The Official S2 NBA Lockout Thread!

6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

1. Thursday's owners-players meeting will be …




J.A. Adande, ESPN.com: Useless. The two sides are too far apart -- and the deadline for losing the season is too far away -- for them to accomplish anything in this final session before the collective bargaining agreement expires.
Joe Gerrity, Hornets 247: Uneventful. The two sides are admittedly nowhere near a deal. With Summer League already canceled and any potential opening night still months and months away, why would either side give ground at all at this point in negotiations? Expect some heated comments from both sides and absolutely nothing in terms of progress.
Zach Harper, Daily Dime Live: Disappointing. When they come out of the meetings at a veritable impasse, we'll be looking at the uncertainty of not knowing when we'll see basketball again. Doesn't mean we'll lose any games or time. But we just won't know for a long time.
Brendan Jackson, Celtics Hub: Fruitless. There is no chance a deal gets done to prevent a lockout. There will be a lot of posturing but, in the end, the players will be organizing workouts among themselves. What the players want and what the owners want are still two very different things. They'll eventually meet somewhere in the middle, but no one knows exactly where yet.
Jared Wade, 8 Points, 9 Seconds: Pointless. Derek Fisher should just stock up on crab cakes, tiramisu or whatever else is that they serve at these contentious negotiation sessions. Because that's the last thing the owners are going to offer the players for a long time.

 

Re: 6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

2. Which player or team would benefit most from a shortened season?


J.A. Adande, ESPN.com: The Spurs. They could've used a shorter season in 2010-11, when they finished off a 57-13 start by losing 12 times in their final 18 games, including a first-round series loss to the Grizzlies. They got injured and looked tired at the end. Fifty games must sound really appealing right about now.
Joe Gerrity, Hornets 247: The Spurs. They seem to be a little too old and creaky to go the distance lately. A shortened season could give them one more chance to steal a title before the dynasty fades into the distant past.
Zach Harper, Daily Dime Live: If he were on a team, I'd have a killer Eddy Curry joke right now.
Instead, I'll say Tim Duncan. If we end up with a 50-game season again, Timmy will be able to give the Spurs more on offense. Even if the games are jammed together, he can really let opponents have it on the block.
Brendan Jackson, Celtics Hub: The Miami Heat and LeBron James. A shortened season is good for any young, athletic, streaky team, and Miami happens to be the best one. Veteran-laden teams need to add pieces, and those pieces have to build chemistry. The Heat proved that they can get to the Finals with James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and a bag of balls.
Jared Wade, 8 Points, 9 Seconds: Dirk and the Mavericks. There is no team in the league more confident right now, and the fewer games the Heat have to coalesce, the Lakers have to get right, the Thunder have to mature and the rest of the teams have to incorporate their new acquisitions, the better the chance for a Dallas repeat.

 

Re: 6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

3. Which player or team would lose the most from a shortened season?



J.A. Adande, ESPN.com: Kobe Bryant. Let's say there's another 50-game season, as there was in the 1998-99 lockout. That would mean Kobe will have missed 64 games because of lockouts in his career. Keep that in mind if he finishes, say, 1,500 points behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the NBA's all-time scoring list.
Joe Gerrity, Hornets 247: The Hornets. A lockout-shortened season wouldn't derail the unprecedented efforts the NBA has made to keep the team in New Orleans, but it would create yet another hurdle. The Hornets need fan support throughout the summer and next year to find an owner, and few events drive spectators away more than lockouts.
Zach Harper, Daily Dime Live: The Lakers might have a difficult time with a shortened season. Without Phil Jackson guiding the flow of their season, they won't have a lot of margin for error if they decide to shake up the roster. A slide at the wrong time could bury them.
Brendan Jackson, Celtics Hub: First-round picks and fringe veterans. Rookies have the potential to make a huge jump in their first year, and anything that stifles that development is not good for career longevity. At the same time, there is always a new crop of players with one foot out of the NBA. Once you're out, you're hardly ever let back in … unless you're Eddy Curry, I s'pose.
Jared Wade, 8 Points, 9 Seconds: The Clippers. Donald Sterling relies on the revenue generated from all 82 games to power his mechanical heart.

