The Lockout & the Raptors: Players approve CBA, Owners too! (1944)
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What are our baseline assumptions? Do we take the owners at their word that they're losing money and that the players are overpaid by about $700 million? For their part, they say they've provided certified accounting stattements and tax records to the players -- so there's at least some semblance of an open book. That doesn't make it impossible to hide things, but I'm more inclined to believe statemens that are backed up by data.
So let's go with a premise that the next agreement needs to bring down player costs by about a third. The solution needs to do three things:
1. Get them out of the mess they're in currently.
2. Implement a system where they can't get right back into the same mess.
3. Fix inequities created by differences in market size and owner financial resources.
The answer to the third point is easy -- increased revenue sharing. For their part, the league has said that they're addressing revenue sharing separately but in parallel to the CBA discussions.
The answer to #1 is principally salary rollbacks.
Finally, the answer to #2 is primarily dealing with long-term guaranteed contracts. It's not guys like Kobe Bryant -- earning $25 million but also having an MVP-caliber season -- who are the problem. It's the guys like Eddy Curry, who are raking in eight figures for almost zero production. The Knicks would waive him in a hot second if they can escape paying his salary. And I'm not sure fans should be made to continue subsidizing him with their ticket & jersey purchases while he languishes on the bench.
So here's a "tough love" proposal:
*. A salary rollback. The owners will want 33%, the players 0%, but let's compromise at 20%. The rollback will be progessive, so that minimum-salary guys aren't touched at all, and the max salary guys take the greatest hit -- but the overall reduction is 20%.
* The salary cap is based on net revenues rather than gross revenues. The inclusion/exclusions and the percentage split needs to be figured out, to ensure a correct revenue split.
* Contracts can be guaranteed for two years, plus the "following" year (on January 10). A new contract is guaranteed for two years. The third year becomes guaranteed on Jan 10 of the second year. The fourth year becomes guaranteed on January 10 of the third year, etc.
* All minimum-salary contracts are fully guaranteed. Protect the guys whose entire career might be just a couple seasons.
* Max salaries stay where they are, but they become just that -- the maximum. No more exceeding the maximum via raises.
* Teams retain Bird rights, but sign-and-trade goes away. It's like someone having a credit card that allows them to make purchses they can't afford, and having a heart attack when the credit card bill arrives.
* Contracts are limited to five years. The mid-level exception is limited to three. The bi-annual goes away.
* Non-simultaneous trades go away (and with them, trade exceptions).
* A franchise tag is available, which can only be used on one player at a time, can't be used on the same player more than twice, and when applied, constitutes a one-year contract at the maximum salary.
* A revenue sharing system is devised that equalizes teams based on market size and owner wealth, but rewards well-run and financially successful teams. This system takes the place of the luxury tax, which is eliminated.
* Oh, and finally, sportswriters get 10%. We'll ask for 10% of the gross, but we'll settle for 10% of the net.
Source: Hoops World
Great insight. This guy really knows his stuff and I always love reading his opinion. In case you have not see my suggested sites on the RR Forums Questions, Suggestions or Feedback board then here:
Larry Coon's NBA Salary Cap FAQ
You'll be hard pressed to find a better explanation of the current CBA.
The Lockout & the Raptors
After I saw the box score tonight I got this sick feeling that we won't see the Raptors play for a long time. Stupid owners, stupid players, just make a freaking deal. Man I hate unions. I have a feeling we're going to hear about some player discontent too once all of this is done. I wonder who the next Hedo will be..... :(
No Raptors summer league team this year...
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In two more signs that the NBA is gearing up for a lockout starting July 1, the league has scrubbed its annual Las Vegas summer league and has also scuttled its annual summer internship program, according to league sources.
The Las Vegas summer league normally starts around July 9, with upwards of 20 teams, including the Knicks, sending little-used veteran players and rookies to compete over a 10-day period.
Also, the NBA usually hires about 30 college students to participate in a 10-week internship program in the league's offices in New York and at the league's entertainment division in Secaucus, N.J.
In preparing for a lockout, the NBA is also not sending any teams abroad for training camp, and did not schedule any preseason games in Europe for this fall.
Owners and players have not held formal negotiations since mid-February, but are expected to resume talks this month. The collective bargaining agreement expires June 30.-Mitch Lawrence
Source: NY Daily News
Raptors players will get pay day overseas? No so fast...
Tim, it all comes down to what FIBA wants to do.
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There’s no such clarity when it comes to the likes of Bryant, Nowitzki and Jennings, because all three would remain under contract to their current NBA employers during a lockout. That reality has spawned the widespread belief that the sport’s international governing body (FIBA) -- presumably under pressure from David Stern -- would block any player contracted to an NBA team from playing elsewhere, since Stern has staunchly supported the participation of NBA players in FIBA’s international tournaments for the past two decades despite the frequent protestations of his owners.
Nowitzki himself sounds pessimistic about securing the freedom to sample the ball in Greece or his native Germany if the 2011-12 season doesn’t start on time, as covered in this cyberspace earlier this month.
Sources close to the situation, however, say that the NBA Players Association is quietly convinced that such pessimism is misplaced and that its players actually can’t be blocked from playing overseas during a lockout.
The union, according to one source, believes that NBA teams ultimately will not be able to legally enforce contracts during an NBA shutdown, whether it’s short or long, which would theoretically clear the way for the Lakers’ and Mavericks’ worst nightmare.
Yet I’ve also been strongly advised that the union anticipates having to caution its constituents with two very strong warnings about playing elsewhere during a lockout in the event that labor negotiations drag into the fall and the NBA finds itself unexpectedly powerless to prevent vets from moonlighting abroad:
1. The union will be telling its players that they risk forfeiting any guaranteed money left on their NBA contracts if they suffer serious injury overseas. Bryant, for example, is owed $83.5 million over the next three seasons. Nowitzki is currently in the first season of a new four-year, $80 million deal. The Lakers and Mavericks would almost certainly have the ability to void those deals if Bryant or Nowitzki suffered some sort of catastrophic injury in an overseas gym. And you have to believe -- drastic as the notion of cutting ties with franchise icons sounds in those examples -- that the threat of getting hurt and invalidating a guaranteed contract will deter plenty of people.
2. The union, I’m told, is also realistic about the overseas market and knows that only a limited numbers of players can reasonably expect decent offers. There are likewise very few teams, even in Europe’s biggest leagues, with the budget to come anywhere close to NBA money, which is why we never saw the once-feared exodus of NBA players after Josh Childress left for Greece in the summer of 2008 for two seasons with Olympiacos. So no one in the players' association, even if its legal read proves correct, is prepared to suggest that Europe will be a legitimate option for more than a handful of locked-out NBAers.
Source: ESPN.com
