The lesson for NBA players Monday was this: You are going to pay and how much is up to you.
There will be NFL labour peace in our time, it turns out.
And in advance of the $800-million cash cow that is the exhibition season, what a surprise.
Against all odds, Jerry Jones and his billionaire owner buddies were able to stand firm against the temporary help - also known as the NFL Player’s Association.
It was always going to be thus. Covering sports labour issues is a deadly dull business; almost as dull as reading about them. Convenience demands the various sides be ascribed certain character traits for dramatic effect.
The players are typically thought to be gritty in the face of a challenge. They’re imagined to have the same steely resolve in labour wars as they do on the field. The owners are simply greedy Republicans.
The latter might even be true, but the players have long since sailed past fighting for principle.
The reality is they’re as worried about their next pay cheque as any other worker. The difference is each of their cheques represents a disproportionate percentage of what most of them can expect to earn in their very short working lives.
As big-time sports labour relations have evolved one lesson has been etched in the owners’ play books: time is a friend. As long as the owners stay together they should never lose.
The owners were able to get a deal that assures them what they wanted most – a bigger promised chunk of future league revenues – without the cost of losing lucrative exhibition games or cancelling the maudlin marketing exercise that will be the twinning of the opening Sunday of the 2011 season with the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th.
Count me warm. Count me fuzzy.
The deal reduces the number of major league North American sports in a labour dispute by half, with the NBA lockout still in the crib.
How will the NFL’s agreement impact the NBA’s labour woes and potentially – though we’re still a year away on this one – the possibility of an NHL work stoppage down the road?
The direct impact will be this: players in the NBA and the NHL better get ready to take a big haircut or be prepared to miss a lot of pay cheques, and maybe both.
The early read on the NFL’s settlement would seem to be a reasonably fair deal for both sides – players take a hit on the salary cap and rookie pay, but get assurance owners will spend more money overall including enhanced medical benefits.
But the number that should jump off the page for any NBA player not a big enough star to earn $400,000 for playing a couple of pick-up games in the Phillipines (as Kobe Bryant, Derrick Rose and Kevin Durant did this past weekend) is 48 per cent.
That’s the amount of league revenue NFL players will be entitled to over the life of their agreement with league. That is a drop from the 50-50 per cent they were getting under the terms of the previous deal.
A few percentage points here or there may not sound like a lot, but over a 10-year deal they add up to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Their goal in locking out the players was to cut themselves a bigger guaranteed slice of future league revenues that they were getting, and they got that done. And that’s against a player’s association that actually has some leverage, given the league makes money and shutting down would cost owners profits.
Do NBA players enjoy anything close to the same leverage?
While the nuances of the accounting system are disputable, there isn’t much argument that many – perhaps more than half – NBA franchises lose money.
Not playing games saves NBA ownership from piling up losses – a reported $300-million in 2010-11.
And while the convenient shorthand is that the 1998-99 lockout in which the NBA played a compressed 50-game schedule ushered in a new low for the league, costing it fans and revenue that it has only recently recovered, the real blame may lay elsewhere.
The league was due to take a dip in popularity whether there was a labour stoppage or not. Michael Jordan was retired and the league was mired in a clutch-and-grab rut that drove scoring to all-time lows, at least since the introduction of the shot clock.
There may have been short term pain on the owner’s part, but they got real concessions in the form of maximum salaries and a luxury tax.
They will be looking for more this time as they tighten the vice.
And if it took time for the league to rebound in terms of star power and popularity, it did return, with last year’s Miami Heat-inspired soap opera a season-long ratings hit.
If I’m an NBA owner, I’ll take my chances this time around.
If the NFLPA can command less than a half share of league revenues, I like my chances of cutting the NBA players share of basketball related revenues drastically from the 57 per cent they enjoy now.
How long it takes and how long it hurts is up to the players, but for all the rhetoric about sticking together to fight the good fight, the math never changes: every game cheque a player doesn’t get is one he’ll never see again.
The NFL owners got what they wanted. The NBA owners will get what they want, and a year from now the NHL owners will get what they want too – a cut in the player’s share of league revenues from 56 per cent to much less than half.
The only question for the players is how much of their own money they want to spend to get to the place they’re all going anyway.
