NBA PM: Super-Agent Steps In?
NBA super-agent David Falk made his biggest mark on the NBA as Michael Jordan’s agent, and there was a time during Jordan’s career that Falk was considered to be the second most powerful man in the NBA after Commissioner David Stern. Falk is not nearly as involved with the NBA as he once was, but he is still a keen observer of the business side of basketball. In some ways, Falk is responsible for the multi-million-dollar deals so many NBA players sign today, but he also recognizes that those same contracts today are causing many of the problems behind the NBA’s lock-out.
“Well, let’s first start in the broad context,” Falk told 106.7 The Fan in Washington, DC. “I think we’re in an environment where you have the perfect storm not to have a lockout. Unemployment in the United States is higher than it’s probably been in decades, and as an Econ major in college, the way they keep labor statistics, they say you’re not looking for a job on a Thursday afternoon wearing a blue shirt, so we’re not going to count you in the people that are unemployed. You go to Detroit or Cleveland, and I bet you the unemployment is up near 25 or 30 percent. You go to one of those fans who’s out of a job, who can’t go to a game for $20 a ticket and a Coke. Derek Fisher is making $5.5 million and he thinks he should be making $6.5 million; or the owner of a team who’s worth $3 billion and lost $4 million last year, those guys have zero sympathy for either side. It’s the worst time to have a lockout. We had a great season, great playoffs, games are at an all-time high, ratings are high, and their job is to make a deal. When I get hired as an agent, my job is not to hold a guy out. It’s easy not to make a deal — you just ask for something unreasonable, and when they say no, you walk away. Sort of like what’s going on in the budget negotiations right now between the Democrats and the Republicans.”
Some are accusing Commission Stern of being to much of a hard-liner in the current negotiations, but Falk doesn’t see it that way.
“No, no, I don’t think David’s being a hard-liner at all. I think there’s probably a lot of young owners that think David’s not being hard enough. But the truth is that there are a significant number of teams that are losing money. You can argue over how much they’re losing; you can argue accounting and say maybe you shouldn’t put depreciation of franchises which is a non-cash item in the loss, but they are losing money. But at the end of the day…and I’m a player guy…but the players in the aggregate are making $2.166 billion dollars. So let’s say you’re a player and I’m an owner, and I say ‘I’m losing money, I’ve got to change your salary, I’ve got to reduce it, I’m losing too much money.’ And you say ‘I don’t believe you’re losing money.’ I say ‘Really?’ I use my favorite David Falk expression — ‘are you bettin’ or are you talkin’? I’ll bet you $2.166 billion dollars that I’m losing money. If you’re wrong, you’re going to lose all your money, and if you’re right you’re going to get it.’”
One of the biggest issues facing the players on their side of the negotiations is the fact that far too many support players are being paid like stars, and that those support players are among the loudest voices on the players’ side.
“I think the problem in the system is basketball in the post-cap era,” Falk explained. “The cap came into the league in ’82 for six teams and for the rest of the league in ’83. And what the cap has done in both basketball and football is it’s made it in order to win…pop quiz, how many teams won a title in the NBA since 1980 in the last 31 years? Eight. Each of those teams have a formula. If you look at the Lakers, San Antonio, Miami almost won it last year — they have three stars that make almost all the money. When the Celtics won in 2008, Ray Allen, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett made 75 percent of the money. The fourth-highest paid guy, Kendrick Perkins, how much did he earn? $3.6 [million]. Now, when your fourth guy is earning $3.6 and you say ‘Kendrick, I want you to be a role player, play great defense, rebound…’ He doesn’t turn to you and say ‘are you stupid? I’m making $9 million, I’m a star.’ Okay, so the formula for almost every team that’s won since 1980 in the cap era is to have three stars and a bunch of role players. What’s happened by putting a maximum salary on the LeBrons and the Kobes and the Iversons over the last ten years, we’ve taken the money that we’ve saved from the stars and we pay guys that are probably worth $3 million, $9 million. That’s the problem in the system. They’re hard to coach, some of them aren’t heavily motivated. In 1998, when I was in my prime, Patrick Ewing was the president of the union. Stars ran the union. Today, the rank and file is running the union, and there’s a lot more rank and file players — they are passing the rules that disadvantage the stars that the people come to see and buy their merchandise or watch their commercials and they’re overpaying the middle guys. So you have guys that are really out of shape…I’m not going to name names….there are certain guys that I watch when I come to the games here that I wouldn’t pay a nickel to watch because they’re in worse shape at age 22 than I am at 60.”
Falk himself says he would love to mediate the discussions between the players and the owners, and to start with he would stop comparing the NBA’s situation to that of the locked out NFL.
“What they’re arguing about mostly is the percentage of the pie. The players are making 57 percent of the pie, the owners want to make it less. And I think there are many ways to solve it. In many ways, having done this for 37 years, and having owned a business that’s bigger than most of the teams, and having been an agent for so many years, I’d love to mediate the dispute because I think there are solutions that are acceptable to both sides. But at the end of the day, this is different than the football situation because the owners are printing money and the owners want a deal in football because they know if they start missing preseason games, for every game they miss, they’re going to be losing money. There are about 14 to 20 teams in the NBA, if they miss games they’re going to make money because the losses are going to stop.”
