John Wall

Ok, now the NBA lockout is over.

After tense months of waiting and wondering when the NBA would come to an agreement  to please fans,players and even themselves.This fight was obviously all over money and the owners got more of it. The owners claimed they lost $300 million last season and with the new 50/50 split, they'll have a chance to make back every penny of those losses with the owners winning 3 billion over the 10 year deal. The owners also got their way on nearly every other big issue like the mid-level exception, revenue sharing, and luxury tax, but the main victory was the split of the BRI. This doesn't mean the players didn't get anything, they won on smaller issues like the minimum team salary and escrow, but as predicted here in October, the owners had all the leverage and used it to get 90% of what they wanted. 

The nba is not over

If you guys were paying attention to my last post, you noticed that i mentioned that the NBA lockout was over. It "was" over... but it seems as the players have declined the newly producded proposal  between them and the Officials. It looks like it will be a holiday season full of football.

THE LOCK OUT IS OVER

The lockout is over but i will still be covering NBA statistics

As of right now, with the players and owners in the depths of a now four month long lockout, the owners have the ball in their hands as they are putting all the pressure on the players.

The owners have revised their proposal and given it to the players union to mull over which, if they were to accept, would mean the NBA season would start on Dec.15 and would consist of a 72-game schedule.

I'm not going to get to excited about this yet, because if we've learned anything over the past few months, it's that no matter how much optimism there is surrounding a meeting, a proposal or a leak of information from a "source," you have to take it with a grain of salt.

The owners are low-balling the players, and quite frankly they have all the leverage, so it's not surprising. In fact, the only ones who seem surprised by the owners actions and proposals have been the NBPA and Billy Hunter.

However, looking at the proposal compared to everything else the NBA has offered, this is the best deal the players have been offered, and it seems that it's the best deal that they will be offered.

Beyond that, I don't think the players union will have the support enough to decertify. There have been a few voices that have spoken louder than others, but decertification pretty much guarantees the cancellation of the season, and I'm not sure the players are willing to go through with that.

It might not be completely their fault that talks went this badly, but if they decertify the NBA public relations machine will pile the dirt on the players as they lay in the graves that they helped dig.

Still, the most intriguing part of this whole ordeal is that D.stern has said that if the offer is accepted by the players then there will be schedule with just 10 games chopped off.

The season won't be incredibly compact, as the league will add a week to the end of the year to stretch out the season just enough so teams are playing games at just a slightly higher rate than a normal 82-game season.

Question possibly

The Golden Rule: He who has the gold, rules
Fundamental Rule of Negotiation: He who cares the least wins

In the NBA, it's the owners who have the gold and care the least.

What do the owners have to lose?
Net revenues from the lost games and any decline in the value of their franchises due to fan alienation and depreciation of assets — namely the players they have under contract.

What do players have to lose?
Salaries from lost games and time cut off from already short career windows.

Why do owners have leverage? 
They have deeper pockets and alternative sources of income. The next most lucrative financial option for players is far worse than the owners’ lowest offer.

Why do players have leverage?
Only a handful of star players have leverage. The owners’ product without the top 20-30 players in the league would stink for at least a few years. Rank-and-file players are more easily replaced and have almost no leverage at all.

Why are labor disputes in sports so weird?
The bosses control the whole sector and face little competition when it comes to hiring labor. Since the merger with the ABA in 1976, the NBA is a monopoly and operates in a manner (it monopolizes!) that would be illegal outside the sports world. Unlike in Silicon Valley, there are no NBA “start-ups.” You cannot create a new NBA team without permission of the incumbent owners. The league also has to approve changes in teams’ location and ownership.

What does this mean? The owners can get together and agree to jointly cut expenses, that is, the player salaries. Players have limited opportunities to play professional basketball in other countries, but realistically, if you are a world-class professional basketball player, you probably want to be in the NBA.

The star players are the only counterweight to management’s power. To a large extent, they ARE the NBA’s product. Because of this, the owners aren’t talking about using replacement players, and some stars are getting decent offers to play overseas during the lockout. These factors are a cause for concern for the owners and put limits on how much they can extract from the players.

Why have past CBAs been so favorable to the players?
In the past, traditional NBA owners were in the game for the fun, the control, and the bragging rights. They made money through franchise appreciation; there was less emphasis on maximizing short-run operating profits. The newer group of owners bought high, are more corporate in orientation, and the financial crisis renewed their sense of vulnerability. They’ve poured a lot of money into those teams and they aren’t comfortable with seeing red on their balance sheets year after year.

