Greed and Basketball

A lock-out was inevitable

What ever happened to the good old days when Basketball was played from the heart? What happened to those days when playing basketball was your identity?  You played for the love of the game. I grew up in Watts, CA in a housing project on a small budget. I never once starved. I always had a pretty good Christmas and Birthday year after year. I had shoes and clothes even though Welfare was our primary source of income. You have kids like me who dreamed of being in the NBA and their prayers were answered. All the years of hard work and hours only to be drafted and basically enslaved. It is the owners who are behind this lock-out. Simply put , they want more money and they do not want to share much of the profits with the primary engine that makes the NBA go and that is, the players. If you don't have players then you don't have the NBA. period! The NBA and it's owners should be shamed. David Stern, the Commissioner, should be shamed. They sold the kids around the world a dream. They taught them to stay in school and get an education but yet, allowed kids to leave school in search for millions. They corrupted their minds. How do you explain to little Jake that his favorite team will probably not be playing this year because somebody wants more money.                                    


        The league's owners have made this happen -- and, if you understand nothing else about this dispute, understand that it is the owners who have brought it about -- unwilling to accept anything less than an overhaul of the current system that they claim is unsustainable. The question is how far are they willing to go to ensure that change. Are they willing to lose an entire season and gamble that the modest signs of recovery in the league will be lost for the foreseeable future. The owners say they cannot make money with this system, which they agreed to just six years ago.The reason they cite is ... themselves. Though they would not characterize it that way, of course. The bottom line is, The Owners want the players' union to agree to a new system where the players give back hundreds of millions of dollars in projected salary over the next decade in order to ensure that teams keep salaries in line and have a chance to make a profit. Players balk at this, saying the owners have to take more responsibility for the business decisions that they make via their general managers and basketball people.

                 NBA owners know the risks before they buy in. They know that players expect to keep making more and more, that the players' agents will always be agitating for max contracts, that great coaches like Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich don't come cheap, that you have to go into massive debt to build new arenas today even with some public financing. They know this because they're not stupid. They got rich because they were smart, asked the right questions, and in the end, made more right choices than wrong ones. Nobody dragged them kicking and screaming into this particular business and in the last 15 years, almost all of the concessions have come your way. There are maximum contracts for superstars where there weren't before. What do you think Miami's Super Friends would have gotten in a true open market without any limitations? About $130 million each? Or maybe $160 million? Maybe even $180 million?     There's now a rookie scale that ended the kind of contracts the Bucks had to give Glenn Robinson ($68 million in 1994). Contract lengths are shorter. Players can't come straight out of high school anymore, and it takes them five years of their career before they get their first crack at unrestricted free agency. You have gotten more than a billion dollars back in rebates from players in the form of escrow payments in the last decade alone.


 Why cant the players stop whining and agree to a 50-50 split? That's not so bad. No group of professional athletes has ever made as much money as they're  making today. They made the last of this kind of money in the midst of the worst economic downturn in eight decades. Nobody wants to take a pay cut. I understand that but these athletes have great jobs, and tens of millions of Americans do not. They would kill to be able to take a pay cut to keep what they once had. Yes, owners have to be responsible for the decisions they make. But if they chose not to make them, to save their money and go the cheap route then hey they got to live with that out-come which wont be pretty. In 1995-96, after 11 years in the league -- during which time he'd won three championships, redefined the game on and off the court, taken the mantle from Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Dr. J and been the catalyst for an explosion of interest in the NBA, sold a billion pairs of sneakers, been on the Dream Team, retired from the game and returned with a simple, declarative, two-word sentence: "I'm back" -- Michael Jordan made a whopping $3.8 million playing for the Bulls. Sure That's a lot of money, but nothing compared to today's players average salary of $5.7 million dollars. Funny thing is, ain't none of them MJ.

                         The union has already proposed a reduction from its current 57 percent of Basketball Related Income to 54.3 percent. If the players accepted a 50-50 split of future revenues,  it would  prove their seriousness of purpose in doing their part to restore fiscal balance to the league. The union going from its current 57 percent down to 50 percent would be a $280 million annual giveback by the players, covering almost all of the $300 million the owners say they lost last year. But in the end It's the greed that pilots this plane. What kind of a world do we live in where 5.7 million dollars a year is not enough to live on when I grew up on $600 dollars a month in a family of 4. Its says in the bible; "What is a man that profits the world but loses his soul"? 


                                                                                                                                 -  Marcus Nash