NBA players Friday joined the ranks of their brethren in baseball and hockey in a full-scale feud over a new contract with the rejection of the tentative labor agreement reached last Wednesday between the league and the players’ association.
“I work for the players,” said NBA Players Association President Buck Williams of the Portland Trail Blazers. “If they tell me they don’t understand or are uncomfortable with the deal, then I must yield to their concerns.”
And the negotiating committee, chaired by Players Association Executive Director Simon Gourdine along with Williams and Charles Smith of the New York Knicks, did Friday during a nearly five-hour meeting in the O’Hare Westin Hotel.
Just hours after the NBA Board of Governors approved the tentative contract by a 28-0 vote, a group of dissident players, led by Bulls Scottie Pippen and B.J. Armstrong, Patrick Ewing of the Knicks and Alonzo Mourning of the Charlotte Hornets, persuaded the association leadership to back off the agreement, particularly a so-called “luxury tax” on free-agent contracts.
The move came amid a threat by a group reportedly consisting of more than 150 players to move to decertify the union and replace it with a new bargaining unit or leave players to bargain individually.
Bulls player representative Steve Kerr said he feared such a move would throw the league into chaos.
The compromise apparently was to order the players’ bargaining group to change elements of the deal while dozens of players still continued efforts toward decertification.
“The luxury tax is something talked about the last couple of days that was the most disconcerting thing,” said Armstrong. “It was a very cosmetic . It looks good, sounds good, but when we get down to it no one really knows the effect of how this would work two or three years down the line.”
That fear, which the players were alerted to by their representatives this week, was that free agency and guaranteed contracts would dry up under the deal worked out between the league and the union and which was presented to owners and players Friday for potential ratification.
It was a six-year deal that included a rookie salary cap, free agency for all rookies after three years, a reduction of the player draft to one round in 1998, increases in the minimum salary to $225,000, an increased salary cap from the current $15.9 million to $23 million and $32.5 million by the end of the deal, an elimination of restricted free agency, but also a “luxury tax” if leaguewide salaries exceed 63 percent of revenues.
“The deal would be worth $4.5 billion to $5 billion over the next six years,” NBA Commissioner David Stern said earlier Friday after the unanimous owner approval. “It has the most liberal free-agent rules in any sport, the smallest number of drafted players, we’re prepared to go with it and we hope the players are too.”
But they weren’t, and the NBA said Friday night it would have no further comment until notified by union leadership.
The league and its players have a no strike/no lockout agreement through the end of next week, which means the expansion draft and collegiate draft will not be affected.
But that agreement ends July 1, which is when free agents are allowed to negotiate with teams. That is one reason why the league was urging a quick solution. It did not want new free agents and rookies being able to sign large new deals that would not be allowed under the proposed new agreement, and which could set off another spending spiral.
Clearly, rank and file didn’t like what Simon (Gourdine) had to say, so he’s being asked to return to negotiate another deal under the threat of a decertification and a clear repudiation of the bargaining process since stars like Pippen, Ewing and Michael Jordan rarely involve themselves in union matters.
In fact, so disinterested were Bulls players in recent years they had no player representative for two years until Kerr joined the team and volunteered to take the job.
But the owners have been equally strong in insisting the loopholes in the salary cap that allowed “balloon” payments and other exceptions be closed to provide some cost certainty. The only exceptions the owners offered were the right to sign rookies to designated salaries and the right to sign a team’s own free agent, but subject to that luxury tax.
But with so many loopholes now, players noted salaries already were close to 60 percent, so the tax almost certainly would come into play quickly–and at 100 percent in two years–leaving teams reluctant to pay players and players with nowhere to go because other teams wouldn’t be allowed salary-cap exceptions.
So the bargaining will begin again with perhaps a threat to the games next fall.
“There’s always that possibility,” said Gourdine. “After long, protracted negotiations it’s a delicate process. And it could unravel at any time and you’ve got a situation similar to other sports.”