Why don’t the players settle?
Perhaps because they have done so well in the past, it’s hard for the players to accept that the owners are dead set on hammering them this time. They feel, correctly, that they have been making all the concessions. Imagine trying to redo your “chores deal” with your spouse, with one side giving in on every negotiating point. As human beings, we are programmed to reject one-sided deals, even when surrender might be the rational choice.

How far apart are the two sides?
The split on BRI (Basketball Related Income) is supposedly the biggest point of contention. Players want 52.5 percent (down from 57 in the previous contract). Owners are “adamant” on 50 percent and started with an initial lowball offer of 37.

Take the NBA’s 2009-10 BRI estimate of $3.6 billion; 2.5 percent of that is $90 million. Let’s say the life of the contract is 6 years. The total value of that over six years, with reinvestment, is around $500 million.

Is it economically worthwhile for the players to hold out for $500 million?
No. Total NBA salaries last year were over $1.5 billion, about three times the amount they are fighting over. Canceling a third of the current season would wipe out the gain of winning the extra 2.5 percent of BRI over the life of the new collective bargaining agreement. Canceling the whole season over 2.5 percent of BRI is insane for the players.

Of course there are other issues relating to the salary cap, like the length of contracts, but the BRI split seems to be the sticking point.

What’s the bottom line?
Can the owners afford to give the players a better deal? Yes.

Forbes magazine estimates that the Knicks franchise, the NBA’s most profitable, is worth about $655 million. The Milwaukee Bucks, the least profitable franchise according to Forbes, still is worth $258 million, and the Clippers, often considered the worst-run team, have a net value of $305 million. The value of the Knicks alone could more than cover what the players are asking for.

Can the players stop the owners from getting a deal that is much worse for them than the previous Collective Bargaining Agreement? No. What the players are willing to agree to is already materially worse than before. The only question that remains is how bad it will get.

Does the players’ line in the sand over 2.5 percent of BRI make economic sense? No, not if they miss many games to achieve it.

Is the owners’ offer fair? Not really.

Should the players take it? Yes.

Will the owners give in and up the ante? Very unlikely.

Will the players be rational and take what is on the plate? We can only hope so.

NBA REALLYY???

All games from Oct. 9-15 are off, the league said. Camps were expected to open Oct. 3.

“We have regretfully reached the point on the calendar where we are not able to open training camps on time and need to cancel the first week of preseason games,” Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement. “We will make further decisions as warranted.”

The players’ association did not comment.

NBA.com’s schedule page, which has a banner across the top listing the number of games on each day, was changed Friday morning to read “0 Games” for each date until Oct. 16, when there are four games.

Those could be in jeopardy, too, without an agreement by the end of this month or very early October. The league scrapped the remainder of its preseason schedule on Oct. 6 in 1998, when the regular season was reduced to 50 games.

That remains the only time the NBA has lost games to a work stoppage.

The cancellations were inevitable after Thursday’s meeting between owners and players ended without a collective bargaining agreement. Both sides still hope the entire regular season, scheduled to begin Nov. 1, can be saved.

The league locked out the players on July 1 after the expiration of the old labor agreement. Owners and players still haven’t agreed on how to divide revenues—players were guaranteed 57 percent under the previous deal—or the structure of the salary cap.

The next talks aren’t scheduled, but both sides said Thursday they hope to meet again next week—though the window could be limited because of the Jewish holiday and a union meeting Tuesday in Miami. They probably need a deal by the middle of October to avoid canceling real games.

Asked Thursday if he thought things were far enough along to still believe that was possible, Commissioner David Stern said: “I don’t have any response to that. I just don’t. I don’t know the answer.”

According to NBA policy, ticket holders for canceled games will be refunded the cost of the ticket plus 1 percent interest.

The NBA had long prepared for a shortened or canceled preseason, declining to schedule exhibition games overseas for the first time since 2005—also when a labor pact was set to expire.

Still, the hope had been to find a way to negotiate a deal in time that would allow the ball to be tipped as scheduled in Detroit and Orlando on Oct. 9, the first of five games that night. Realistic chances of that passed in recent days, given the expectation of about two weeks from a deal in principle to a completed agreement.

Follow Brian Mahoney on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Briancmahoney

Hmm this is getting interesting

Some thoughts on the NBA lockout ...

