Bonn1997 wrote:

Knickoftime wrote:
OKC was 5 mins from going to a Final. They didn't execute. Doesn't mean they couldn't have. San Antonio are/were title contenders for years, but couldn't win every time.

So the answer to your question is OKC was a title contender, and probably would be again. And given luck, health, circumstances, I think the odds are decent OKC has the ability to win a title. And in fact, that's likely the crux of the criticism that he's getting, that he maybe does not have to drive to get over the hump lots of superstars have faced on their careers.

OK but how many times do you give it a shot in OKC with the same core before moving on? We're not just talking about last season. (Even last year he lost to the team that lost to the champions.) He tried seven times with Westbrook and Ibaka as his top teammates. No, it's not impossible he'd win a championship with them but I think the most likely scenario is he'd have more of what happened the last seven years.

Makes sense. Moreover, no disrespect to Oklahoma, but I have a feeling that had the franchise stayed in Seattle, Durant might have had a harder time deciding to leave it.

The topic du jour, of course, was Kevin Durant, who left Oklahoma City after nine years with the little franchise that could and joined forces with three All-Stars -- including the two-time reigning MVP -- in the Bay Area. As Silver dusted off his talking points from the 2011 lockout, it reinforced the notion -- often lost in documenting Durant's decision for posterity -- that this is something that wasn't supposed to be allowed.

There they were again from Silver on Tuesday, the two goals that would never change: 1) NBA franchises, if well managed, should have a chance to be profitable; and 2) regardless of market size or the depth of ownership's pockets, they should have the opportunity to compete for championships.

As the league forged ahead with a massive reduction in the players' share of revenue and onerous system restrictions designed to rein in the big-spending teams in glamour markets, the system was working for a while. Oklahoma City, albeit hamstrung by the escalated luxury-tax system and forced to trade James Harden in 2012, had persevered and become the beacon of small-market success that Silver had envisioned at the bargaining table six years ago.

An unanticipated tripling of the league's broadcast deals -- "We did not model for such a large spike," Silver said Tuesday -- threw all of those plans under a freight train this month. The massive jump in the cap from $70 million to $94 million -- plus, the Warriors' good fortune at having MVP Stephen Curry on a wildly below-market deal, and other factors -- paved the way for the kind of star-clustering that the CBA was supposed to prevent.

"I don't think it's good for the league, just to be really clear," Silver said. "I will say whoever is the prohibitive favorite, try telling that to the 430 other players who aren't on those two teams. I mean, we have the greatest collection of basketball players in the world in our league, and so I'm not making any predictions, but there's no question, when you aggregate a group of great players, they have a better chance of winning than many other teams."

At the league meetings in Las Vegas, the Durant decision was front-and-center in dialogue among owners and executives in the context of what can be done to recalibrate the deal with the National Basketball Players Association.

"Of course we discussed the activities from the last two weeks for free agency," Silver said. "I would say we had a robust discussion in the room of various views of player movement that we've seen."

For several months, the league and union have been meeting to pave the runway for a new labor deal. As CBS Sports first reported in December, the goal of the discussions isn't simply for one side or the other to decide whether to exercise its right to opt out of the deal by Dec. 15. The purpose is to agree on a completely new labor deal before this two-year cap spike does any more damage.

"I think we do need to re-examine some of the elements of our system so that I'm not here next year or the year after again talking about anomalies," Silver said. "There are certain things, corrections we believe we can make in the system. Of course we're not going to negotiate here with the union; it requires two parties to make those changes. I think we've had very productive discussions with the union so far, and we will continue to do so."

There are two obvious ways to tackle the problem, and they're both non-starters for one side or the other.

First, there are renewed signs that hard-line owners are digging in with the intention of achieving the league's long-sought goal of a hard salary cap. It was the biggest bargaining chip that Silver, as the NBA's lead negotiator during the last round of labor talks, had to leave on the table to get a deal done that saved the 2011-12 season.

The union will never go for it. In 2011, former executive director Billy Hunter's position was that the only way he'd agree to a hard cap was if it were set impossibly high so it almost wouldn't matter. It's laughable to think that his successor, Michelle Roberts, would surrender such sacred bargaining territory in her first CBA rodeo.

http://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/in-wake-of-durant-to-warriors-adam-silver-vows-to-fix-broken-nba-labor-deal/

Knickoftime wrote:Still say it would be incredibly tone deaf to lockout now.

Tone deaf you say?

I can't imagine a more tone deaf group of people than the billionaires who run the NBA. The fact that Silver is already saying it's bad for the league tips their hand...

Knickoftime wrote:

crzymdups wrote:I can't imagine a more tone deaf group of people than the billionaires who run the NBA. The fact that Silver is already saying it's bad for the league tips their hand...

Silver is performing his job function.

The players can opt out too and could ask for the world. He has a position to protect.

His and Stern's default position, their job description, is to point out the flaws in the system. He can't give up all bargaining position by publicly stating all is great with the league and man are all the owners making money and happy.

