NBA: Sorry, Mr. Silver, But It’s Not Too Soon To Talk Lockout
By Phil Watson
In some ways, NBA commissioner Adam Silver has proven to be quite different from his predecessor, David Stern.
For starters, he got rid of Donald Sterling when Stern and his predecessor, Larry O’Brien, allowed him to linger as a blight on the league for more than three decades.
It could be argued that Silver did what he had to do—the level of public outcry and backlash against Sterling was far greater than it had ever been before—but the point remains: New guy dealt with it after Stern spent 30 years doing his own version of giving Sterling a no-look pass.
But in other ways, Silver is indistinguishable from Stern.
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For starters, Silver is still banging the drum for a 20-year-old age limit on draft eligibility, something that appears to be nothing more than a bone being thrown to the NCAA brand of basketball, which has been the
de facto
minor league for the NBA ever since there has been an NBA.
One could get into the racial undercurrent of the age-limit debate, considering there is no issue in other sports with teenagers turning professional, sports such as golf, tennis, hockey or baseball.
Not coincidentally, none of those sports get the majority of their young talent from the NCAA, certainly not to the degree the NBA and NFL do.
But Silver might as well have been Stern for his answers last week to questions about the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, the one that technically runs through the 2019-20 season but that contains opt-out language for both sides after the 2016-17 campaign.
"“It’s premature even for me to be concerned,” Silver said at a press conference following the NBA Board of Governors meeting (per ESPN New York). “We negotiated a 10-year collective bargaining agreement, there is a six-year out for either side. We are going into year four. We have, in my mind, something that is incredibly positive and that is two new great media deals. Fifty-one percent of that money goes to the players.”"
If that sounds like Stern soundbytes from 1992, 1997 or 2008, that would be because that was almost verbatim (excepting for the percentage of the players’ share) what Stern said in advance of lockouts called by the owners in 1995, 1998 and 2011.
He then followed that statement by reminding the assembled press that 10 of the NBA’s 30 teams “are not profitable under the current system despite revenue sharing.”
That number is far less than the 22 teams the NBA claimed were losing money before the 2011 lockout.
LeBron James and other players have already been discussing the ramifications of the association’s gigantic new television deal that takes effect in 2016, saying that the owners cannot realistically go all poor-mouth at that point.
And that’s not even pointing out that the Milwaukee Bucks—a franchise that hasn’t won a title in 43 years, was coming off its worst season in history and hasn’t advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs since 2001—sold for a then-record $550 million in May.
That record was then almost quadrupled when Steve Ballmer paid a ludicrous $2 billion to get the Los Angeles Clippers out from under Sterling’s control this summer.
In 1995, the players were locked out for 79 days during the offseason because the players rejected an agreement reached by its union representatives. No games were lost that time around.
In 1998, the players were locked out for 190 days while trying to come to an agreement on a collective bargaining agreement. A total of 464 games were lost.
In 2011, the players were locked out for 160 days, with 240 games wiped out.
So if fans are already starting to get a little antsy about what could happen in 2017, it’s hard to blame them.
Given the crazy amounts of new cash that are going to start flowing into the league in 2016, there is no reason that a new CBA can’t be done well in advance of the 2017 opt-out date.
Well, there is one thing that could stop it: Adam Silver continuing to channel David Stern and insisting there is no cause for alarm, even as the sky is falling all around him.