NBA Unlocked…If You Care
In continuation of my tradition to write about things that not many people care about, I will discuss the NBA. The players have been locked out since June 30, and no one has really paid attention. It seems that many more people cared about the NFL lockout, which didn’t even affect the regular season all that much. The NBA season has lost 16 games, and people seem to be shrugging their shoulders and paying attention to college basketball. For the few that care, and for the handful of people without lives that read my articles anyway, here’s a rundown of the situation.
In order for the NBA to avoid violation of anti-trust laws, there needs to be a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with a players’ union which lays out rules about salaries, trades, and other details about the responsibilities of the owners and players. Since the end of the last NBA season, the players and owners have been working on a new CBA.
The previous CBA expired on July 1, 2011. The two sides were not able to come to an agreement, and the owners locked the players out on June 30, 2011. Many owners were claiming that they weren’t able to make a profit because the previous CBA entitled the players to such a large portion of the revenue. Since there is no revenue-sharing in the NBA, many owners were left losing money each year. Although a list of teams that were losing money has not been made public, it is assumed that smaller market teams are the ones that are in the red, and big market teams such as the Knicks and the Lakers aren’t having as hard of a time.
As of November 25, 2011, a “handshake agreement” has been arrived at, and a deal is expected to be approved by both sides which will have the 66-game season (as opposed to the usual 82) begin on December 25 of this year. The two biggest aspects of the agreement are that there will be a salary-cap system which will punish teams more harshly for spending above a certain amount than they have been in the past, and players will get between 49% and 51% of basketball-related income, whereas they were entitled to 57% in the past. This is a big loss for the players, but they did succeed in avoiding a hard-salary cap system, which would have outright barred teams from spending a certain amount, instead of just penalizing them.
That’s about it. Aside from the players temporarily disbanding their union in order to sue the NBA for anti-trust violations, and Michael Jordan attempting to fleece the players like a pack of sheep in a meat grinder, nothing really exciting has happened. That’s why I wrote about it.
