My basketball highlight was one I didn’t see but have heard plenty about. It was in January 1999, when it seemed the NBA was about to cancel the 1998-99 season because of a contract impasse.
It was a last players’ meeting before it appeared Commissioner David Stern would be the first pro sports boss to cancel a season.
It figured to be a turbulent meeting with players, who typically are followers in such matters and fearful of breaking whatever code it may be that binds them against the forces of management, on the brink of losing their jobs.
Charles Oakley, who happened to be starting the first year of the biggest and probably last contract of his career, walked in. It isn’t clear what was said, but he slapped Karl Malone across the face. Malone had been a hard-liner against an agreement. The action woke up everyone and before you knew it there was a new contract, a 50-game season, playoffs and stability.
Someone needed to slap hockey players across the face.
They lost their season Wednesday. No one, I believe, will have to slap NBA players this summer when their current collective-bargaining agreement expires. There could be a lockout July 1, but don’t expect NBA players to miss any games next season.
If there is anything to the cancellation of the NHL season, at least it settled the debate of who are the stupidest players in professional sports.
“We’ve been having a number of negotiations the last few months,” said NBA Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik, who replaced current NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. “We’re probably going to meet over All-Star weekend. We’re trying to see what we can do. Fortunately, our issues are narrower than what the NHL had or what we had six years ago. Still, we’re not there yet and there’s no timetable. We’re hopeful.”
Players union chief Billy Hunter has said the current structure is “generally working” but warned the league shouldn’t expect major concessions or another luxury tax. Still, though an agreement isn’t certain, count on one before next season.
We gleefully offer examples of the stupidity of pro athletes, a sort of balm for ourselves. Something like, “They make all that money, but we’d never be like that.”
But NBA players are smart enough to understand they have the best jobs in the world and are not about to give them up over a billion dollars here or there. NBA players, with an average annual salary of close to $5 million, were the first players group to embrace salary controls, and they are the best paid in the world.
The NBA players are not going to come out of this bargaining better off technically than they were before. The major issues are the length of individual contracts and the raises during contracts. Currently the length is up to seven years with annual raises between 10 and 12.5 percent. The NBA is looking for four-year maximums and much smaller raises.
The truth is no one benefits from seven-year contracts but the agents, the players’ luxury-car dealers and their great, great, great grandchildren. Players often lose motivation and want to be traded. Owners end up with $15 million albatrosses like Allan Houston, Glenn Robinson, Brian Grant, Latrell Sprewell and Penny Hardaway. Fans end up with unmotivated players and teams struggling to revive.
There also is the bottom-end age limit, which seems sure to increase to 20 because it never made sense for the current union members to be losing jobs to teenagers. There are some other more technical issues of an escrow of 10 percent that has been withheld from players and the luxury tax connected with it.
But somewhere along the line, even the players begin to understand they are arguing about whether they all will be multimillionaires or multi-, multimillionaires.
Hockey players never got that.
The NBA is anxious to make an agreement before July 1 because the threat of a lockout–which sounds worse than it is in the summer when little goes on–hurts business. Fans are slower to renew tickets, sponsors are uncertain about advertising and merchandisers are hesitant about orders.
It becomes less urgent for players, who don’t begin to feel the financial pain until late fall. Players don’t get paid in training camp, and few welcome the idea of a month of it. With no major obvious “givebacks,” it may appear to some players there is no reason to settle quickly.
Of course, some believe that in 1998 the players had a better deal on the table before the season than they got when they finally settled after losing a half-season’s pay. The players’ executive committee is headed up by veterans like Antonio Davis and Theo Ratliff, who are on what figure to be their last contracts. Most believe it’s unlikely they will sacrifice millions at the end of their contracts for a core of young players with little appreciation or regard for history and no seminal issue.
Leadership also is pivotal. In baseball, union leadership seems to live to fight, almost as if it hates the negotiating game but loves to win its battles. What’s wrong with occasionally doing something in the interests of the game that has supported you so well? It’s hard to believe the baseball steroid issue couldn’t have been handled more quicklyif the union wasn’t seeking a concession for the testing. Because of foot-dragging, the entire membership is suspect.
You hear the hockey players whine again–and the baseball players still–about how other industries don’t have salary restraints to share revenues. What they always conveniently forget is sports is unique. It’s a partnership. AT&T gladly was a monopoly. The Yankees seem like one, but without competitors there’s no league. Yes, it seems an artificial business model, but it’s the best way to assure good competition and that everyone can make money.
The NBA will play a full schedule next season and we all can go back to making fun of the foolish things they say and do while they laugh, as it were, all the way to the bank.