 

Re: 6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

4. Whose side are you on: the owners' or the players'?



J.A. Adande, ESPN.com: I'm with the players. People spend money to watch players play, not owners own. NBA players have already accepted a salary cap, a rookie wage scale and a maximum salary, and owners still want more to cover their own mistakes. The owners are the ones who want to deprive us of basketball to suit their needs; when the players are fiscally irresponsible they don't shut down the league.
Joe Gerrity, Hornets 247: The owners. It's hard for me to get past the fact that just about every player under contract makes millions a year for playing a sport most people participate in at the YMCA, while owners invest hundreds of millions of dollars and often lose money.
Zach Harper, Daily Dime Live: I'd like to vote Independent here. There is good and bad to both sides right now, and they both need to give in a little. I like the current system in the NBA and think it just needs a few tweaks instead of a massive overhaul. Ultimately, I'll end up siding with whichever side gets this done.
Brendan Jackson, Celtics Hub: I'm with whoever makes basketball a reality next season … which is just a gutless way of saying that I can see both sides' perspective. No one in any socioeconomic stratum wants to take a pay cut, but it's pretty evident that the CBA needs overhauling. The Joe Everyman in me wants the players to keep fighting, but the fan in me wants them to keep playing.
Jared Wade, 8 Points, 9 Seconds: The hot dog vendors. So far, neither side seems to be negotiating in earnest. There has been no urgency, and both camps have dug in, resigned to the inevitability of a lockout that is now imminent. And if this delay in taking the negotiations seriously in favor of juvenile posturing leads to missed games, it won't be the millionaires or the billionaires who suffer the most.

 

Re: 6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

5. What will you turn to in the event of a lockout?


J.A. Adande, ESPN.com: I'll be watching classic series online on HBO Go. I already caught up on the "Game of Thrones" episodes I missed during the playoffs. I was a late arrival to "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "Entourage," so during the lockout I'll peep the early seasons. I'll check out "Deadwood." And I'll re-watch all five seasons of "The Wire." Any other recommendations?
Joe Gerrity, Hornets 247: Without Summer League to complete my life, I'm taking my talents (and my girlfriend) to the Netherlands and Sweden for a few weeks. Otherwise, I'm working to integrate Hornets247 and Hornets Report, and hosting a ticket-sales event for the Hornets. Also, I'll be dancing, eating seafood and attending festivals in the fantasy land they call New Orleans.
Zach Harper, Daily Dime Live: I'm going to turn my attention to what I usually do: watching, tweeting and writing about (mostly bad) movies. I'll watch a lot of baseball, check out the Euroleague and play a lot of video games. Basically, I can't wait to push all of this stuff aside to spend 15 hours a day watching, discussing and consuming the NBA.
Brendan Jackson, Celtics Hub: I am going to parlay my TrueHoop TV gig into a successful movie career. Is Scorsese still into romanticizing Boston Irish? If so, I've got some pale skin and a red beard he should see. In reality, I'm going to save a lot of money by not renewing my NBA League Pass and actually play basketball. Aw, who am I kidding? I can't not have League Pass.
Jared Wade, 8 Points, 9 Seconds: The stack of books that has been gathering dust on my shelf while I have spent the bulk of my AM hours over the past five years watching the likes of Tuesday night Warriors-Kings games. I might even try to find out what getting a good night's sleep between November and June feels like. Gonna be weird.


http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?page=5-on-5-110630

 

Re: 6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

11 thoughts about the end of the CBA

By Henry Abbott

It's June 30, scheduled to be the final day of the NBA's collective bargaining agreement. 11 things to think about:

1. Huge point: The starting point of these negotiations was not "will the next deal be better for the players or the owners?" The starting point was "how much better will this deal be for the owners?" In other words, the players always accepted the future won't be quite as rich as the past. With that in mind, in 2010-2011, players paychecks totaled about 1.99 billion dollars after the 8 percent escrows were held back. After months of doom and gloom, and talk of big rollbacks of salaries, the league has now essentially offered to pay players $2 billion next season. I know, I know, that offer comes with plenty of unpleasantness for players in the future. But next year's salaries have got to be a, if not the, key issue among the current players who vote. With that in mind, I disagree with the assessment that the two sides are worlds apart. Just for fun, let's say the league offered to pay players $2.2 billion next season. Would a majority of players really prefer staying home to that?
2. The union looked at all of the owners' various proposals and declared that they had real religion on hard salary caps and guaranteed contracts. The league has moved a lot on both issues. They have moved all the way to the players' position on guaranteed contracts, and the "flex cap" somewhere north of $62 million being tossed around now is a far cry from the hard cap of $45 million that was in the mix in March. Meanwhile, the players were nice enough to open negotiations with a vague but meaningful offer to take less money. The things both parties have given up meant a lot, and are, to me, another reason to expect the lights to be on next fall.

1. The idea that owners want new kinds of cost certainty is a bit of a myth. They have it right now. NBA contracts are literally a zero sum game. Pretend that this last season every NBA owner had gone Cuban and signed up a roster where five guys made more than $7 million a season. In that world, the average income for each team's players would have been a little more than $72 million. Now, pretend that the opposite happened, and that every owner had instead Maloofed their way to tiny salaries, not offering any max deals and loading up on Pooh Jeters and the like. Know how much each team's players would make in that world, all together? The exact same $72 million or so. The existing deal gives players precisely 57 percent of basketball-related income no matter what all the contracts say. The league has had perfect cost certainty since 1998. All that fluctuates is which owners and players spend and receive what percentages of all that.

 

Re: 6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

1. The motivation behind a team-by-team hard cap is not to give owners a sense how much players will cost. It's to give owners a sense of how much competing will cost. Now that we don't have the high-payroll, low-wins Knicks to kick around anymore, it's fairly clear that spending more on salaries correlates decently with winning (although the Bulls are an exception). The Mavericks spent the most and won. Teams that spent very little (Timberwolves, Clippers, Cavaliers, Kings) generally did poorly. Competitive owners like Mark Cuban -- who has faced steep losses in recent years -- are left in a tough position: Win or be profitable? With a hard cap, Cuban's losses would be controlled or eliminated even as he goes all out to beat the competition. This is a big decision for the owners to make. Cuban can save money right now by standing down in the never-ending arms race of signing all the best players. Is it worth a lockout to save him, and owners like him, from themselves?
2. The league even has something like a team-by-team hard cap right now. The many constraints on pay (a maximum of 15 players, the rookie scale, the mid-level exception, maximum contracts, etc.) make it only possible to spend so much. If you have $200 million a year to blow on salaries, you simply would not be able to get it done under the current CBA, no matter how hard Isiah Thomas might have tried. I don't know what that maximum number is -- certainly it's more than $100 million -- but it's worth noting that in giving into a host of salary limitations in the past, the union has effectively already agreed to a very high hard cap. Now on the table is not the idea of putting a totally new cap in place. What's on the table is bringing the existing de facto cap down.
3. Chris Sheridan pointed this out on Twitter, and he's dead right: Both sides are being fairly nice to each other. That means something -- from combatants like this, who are so well versed in nastiness. I can't speak for hardline owners, but it'd be tough to convince me that players and league officials don't really want a deal.
4. The story is that a hard cap would increase parity, and therefore TV ratings. Although the best available evidence is that if it would do that, it would only do so a little bit.
5. Another thing that's happening in these talks: The NBA is shifting a bit, from a league whose primary audience buys tickets, to a league whose primary audience watches on television. Television revenues have the potential to get so big that, like in the NFL, ticket revenue stops being make-or-break.