The lockout has lasted most of the summer.

There’s been a lot of recent bluster from the owners and players about the start of the season being threatened.

One can probably forget about training camp opening on time on Oct. 3.

Everyone seems to be forgetting something: Some of the players are close to being broke. They live paycheck-to-paycheck, just like many of us do. When they start losing paychecks — their first check is scheduled for Nov. 15, I’m told — that’s when this is going to hit home with the players.

Some players — no names please! — are starting to freak out. They need money to survive and continue to live their lavish lifestyle. There’s a lot of money at stake. The owners want to prove their point and make sure they get the upper hand.

That’s why there’s a good chance games will now be lost. The owners better be sure they know what they’re doing. Public opinion is not necessarily on their side.

Many agents think the players’ best course of action is to decertify. Union head Billy Hunter said he’s not even thought about decertification. Why hasn’t he? Observers say if the players decertify, Hunter will lose his job.

Both sides have to move fast in order to save the season. If even part of the season is lost, the NBA might never get those fans back.


© Copyright 2011 The Morning Journal, a Journal Register Property & part of Journal Register OH -- All rights reserved

NEW NEWS jaja

NBA lockout begins as sides fail to reach deal

Posted Jul 1 2011 1:54AM

NEW YORK (AP) -- The NBA locked out its players Friday when its collective bargaining agreement expired, becoming the second pro sports league shut down by labor strife.
The labor deal ended at midnight after players and owners failed to reach a new contract. The two sides remained far apart on just about every major issue, from salaries to the salary cap, revenues to revenue sharing.
The long-expected lockout puts the 2011-12 season in jeopardy and comes as the NFL is trying to end its own work stoppage that began in March.
It is believed to be only the second time that two leagues have been shut down simultaneously by labor problems.
In 1994, the NHL and MLB were idle from October through the end of the year. The NHL locked out its players from October 1994 until mid-January 1995 and reduced the 1994-95 season from 84 games to 48. MLB endured a 232-day strike from August 12, 1994 until April 2, 1995, which led to the cancellation of the entire 1994 postseason and World Series.
In a call with the labor relations committee on Thursday, Commissioner David Stern recommended that the first lockout since the 1998-99 season be imposed.
"We had a great year in terms of the appreciation of our fans for our game. It just wasn't a profitable one for the owners, and it wasn't one that many of the smaller market teams particularly enjoyed or felt included in," Stern said. "The goal here has been to make the league profitable and to have a league where all 30 teams can compete."
Despite a three-hour meeting Thursday and a final proposal from the players - which NBA leaders said would have raised average player salaries to $7 million in the sixth year of the deal - the sides could not close the enormous gulf between their positions.
"The problem is that there's such a gap in terms of the numbers, where they are and where we are, and we just can't find any way to bridge that gap," union chief Billy Hunter said.
All league business is officially on hold, starting with the free agency period that would have opened Friday. The NBA's summer league in Las Vegas already has been canceled, preseason games in Europe were never scheduled, and players might have to decide if they want to risk playing in this summer's Olympic qualifying tournaments without the NBA's help in securing insurance in case of injury.
And teams will be prohibited from having any contact with their players, most of whom won't be paid until a deal is done but insist they'll hang in anyway.
"We're going to stand up for what we have to do, no matter how long it's going to take," Thunder star Kevin Durant told The Associated Press. "No matter how long the lockout's going to take, we're going to stand up. We're not going to give in."
The lockout comes exactly one year after one of the NBA's most anticipated days in recent years, when Lebron James, Dwyane Wade and the rest of the celebrated class of 2010 became free agents.
That free agency bonanza - highlight by the James, Wade, Chris Bosh trio in Miami - got the league started on a season where ticket and merchandise sales, ratings and buzz were all up. That weakened the owners' case that the system was broken beyond repair, but it also demonstrated why they wanted changes, with Stern saying owners feel pressured to spend as much as possible to prove their commitment to winning to fans.
The last lockout reduced the 1998-99 season to just a 50-game schedule, the only time the NBA missed games for a work stoppage. Hunter said it's too early to be concerned about that.
"I hope it doesn't come down to that," he said. "Obviously, the clock is now running with regard to whether or not there will or will be a loss of games, and so I'm hoping that over the next month or so that there will be sort of a softening on their side and maybe we have to soften our position as well."
The NBA appeared headed this route from the start of negotiations. Owners said they lost hundreds of millions in every season of this CBA, ratified in 2005. League officials said 22 of the 30 teams would lose money.
So they took a hard-line stance from the start, with their initial proposal in 2010 calling for a hard salary cap system, reducing contract lengths and eliminating contract guarantees, as well as reducing player salary costs by about $750 million annually. Though the proposal was withdrawn after a contentious meeting with players at the 2010 All-Star weekend, the league never moved from its wish list until recently, and Hunter said he believes negotiations never recovered from that rocky beginning.
The union had previously filed an unfair labor charge against the league with the National Labor Relations Board for unfair bargaining practices, complaining the NBA's goal was to avoid meaningful negotiation until a lockout was in place.
Despite frequent meetings this month, the sides just didn't make much progress.
Owners want to reduce the players' guarantee of 57 percent of basketball revenue and weren't moved by the players' offer to drop it to 54.3 percent - though players said that would have cut their salaries by $500 million over five years.
They sparred over the league's characterization of its "flex" salary cap proposal - players considered it a hard cap, which they oppose - and any chance of a last-minute deal was quickly lost Thursday when league officials said the union's move was in the wrong direction financially.
"I don't think we're closer; in fact it worries me that we're not closer. We have a huge philosophical divide," Stern said.
Hunter said he hopes the two sides will meet again in the next two weeks, after the union has looked at some additional documents it requested.
The players' association seems unlikely, at least for now, to follow the NFLPA's model by decertifying and taking the battle into the court system, instead choosing to continue negotiations. Hunter said last week he felt owners believe the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, which is debating the legality of the NFL's lockout, will uphold employers' rights to impose lockouts.
"We'll just continue to ask our fans to stick with us and remain patient with us. As players we want to play. That's who we are; we're basketball players," Lakers guard and union president Derek Fisher said. "Right now we're faced with dealing with the business aspect of our game. We're going to do it the same way we play basketball. We're going to work hard. We're going to be focused. We're going to be dedicated to getting the results that we want."
About 90 percent of NBA players get paid from Nov. 15 through April 30, so they won't be missing checks for a while. But Stern has warned that the offers only get worse once a lockout starts, so the league could try to push through elements of its original proposal when bargaining resumes.

