As of July 1st, the National Basketball Association (NBA) officially ‘locked’ the players out of the clubs. The lockout means the players won’t be paid their salaries, can’t use team facilities, can’t negotiate contracts, can’t be traded and won’t receive perks such as health care. The league (and hence the clubs) and the players are at dispute over how the money made by the league should be spent. This is despite the fact that the NBA has had TV ratings that are through the roof, and attendances that are over 90% capacity for a seventh season on the run. Unless the two sides can reach a new agreement, the start of the league will be postponed for the first time since the 1998/99 season, which was shortened from 82 games to 50.
On one side of the argument, you have the league and the clubs who say that due to the expiring collective bargaining agreement (CBA) the league is losing approximately $300 million a year, and that 22 of the 30 NBA franchises are losing money. They say that belts need to be tightened and that the last CBA set a precedent for sky high players salaries coupled with a lack of stability for franchises. The league model needs to be changed and made more sustainable. The league say they have offered the players union a deal worth approximately $5 million a player more than they currently get, which could go up depending on league growth.
On the other side of the argument you have the players. Their argument is that the TV audiences for NBA games are at a record high. The arenas are packed out with fans and have been for the last seven seasons. The money is there for the clubs to earn and that is mostly due to the efforts of the players playing the game. They feel that they should be made to pay for the fact that some owners clearly can’t manage their teams correctly and have over spent paying for players to come to their team. If the teams couldn’t afford to pay the players the contracts they agreed to pay them, they shouldn’t have signed them.
Both sides make a good argument and both have good points. The hard facts are that the league wants to introduce a ‘hard’ salary cap which would mean around $800 million in cuts to players salaries whilst the players want a continuation of the current arrangement (albeit with a promise to cut $100 million a year from salaries). The owners had wanted to do away with guaranteed contracts altogether, but have since changed that to reducing them to 5 & 3 years instead of the current 6 & 5 years. The players again want this to remain the same. There are other little wranglings the two sides are discussing but as you can see, the two sides are still miles apart.
So who exactly is to blame for this lockout? Well that depends on how you look at the facts above. But its clear to see that this could drag on potentially longer than the lockout of 98/99 (which ended in November), and the damage it could do to the leagues reputation amongst fans and sponsors alike could be severely effected too. From now until the lockout ends, officials on both sides are on damage limitation, with surely no side coming out of this situation better off than they previously had been. The REAL question that SHOULD be being asked is, couldn’t all of this been avoided?
Sources
NYDailyNews.com