You ask Adam Silver about CBA issues and he's suppose to tell you what's wrong. He has to. People are reading into him doing what he's paid to do in any circumstance in any year.

Yeah, but the point is that last summer at this time he said the league was doing better than ever and he hoped they could avoid a lockout. The Durant thing shifted perception (not reality, but perception)... I dunno... I'm rooting against a lockout, but I'm not putting it past the owners to try something dumb.

crzymdups wrote:

Knickoftime wrote:

crzymdups wrote:I can't imagine a more tone deaf group of people than the billionaires who run the NBA. The fact that Silver is already saying it's bad for the league tips their hand...

Silver is performing his job function.

The players can opt out too and could ask for the world. He has a position to protect.

His and Stern's default position, their job description, is to point out the flaws in the system. He can't give up all bargaining position by publicly stating all is great with the league and man are all the owners making money and happy.

You ask Adam Silver about CBA issues and he's suppose to tell you what's wrong. He has to. People are reading into him doing what he's paid to do in any circumstance in any year.

Yeah, but the point is that last summer at this time he said the league was doing better than ever and he hoped they could avoid a lockout. The Durant thing shifted perception (not reality, but perception)... I dunno... I'm rooting against a lockout, but I'm not putting it past the owners to try something dumb.

I think the owners are playing defense. Bear in mind the owners want people to hear the drumbeats because if they don't opt out then they look like heroes and the party preventing a work stoppage. The get credit for just honoring the existing CBA.

I think a strike is more likely.

crzymdups wrote:

Knickoftime wrote:

crzymdups wrote:

Knickoftime wrote:

crzymdups wrote:I can't imagine a more tone deaf group of people than the billionaires who run the NBA. The fact that Silver is already saying it's bad for the league tips their hand...

Silver is performing his job function.

The players can opt out too and could ask for the world. He has a position to protect.

His and Stern's default position, their job description, is to point out the flaws in the system. He can't give up all bargaining position by publicly stating all is great with the league and man are all the owners making money and happy.

You ask Adam Silver about CBA issues and he's suppose to tell you what's wrong. He has to. People are reading into him doing what he's paid to do in any circumstance in any year.

Yeah, but the point is that last summer at this time he said the league was doing better than ever and he hoped they could avoid a lockout. The Durant thing shifted perception (not reality, but perception)... I dunno... I'm rooting against a lockout, but I'm not putting it past the owners to try something dumb.

I think the owners are playing defense. Bear in mind the owners want people to hear the drumbeats because if they don't opt out then they look like heroes and the party preventing a work stoppage. The get credit for just honoring the existing CBA.

I think a strike is more likely.

I would be shocked if the players strike with a $105M cap...

They're routinely perceived as having lost the last labor dispute when the owners cried poverty. They gave up 6% of revenue and nearly immediately after the Clippers were sold for $2B and the owners struck it rich with the TV deal.

It would be human nature for them to want to get back some of what they gave up.

I think Silver is basically trying to start the negotiations in public, essentially. Letting the NBPA know their points of contention before they start talking.

But I also think he's trying to make the case in public. "4 superstars on one team is bad for the league"...

Of course he is, again, that's literally his job.

crzymdups wrote:

Knickoftime wrote:

They're routinely perceived as having lost the last labor dispute when the owners cried poverty. They gave up 6% of revenue and nearly immediately after the Clippers were sold for $2B and the owners struck it rich with the TV deal.

It would be human nature for them to want to get back some of what they gave up.

I think Silver is basically trying to start the negotiations in public, essentially. Letting the NBPA know their points of contention before they start talking.

But I also think he's trying to make the case in public. "4 superstars on one team is bad for the league"...

Of course he is, again, that's literally his job.

Well, yeah, the players gave up a lot. So when the owners come asking for more... it's not gonna be pretty.

And I don't think Silver's job is necessarily supposed to be to represent the owners. Isn't he supposed to do what it best for the league? But maybe that's naive. Anyway, we'll see, but I predict that it will be somewhat rocky. Owners want more restrictions on Free Agency, more parity (which I feel is impossible in the NBA given the impact the top 5 players have on the league), meanwhile the player's association has to remember they went from something like 51% of the revenue to 44% of the revenue right before an era of unprecendented growth... the cap could actually be something like 12-14% higher based on them getting another 6-7% of the total pot. If it were a 50/50 split, I think the cap would actually be more like $114M next season instead of the projected $102M... I just think there is the potential for the powder keg to explode.

crzymdups wrote:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2016/07/15/nba-teams-appear-to-be-preparing-for-a-lockout-heres-what-they-want-changed/

The idea of a hard salary cap has been something the NBA has always wanted. There’s no better way to prevent teams like the Warriors from accumulating a disproportionate amount of talent than a fixed spending limit teams are forbidden to exceed.

It may prevent teams like the Warriors, but it didn't actually prevent the Warriors.

Or the Heat for that matter.

Both teams had to be under the soft cap and were therefore limited by what was effectively close to a hard cap when those deals were made. Warriors got rid of a whole lot of players to make it work.

That point was non-sensical.