CREDITED TO NBA.COM

LOCK OUT

Player Revenue Splits

By far the biggest issue facing this labor situation is the division of overall revenues. In the NBA, revenues are referred to as Basketball-Related Income. Under the current system, the players take home 57% while the owners are left with 43%.

Over the last year or so, the owners have raised a number of reasons they feel their share should be bigger: costs associated with stadiums, additional expenses incurred through long-term debts, the rising costs of travel and so on.  The NBA has claimed that 22 of its 30 franchises lost money this past season.

The easiest way to fix that problem, of course, is to drastically reduce costs associated with players. In other words, by cutting their salaries significantly. Options on the table: rolling back future salaries of previously agreed to contracts, reducing the length of contracts (less years = less money) and reducing the amount of guarantees in a contract (allowing an owner to get out of a bad contract more easily or more quickly). It goes without saying that the players are opposed to all of those ideas on principle, given that they represent major concessions to what they have previously negotiated for themselves.  

2. The Type of Salary Cap

So... who is acctualy happy about it....

I'll tell you first off that is not and of us =(.
And that goes beyond just the U.S. More than 300 million people play basketball recreationally in China, which has a deep fascination with the Nation Basketball Leauge and its superstars. Mr. Bryant was treated like a rock star -- some might even say a god -- when he played for the U.S. team in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
And what of the sneaker business? The basketball shoe market is a $2.4 billion market. Between the traditional Nike brand and Nike-owned Jordan Brand and Converse, the Swoosh controls 94% market share in basketball shoes. Nike is a marketing partner of the ; NBA Adidas is a marketing and merchandising partner.

WHYYY

 Why the NBA and not other basketball organizations around the world? Maybe its because we have the most over paid players, or could it be that the owners want a LARGER cut than what they already have. Phhhh..... what about the audience, when do we get a word on the situation. We fund the NBA millions just to sit and watch them play for 4 quarters.

"Nobody is anxious to have a lockout or a work stoppage," said Neil Pilson, the former CBS Sports president who now runs his own consultancy, Pilson Communications. "From a cable [network] standpoint, a lockout would be manageable. But then you have a lot of goodwill there that's threatened."