Lockout or no lockout, Falk doesn’t believe too many NBA players will see Europe as a great option once they start to really look at the situation.
“I don’t think so. First of all, I’ve been discussing this with my own clients. I had a client in 1989 who was the National Player of the Year named Danny Ferry. He got drafted No. 2 by the Los Angeles Clippers, and he had personal reasons why he didn’t want to play for the Clippers at that time. His first year, he played for a team in Rome called Messaggero. It was owned by a very wealthy guy named Raul Gardini who was one of the three wealthiest men in Italy and he made $4 million dollars in 1989. Very few NBA players will make $4 million in 2011 if they go to Europe. And if you ask (Ferry) since he’s been a general manager, the floors were hard, the medical situation wasn’t very great, the guys smoked and drank after the games, practices were four hours a day and he really hurt his knees. I’m not sure he ever became the player he could have been had he started in the NBA. And so some of these guys going over there and risking $100 million dollar contracts to make a couple of million the next several years, I’m not certain for a lot of players that that’s a very wise choice.”
One thing that we have constantly observed in talking to players and owners alike about the issues at stake in this ongoing labor dispute is that the two sides don’t really seem to be communicating effectively. In particular, the players don’t seem to be getting the best information about their own side of the issues. Perhaps it’s time for someone else to step in, someone who will clearly be in favor of the players but who also understand how to run an effective multi-billion-dollar business. David Falk is all but volunteering – perhaps the players should take him up on his offer.
Listen to David Falk on 106.7 The Fan in Washington, DC by linking here!
Hall of Fame For Yao Ming?
In the days since we learned that Yao Ming would be retiring from the NBA, a debate has been raging about just where Yao fits in the grand scheme of things. Should his jersey be retired by the Houston Rockets? Should be be inducted into the basketball Hall Of Fame? I’ve been asked a number of times to sound off on this issue, so here are my thoughts.
The first question is easily answered. As amazing as Yao Ming was when he was healthy, he simply didn’t have enough healthy years or career accomplishments as a Houston Rocket to warrant having his jersey retired alongside NBA champions and MVP’s like Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, Moses Malone and Rudy Tomjanovich. He was important to the franchise from a marketing perspective even when he didn’t play and he brought literally billions of new fans to the NBA from China. Still, retiring a jersey is about the great things a player did on the basketball court, and at the end of the day Yao was never healthy for long enough to do much of anything for the Rockets.
The second question really shouldn’t be much harder to answer. While Yao’s contributions to the NBA from a pure statistical standpoint aren’t that incredible, his contributions to the league in terms of bringing additional international exposure cannot be understated. Yao arrived in the NBA as a celebrated international basketball phenomenon, and when he was drafted by the Houston Rockets he brought the attention of an entire country to the NBA in a way that had never before been achieved. He may have struggled to stay healthy in the NBA, but he has three FIBA Asian Championships and three FIBA Asian Championship MVP trophies. He is also an eight-time NBA All-Star.
The Basketball Hall of Fame is not just about the NBA, it’s about a player’s contributions to the game of basketball as a whole. Just look at former Portland Trail Blazers center Arvydas Sabonis. He was enshrined in the Hall of Fame, but that had little to do with his modest and belated NBA career. Sabonis was inducted into the Hall of Fame because of his overall contributions to the game of basketball, and Yao Ming deserves to be inducted for exactly the same reason. Few players have put the NBA on a global stage the way Yao Ming did.
Timberwolves Add Nelson To List
The Minnesota Timberwolves have been busy this week, looking for a replacement for head coach Kurt Rambis. They are a little late to the party, of course, having waited so long to decide Rambis’ future that many of the top candidates are gone, but now the search is ramping into high gear and there are a couple of old names being dusted off as part of the search.
{AUTHOR_BOX}Earlier this week the Timberwolves sought and received permission from the Portland Trail Blazers to talk to assistant coach and long-time veteran coach Bernie Bickerstaff and now ESPN is reporting that they will also talk to retired coach Don Nelson. Neither of these choices is likely to excite the imaginations of NBA fans in Minnesota. Bickerstaff’s last coaching gig was with the upstart Charlotte Bobcats, where he managed to win just 77 games over three seasons. Meanwhile, Nelson is best known for quitting on the Dallas Mavericks and then quitting on the Golden State Warriors, though he is also one of the winningest coaches in the history of the NBA. If he took the job seriously he could certainly bring a lot to the Timberwolves organization. But would he?
The more interesting name in the mix, according to Marc Stein, is former Houston Rockets head coach Rick Adelman. Adelman is very much interested in coaching again and was even considered as a candidate for the Blazers’ opening at GM. But how interested would Adelman really be in the Timberwolves? He spent the last four seasons trying to patch together lineups in Houston, where injuries reined supreme, and he had a great deal of success under the circumstances. Now he would like a healthy team that’s ready to compete for a championship, and the Timberwolves only line up with one of those desires. They are, after all, young and healthy. There’s also a very good chance that Adelman is going to sit out a season, as his lead assistant – Elston Turner – just took a job with the Phoenix Suns. He wouldn’t have done that if Adelman was about to take on a new team.
Stay tuned to HOOPSWORLD for more on this developing story. The Timberwolves hope to name a head coach in the coming days.
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