Wednesday, representatives of the NBA owners and the Players Association will sit down in a room together and talk about a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. They’ll do the same thing a couple times when the NBA finals series shifts to Dallas next week.
So, at least they are talking.
But even David Stern admitted that avoiding any lockout at this point is going to be “a challenge.” The current deal expires at the end of June, the lockout would start July 1 (and teams have already gotten detailed instructions from the league on what that would entail). Stern expounded upon his thoughts in a generally positive press conference, as reported by Howard Beck of the New York Times.
“I know both sides will make their best offers before” July 1, Stern said, “because if they don’t, then there’s going to be a lockout that would be destructive of our business from the owners’ perspective, and the players’ perspective.”
Last week, the union delivered what Silver called “some new ideas” to league officials. It was not a full-blown new proposal, but it built on the offer the union made last summer, which the owners generally rejected. Stern said the new ideas addressed at least some of the larger financial concerns.
“And we’ll be suggesting some new ideas to them tomorrow,” he said.
The fact is the two sides remain far, far apart. The owners continue to suggest radical changes to the NBA’s financial system — including a hard salary cap and rollbacks in player salaries — that the players simply will not give in on easily. The negotiations have gone so poorly the players submitted charges against the owners to the National Labor Relations Board (charges the owners deny).
The owners say the league is losing money, to the tune of $300 million or more a season this season and that big changes are needed. The players union says that the owners need to do a better job of revenue sharing and they point to the recent sale of franchises at record prices to suggest things are not as dire as the owners make it out to be.
For all the at-least-we’re-talking comments out of both sides, there are quotes like this one from NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver, the league’s lead negotiator, that point to the kind of radical changes the owners are seeking and why it will be hard to get a deal (as reported by Ken Berger at CBSSports).
“Costs have risen much faster than revenues over the course of this deal,” Silver said. “… At the same time, non-player costs are growing at a much higher percentage, and the built-in increases of our contracts are much higher than inflation and the growth of our business. For example, the three key players on the Heat all have 10.5 percent per year increases built into their deals for next year, at a point when revenues in our business are growing somewhere around 3 percent. It’s a broken system.”
There will be a lockout this summer. The next real question — the most important question — is will it cost games?
