines, and the NBA recaptured a lot of the fans they’d lost over the years.
But they’ll switch it off if they get angry. They’ll say ‘I didn’t care about the NBA, and now they’ve pissed me off, so I’m not going to watch’.
They could’ve avoided that by coming to a settlement, they would’ve actually had a honeymoon with their fans. So much would have had to happen in such a short time before November 1; the NBA would have been big news. You would have had three months of offseason activity condensed into three weeks. It would’ve driven media coverage and stoked the interest even more. Crucially, they would’ve attracted fair-weather fans. The hardcore fans are always going to be there, but the fair-weather fans aren’t.
The frustrating thing about it is both sides know where the deal is to be made; they just didn’t have it in them to make the deal when the time was right.
I expected better out of them.
They’re hurting their product, and turning off their fans; maybe it’s penny wise but pound-foolish.
They’ll come out of this with a better labor deal, but how much damage will they do to their business?
I fear the damage to their product will take a half-decade, maybe even more to undo.
LQ: Realistically, is there any chance we’ll still see a full season?
CS: Anything can happen.
They could push the playoffs back two weeks, they end the middle of June, but there’s nothing really going on at the end of June.
In 1998-99 that’s what they did. They used those two ‘dead weeks’ as time they could fill in. If they make a deal in the next two weeks, they can reschedule cancelled games and still play an 82-game season.
Having said that, when you have a fight that doesn’t end peacefully, it’s very hard to get back in and try to end it. (Monday) was a moment when either something was going to get done, or their positions were going to become more polarized and both sides would dig in their heels.
That’s the way these things usually go, and I don’t see how this’ll be different.
Unless the public backlash in so strong, that Davis Stern has no choice but to fix the situation…I see this becoming trench warfare.
There’s going to be a lot of casualties and no one is going to gain any ground, until someone says ‘enough is enough, lets end this madness’.
LQ: Is either side more to blame?
CS: It’s a matter of opinion.
The owners, in my opinion, got to greedy.
They won the negotiations, they were going to come away with a ton of money and concessions from the players, but they’re trying to get more and more. ‘Piling on’ is the way the Players Union described it.
And at a certain point, even if you’re losing a negotiation, you will play your leverage card. The players leverage card is that without them, there’s no NBA, and without an NBA, these franchises lose money.
The owners should have executed an end game, got x-amount of money, and then settled for the good of the sport. They didn’t do that.
Since it was such a one sided negotiation, it’s hard to blame the players. They addressed the owners concerns; owners said they were losing 300 million dollars, so the players gave them back 200 million.
That’s a lot of money.
Players really did reach out, but there’s a certain point when they weren’t going to cave and give the owners everything they asked for.
LQ: Now that we’ve seen games officially cancelled, do you think more players will ‘take their talents’ overseas?
CS: Well, Patty Mills is playing…
I like Patty, he’s a good kid, and man he’s fast. I met him in Shanghai when the Boomers were playing Team USA; he was faster than Chris Paul that day…it was something to see.
But, the problem (with players relocating) is that a lot of the European teams have begun playing and have spent their budgets. If it would’ve been a certainty that games were going to be cancelled, more players would have gone over.
Players hoped this would be settled amicably, so they waited. Now, there’s not much money left. I don’t think you’ll see many superstars go.
Kobe might go to Italy, but he’s a whole different guy.
But the guys you’ll see going, whether it’s to China, Europe, Australia or wherever, are marginal players…who can’t afford to not to get paid.
But, it wouldn’t surprise me if Dwight Howard went; he’s a little different too.
LQ: Just last week we almost saw Andrew Bogut sign to play in Australia, but his insurance didn’t cover it.
CS: Well, (Bogut)’s got about nineteen different things wrong with him, and a lot of those get excluded from his insurance. He just couldn’t put all the money he has coming to him at risk. It’s a shame, because he has a love for the game, and he can’t understand why this stupidity is reigning supreme.
From getting to know him, he doesn’t tolerate stupidity.
LQ: On Monday morning, there seemed a realistic chance of a deal. What went wrong?
CS: They spent all their time arguing back and forth over systems issues, without even getting to the real issue of money.
After a certain time, they weren’t making any progress and realized that it was hopeless. Both sides weren’t in compromise mode, at a time when (they) needed to be.
Whatever the reasoning, the unforgiving truth is that as of this moment, the upcoming season is in doubt.
If it didn’t go ahead, the loss of another potentially great NBA year would be a tragedy for fans, one that stems from the shortsighted stupidity of the people tasked with running it.
Follow Chris Sheridan’s work on his blog.
Liam Quinn is a first-year Bachelor of Journalism student at La Trobe University. You can read more of his work on his blog, and follow him on Twitter: @liamquinn23
This piece originally appeared here on BackPageLead.com.au.
