NBA tries to bounce back budget

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August McCarthy, Editorials Editor
March 3, 2010
Filed under Editorials

Cooperation between players, team owners and league officials has always been vital to maintaining a well-functioning league. Unfortunately for the National Basketball Association, this tradition is being threatened as the expiration date from the 2005 collective bargaining agreement approaches. The contract, which is set to end prior to the 2011-2012 NBA season needs to be renewed or a new deal needs to be negotiated between the NBA Players Association, the league and team owners if anyone is going to play ball that year.

If the big-name players making triple the league average of almost $6 million want to hold out because they do not want a new agreement to shorten their contracts, then they might end up not playing at all. Meetings have started to take place between the league and the players association, since an agreement needs to be reached prior to the 2011 season.

Veteran star Carmelo Anthony and a few others recently attended one of the meeting between the two sides. “When you walk into one of those meetings, one of those CBA meetings, and you see myself, you see the LeBrons and the Kobes and the Kevin Garnetts, it’s a stronger presence. So I think we should go in and make our presence felt.” The league was not pleased with the players association, tearing up their proposal for the new collective bargaining agreement, which is set to expire in July of 2011.

These negotiations between players and team owners have the appearance of the usual fight over contracts, but what some do not realize is that this time it may not end with a traded player or some renegotiated contracts.

The current collective bargaining agreement is set to expire just before the start of the 2011 season. Some now fear that this will not happen, and will instead result in a lockout, much like the 2004-05 NHL season, for similar reasons. Every year the league re-adjusts its salary cap, but now for only the second time in its 26 year existence, it will decrease. The “hard” salary cap that the league seeks to impose would be similar to that of the NFL and NHL. This will reduce exceptions for teams to exceed the salary cap, which will ultimately result in players receiving shorter contracts with less money.

Obviously, one party will not be completely satisfied, and in this case it will need to be the guys with the superstar contracts. The Kobe Bryant and Paul Pierce types of contracts will need to be eliminated in amount and length. “If they don’t like the new max contracts, LeBron can play football, where he will make less than the new max,” commented one executive to CBSSports.com. “Wade can be a fashion model or whatever. They won’t make squat and no one will remember who they are in a few years.”

The main goal is to get nearly half of all franchises, who are operating in the red, back to how they were before the recession. “We are at a revenue percentage right now with our players that is simply too high to power a sustainable business model” said NBA Commisioner David Stern. Ticket sales have dropped across the league for all but a few franchises, and teams in smaller markets are having an especially difficult time. Even teams who boasted a playoff-bound record are struggling. Stern acknowledged this, saying, “we need to make significant changes to deal with the very substantial losses that are hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Eventually, players will come together to negotiate with the league and the owners. If a team only offers them $2 million instead of the 5 or 6 they were expecting, they will take it. What they set out to do was play basketball. And at the end of the day, fans will be able to tell if basketball, or money was why they play the game.