Are The Players Right?
Without taking any crazy numbers or percentage points into consideration or trying to decipher any collective bargaining jargon, this lockout can be stripped down to one basic idea: the players are probably in the right, but they’re going to end up on the losing end of this thing anyway.
I don’t think any of us fail to understand the basics of what’s going on here. Too many owners are losing too much money, and since they’re the ones that make NBA teams go, and since the NBA is supposed to be a business, some kind of change had to happen.
Unfortunately for the players, the only way things can balance back out is if salaries get cut, now and in the future. If any boss for any job anywhere in the world tried scaling back everybody’s salary dramatically, the employees would throw a fit. If there was a union, they’d refuse to work. No one wants to take a pay cut, especially when their boss’s financial issues weren’t the employees’ faults anyway.
It’s easy to argue in favor of the players on this. Owners claim the players make exorbitant amounts of money, that the price for a marquee player has gotten too high. Owners set those prices, however, by setting GMs loose to spend cash that isn’t there. Of course it’s going to be hard for a team like Atlanta to make money when they aren’t even close to filling up their arena every night, yet spend more money for Joe Johnson (who wasn’t even allowed time to shop around and set a market value for himself) than Miami paid for Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, or Chris Bosh or New York spent on Amar’e Stoudemire.
While you could certainly argue it’s necessary to spend money to compete for a championship, winning a ring isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for running a profitable team. If teams were more fiscally responsible, passing on players that got too rich for their blood or at least letting the market determine a price for them instead out outbidding themselves, there wouldn’t be a problem right now. Instead, owners want to radically restructure a collective bargaining agreement so they can be saved from themselves.
How is that fair to the players?
{AUTHOR_BOX}We can’t even say it’s impossible to be competitive as a small market who pinches pennies. Look at what Sam Presti has been able to do with the Oklahoma City Thunder. They drafted well, added relatively inexpensive role players around their young core, and actually had summers where they had tons of cap space, yet chose not to spend it because there weren’t any players who fit what they were trying to do.
When Detroit blew tens of millions of dollars on Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva in 2009, they did so because their money burned a whole in their pockets. What would’ve been smarter would be to pass on those guys, bank the cap space, and try again for the marquee group of free agents in 2010. The fact they couldn’t show a single year’s worth of patience shows why the players aren’t responsible for the stupid things organizations do.
Chicago, for example, didn’t think Ben Gordon was worth $11 million a year for five seasons, so they let him walk. It hurt to do that, but it was the right business decision to make. That’s the way it goes sometimes. Loyalty is great and everything, but if the owners are so concerned about their checkbooks, then business needs to supersede that loyalty.
So are the players on the right side of this argument? It certainly seems like it. It’s not their fault that owners allowed their finances to go haywire. Despite that fact, the owners are going to end up with the better end of the deal when everything is all said and done. Fewer than half of the players in the league opted to have their salaries spread out over 12 months, and even fewer are well-known for being smart with their cash.
As long as the players in general have so little sense for how to work their money, all the owners have to do is wait it out. Cash will run dry long before resolve, and when that happens players will start agreeing to concessions just so they can start receiving a paycheck again. It’s unfortunate and frustrating for them, especially because they’re right, but that is the reality of this situation.
The duration of the lockout all depends on when that tipping point finally occurs. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter who’s right. All that matters is who can afford to wait the longest. In this case, it’s the owners.
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