Tag: executive director

NBA players should swallow pride, but won’t

When the National Basketball Players Association’s representatives meet in Manhattan on Monday or Tuesday — hey, no need for urgency — their choices are simple: accept a deal most of them hate and play a 72-game season starting in mid-December; or reject it, decertify and know cancellation of the entire season is a virtual certainty.

Don’t be surprised when the player reps choose Doomsday.

Player sentiment was running hot against approval the day after they received the last, best offer the NBA says it will make.

There was this tweet Friday from Spurs swingman Danny Green: “The email I just received on this update got me HOT … we would be fools to take this deal.”

It took only a few minutes for Green’s disdain to get multiple retweets from other players, including this from his former Spurs teammate, George Hill: “Yeahhhhhh.”

Here’s the truth about the revised offer the NBA made to its players Thursday night in Manhattan: It’s a huge economic giveback the players should hate.

Commissioner David Stern knows this and so does Billy Hunter, the union’s executive director.

This is true, too: The players will be fools if they do reject it, no matter how bad a deal it is for them.

If they think the pattern that marked the course of the 1998-99 lockout is bound to repeat itself, that there is a deal to be struck in January, on terms they like better, they are miscalculating the new dynamic inside the tiny club of those who own the 30 teams. When Michael Jordan is identified as the hardest of the hard-line owners, be assured obstinacy rules the day when the full board of governors chooses a course.

Stern isn’t bluffing this time. Rejection of this deal means the next bargaining session — midtown Manhattan next July, anyone? — will ?begin with an offer from the league that will slice another ?3 percent from the players’ share of basketball related? income and impose a “flex” ?salary cap that’s really just a ? hard cap that can be imposed incrementally.

Gone will be the salary cap exceptions the players hold most dear. Ditto guaranteed contracts.

Ask any NHL player that lost the entire 2004-05 season after negotiations that followed an arc eerily similar to these NBA talks, and they will tell their basketball compatriots a principled stand isn’t worth the wasted fortitude.

No fair-minded fan questions the reasons for player anger. How difficult must it be for a player as competitive as union president Derek Fisher to stomach deputy commissioner Adam Silver lecturing about how much more competitive the league will be under the system the owners propose?

“We believe we will be proven right over time that this new model … will create a better league,” Silver said Thursday, campaigning for union acceptance. “It will create one where fans in more markets will be able to hope that their teams can compete for championships, that fans can believe that a well-managed team, regardless of market size, regardless of how deep the owners’ pockets are, will be in a position to compete for a championship, and that more players will be in a position to compete for rings as well.”

Every player knows Silver is a brilliant lawyer but hardly a basketball expert. When he talks about what is best for competitive basketball, it’s a bit like Kris Humphries lecturing on the secrets of marital longevity.

Phil Jackson, Fisher’s now-retired coach, advises that anger is the enemy of instruction. It is also the enemy of common sense.

On Monday or Tuesday, what’s best for the players is the common-sense realization that they are out of good options.

It is the very competitiveness of players, which Silver doesn’t comprehend, that likely means the league is headed for basketball Doomsday.

mikemonroe@express-news.net

Stern details specifics of ultimatum in letter

By Howard Beck, New York Times

NEW YORK — The ultimatum issued by the NBA to its players over the weekend not only threatens them with a worse labor deal but also a massive pay cut if they do not make a deal by Wednesday afternoon.

A letter sent by David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA, to the players union Sunday contrasts the proposal on the table — highlighted by a 50-50 split of revenues — with a “reset” proposal that would cut the players’ share to 47 percent, roll back current contracts, impose a hard salary cap and reduce contract lengths.

The salary rollback, which was part of the NBA’s first controversial proposal in 2010, had not been included in any league proposal for many months, and it was not publicly mentioned by Stern when he announced the ultimatum Saturday.

But the rollback was included in the letter Stern sent to Billy Hunter, the union’s executive director. A copy of the letter was obtained by the New York Times.

The union has until 5 p.m. Wednesday to accept the NBA’s last proposal or have it replaced by the reset proposal, Stern wrote.

The NBA’s current proposal to the players includes a soft salary cap, a 50 percent share of revenues for players and these features:

• Salary-cap and luxury-tax levels in Years 1 and 2 of the new agreement will be no less than they were in 2010-11. By Year 3, they will be adjusted downward to conform to the new system.

• Sign-and-trade deals and the biannual exception will be available only to nontaxpaying teams.

• Extend-and-trade deals, like the one signed by Carmelo Anthony last season, won’t be allowed.

• The midlevel exception will be set at $5 million for nontaxpaying teams, with a maximum length between three and four years (alternating annually). The value of the exception will grow by 3 percent annually, starting in Year 3.

• The midlevel exception will be set at $2.5 million for taxpaying teams, with a maximum length of two years, and cannot be used in consecutive years.

• A 10 percent escrow tax will be withheld from player salaries, to ensure that player earnings do not exceed 50 percent of league revenues.

• Maximum contract lengths will be five years for “Bird” free agents and four years for others.

• Players will be paid a prorated share of their 2011-12 salaries, based on games played once the season starts.

• Team and player contract options will be prohibited in new contracts, other than rookie deals. But a player can opt out of the final year of a contract if he agrees to zero salary protection (i.e., if it is nonguaranteed).

The “reset” proposal features a flex-cap system that contains an absolute salary ceiling — to be set $5 million above the average team salary. In addition, the NBA would roll back existing contracts “in proportion to system changes in order to ensure sufficient market for free agents.”

Some of the other major differences in the “reset” proposal:

• The midlevel exception would be set at $3 million in Year 1, with a maximum length of three years, and would grow at 3 percent annually.

• Maximum salaries would be reduced.

• Contracts would be limited to four years for “Bird” free agents and three years for others, but each team could give a five-year deal to one designated player.

Both proposals include an “amnesty” provision that will allow every team to waive one player and have 100 percent of his salary removed from the cap.

Hunter tells players to prepare to miss half a season

So much for that optimism that the players and owners were getting closer to a settlement that would end the lockout.

After Tuesday’s meetings with owners, NBPA executive director Billy Hunter advised players to prepare to miss at least half the upcoming season.

NBPA president Derek Fisher was just as bleak in his assessment.

“We can’t come out of here thinking that training camps and preseason are going to start on time at this point,” Fisher after the meeting.

NBA commissioner David Stern said it was a day without much progress. The biggest obstacle continues to be the players’ resistance to a hard cap.

The next step for the owners will be their board of governors meeting Thursday in Dallas. Expect some kind of announcement at that time where training camp and preseason games will be postponed.

As expected, there seems to be a division of opinion between owners on the need for a hard cap. The challenge of getting all of them to sign off on a deal might be as hard for Stern to pull off as dealing with the players.

And after reports of Tuesday’s meeting, it doesn’t appear that will be very easy, either.