Undeterred for three months by unflattering news coverage about getting a "fair deal," the NBA team owners and players' union failed once again to strike a deal this week. For the second time in 13 years, the NBA will lose games to a work stoppage.
The players have legitimate gripes about the owners' seriousness about negotiating a compromise: The owners opened these negotiations with extreme demands, including steep across-the-board salary cuts, discontinuing contracts and restructuring the salary system so that owners wouldn't have to suffer the indignity of revenue losses when they make poor management decisions.
Make no mistake: The NBA is a hugely profitable business. It's unreasonable to expect that labor battles won't arise when billions of dollars are at stake.
But these owners are — without exception — exceptionally rich people. 12 of the 30 NBA majority owners ranked in Forbes' latest list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, all with approximate net worth between 1 billion and 14 billion dollars. Their constant harping about a salary system that makes it difficult to turn a profit is particularly odious against the backdrop of the nation's worst financial crisis in 80 years. With unemployment stagnant at 9 percent and average household income below $50,000, they're certainly not going to succeed at winning any sympathy from the American public.
Had the owners not entered into negotiations in bad faith and instead injected a note of pragmatism from the beginning, the lockout would likely be over by now. As it stands, they've backed off a number of their initial demands, including those for salary rollbacks and non-guaranteed contracts, but the players' union insists that isn't good enough. They want to keep as much of the current system in place as possible so that many players can continue to receive bids from big-market teams that are far out of proportion with their talent.
Orlando Magic guard Gilbert Arenas, for example, has become a poster child for overpaid basketball players. No one forced the Washington Wizards to sign Arenas to a six-year, $111 million contract, or the Orlando Magic to trade for it. Still, the players' cries for "fair compensation" seem all the more hollow when one hears of cases like Arenas.
Instead of proudly declaring how willing they are to lose income to this noble cause, it would be nice if the owners and players thought about the fact they aren't the ones suffering the most from these weeks of lost paychecks. More than 10 percent of the NBA workforce was laid off over the summer, and hundreds of others are losing paychecks with each week that the lockout continues. If you own an NBA team, you can afford to skip a year of income; if you work in a concession stand, you aren't so lucky.
Like the owners, the players can hold out financially, but they can't hold out forever. The players are rich. The owners are much richer, and the players have no leverage in this fight. In a desperate attempt, rumors have started about players establishing their own league if the owners don't concede more ground. Get real.
The players know it's only a matter of time before their collective resolve fractures under the weight of all those lost millions. The marginal improvement they might see in the owners' proposal if they wait long enough will be outweighed by the months they spent pleading their case to the fans and pretending they weren't already beaten.
No one likes to see millionaires and billionaires pleading for sympathy on their own behalf. There are real livelihoods at stake here, and none of them are represented at the bargaining table.
