You can call out the owners for being greedy, condescending and unreasonable during these lockout “negotiations.” But you can’t say they don’t know what they’re doing. The ultimatums, demands and all of the posturing has the players backed into a corner. Yesterday, David Stern and Adam Silver took to Twitter to answer questions on their most recent proposal – one in which has many players in New York at this very moment. Nothing surprising was revealed. Everything was shaded in “the players are the bad guys” coloring.
Perhaps this week is when we’ll finally get an answer to all of our questions, and truthfully, the answer everyone wants – actually, it’s an action – is to just shut up about the lockout. Most basketball fans that I know have moved on to college. Either that or they never moved from the NFL at all. The general consensus seems to be the players are not thrilled about their position: take a bad deal or no deal at all. Still, Orlando rep Chris Duhon tweeted just a few hours ago that the Magic would accept this deal. So there’s some hope.
The only somewhat interesting information I found from yesterday was a list in a slideshow presentation from the NBA. Meant to educate frustrated fans on what all of this means, it was a sample from the NBA of what a current team would look like under the new deal in 2013-14. Broken down by salary, team’s would look like this:
1) Superstar (max salary) – $17 million
2) All-Star – $14 million
3) Starter – $10 million
4) Starter – $8 million
5) Starter – $8 million
6) Sixth Man – $5 million
7) Rotation Player – $4 million
8 ) Rotation Player – $3 million
9) Rotation Player – $2 million
10) Rotation Player – $1 million
11-15) Remaining Players – $3 million total
Sounds reasonable. But it isn’t. As has been pointed out by others, what championship team are they basing this off of? With a formula like this, the Lakers, Celtics and Heat, among others, wouldn’t be able to exist. The numbers look okay on first glance, but when you break it down how many teams outside of perhaps Oklahoma City would work in this format? The league would start over. The very best players would scamper into every corner of the league. The super team would cease to exist.
Small market owners want a bigger piece of the pie. With a template like this, they would get it. But this isn’t fantasy basketball. You can’t stick a price on everyone’s head. You can’t limit maneuvering.
I’m not a small market fan. I’m not a big market fan either. It doesn’t really matter to me who consistently wins or who can’t get themselves out of the cellar. What I do know is a system like this would neither be fun or interesting. Parity is cool, every league needs some of it, but at the end of the day I enjoy my villains. I do feel for the people associated with the teams struggling right now. But I don’t think this would be the answer the game needs.
Would this be a good idea?
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