 

Re: 6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

1. The league and its owners are spending more than they anticipated on things like marketing (to sell tickets in a bad economy), paying coaches and GMs (who are making a lot), and expanding the game to China, Europe, India and Africa. Those are all smart things to spend on. But, here's the kicker: When those things come with revenue, under the existing CBA, the league has to give players 57 percent of that revenue. So in theory they could spend $100 million in China, which might make them $120 million in revenues. Then they'd have to give players 57 percent of that $120 million in income, meaning that their fledgling overseas marketing efforts, even while technically in the black, would in fact leave owners something like $50 million in the hole. Makes it hard for the league to grow aggressively. That was a mistake the league made in the last CBA that they'd like to fix now. Redefining "basketball-related income" is seen as nothing but taking money from players, but it's also a reasonable attempt to give owners incentives to do what's best for the league, including investing in China. Meanwhile, there are other kinds of income that the owners should share as they do in the current CBA: In a few years most owners expect to have a far bigger national TV deal. That income comes with very little added cost, and it makes all kinds of sense for owners to share that generously with players.
2. Owners have tricky ways of making their businesses look like they're doing far worse than they really are. They get tax advantages. They get public money. They get a high profile (Mark Cuban on David Letterman, Mikhail Prokhorov ascending in Russian politics) that benefits their other businesses in untold ways. They get to do sweetheart deals with other businesses they own, whether that's the local cable channel, a jet charter company or the parking lot outside the stadium. It's tempting to assume, through all that, that owners who cry of financial pain are simply lying. And no doubt, in some cases, they are. It would take a hundred accountants, lawyers and economists a year to really calculate the profits and losses of most teams. There is one great equalizer, though, and that's selling the team. Whatever the total, real-world benefit of owning a team is, it's pretty much lost when you sell it. And so, if owning a team is so great, nobody would ever sell, and certainly nobody would ever sell at a loss. And yet sources insist that the Bobcats, Hornets and Nets -- and depending who you ask now the Sixers, Pistons, and Hawks -- have all sold or are selling at "take this thing off my hands" prices. No small number of owners marinated in the benefits of ownership, weighed it against the costs, and wanted out. So, no, I'm not asking you to take the NBA's word for it that 22 of 30 NBA teams lost money last year. The math is undoubtedly more complex. But I am certain that plenty of NBA owners are not loving the current set-up, and therefore it's not strange that the owners are driving a hard bargain, especially as a huge chunk of today's owners bought their teams in a good economy for hundreds of millions. They're like the people on your block who paid a fortune for their house -- they have far less wiggle room than the little old couple next door that bought for $30,000 in the 1960s. These owners are prepared to drive hard bargains.
3. Public money for stadiums has become scarce, and I have to believe that's part of the owners' pleas for financial relief from players. Huge moneymaking buildings for free or cheap have been no small part of what makes owning a team a no-brainer. Now teams in need of stadiums -- like the Kings and whatever team may one day relocate to Seattle -- face tough economics. Getting either deal done requires some kind of miracle. And in that context, if you ever fantasized about a world where taxpayers didn't contribute so much to buildings -- even if it meant players earned a little less -- well, your time is now.

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop

 

Re: 6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

Happy Birthday!

Are you and HCP twins?

 

Re: 6/30/2011 The day the NBA earth stood still

KBerg_CBS Ken Berger
BREAKING: Owners have informed players they are locking out



KBerg_CBS Ken Berger
Union has no plans to decertify as of now and will continue to negotiate, according to a source.

 

Does Nolan Smith get a NBA paycheck before the lockout or will his agent lend him money to get a place to live and a car here in Portland?

 

The good news is the longer the lockout the longer Nate has to improve and expand his playbook.