A great article, long but very much worth the read. Describing what went wrong at each stage and who and why they blew it. Stern! Hunter! The Owners! The Players! The Agents!
We are at quite an impass. Too many egos. Too many personal issues. Too much hatred and mistrust. I think it was wise for the players to bring in a new legal team. That's the new hope because the old team and negotiations are gone.
Business Vs. Personal
The two sides of the NBA lockout are taking opposite approaches and have created a "nuclear winter" in professional hoops
By Bill SimmonsPOSTED NOVEMBER 18, 2011 Hagen: Your father wouldn't want to hear this, Sonny. This is business not personal.
Sonny: They shoot my father and it's business, my ass!
Hagen: Even shooting your father was business not personal, Sonny!
Sonny: Well then, business is going to have to suffer.
That's one of the most famous scenes from one of the most famous movies ever made. You know how things end for Sonny Corleone — he ignores his consigliere, makes it personal and ends up gorging on a bowl of bullets parmigiana.......
"For years owners have treated players as if they are just their property," (agent Aaron)Goodwin said, "fining them over how they dress, act, everything. This is the first time the players have the opportunity to say no."
Whoa. For months and months, bubbling beneath the surface of the posturing and rhetoric, buried under anonymous leaks, veiled threats and everything else that makes any professional sports lockout or strike so insufferable, a dynamic had been swelling that was entirely, 100 percent personal.......
Let's look at the second part of Goodwin's quote …
For years owners have treated players as if they are just their property — fining them over how they dress, act, everything.
That's not an outlandish claim. For the past twelve years (since our last labor shutdown), Stern capped contracts and rookie deals so players didn't get paid too much (or too much right away). He instituted a mandatory dress code so injured players looked more professional (translation: less "urban"). He cracked down on taunting during games, physical play, leaving the bench during altercations and anything else that might lead to another Artest Melee or Kermit/Rudy scenario. He pushed players to participate in "NBA Cares," fined them for not showing up on time to All-Star Weekend, fined them for avoiding the press during the playoffs and basically treated them like an overbearing high school principal. And, of course, he made every decision in his typically smug, sarcastic, endearing-or-bullying-depending-on-how-you-feel-about-him manner.3
He's clearly wearing out the players … and not in a good way. During one of Stern's typically biting lectures in a crucial labor meeting two months ago, Dwyane Wade snapped and yelled at him, "Don't you point your finger at me!" That was personal, not business. That was Wade telling Stern, "Fuck you, you're not my dad. We're tired of your condescending bull****. It's not happening anymore."
.......Here were the offending parties in no particular order.
1. Billy Hunter and Derek Fisher
Imagine riding in a car with someone who doesn't care if he dies. He's driving 100 miles an hour on the highway and cackling like a maniac. You're asking him to slow down. He asks, "What's it worth to you?" You stammer. He says, "Unless you give me everything in your wallet right now, I'm driving into that highway divider up there." You have to make a decision: Do you pay him, or do you think he's bluffing?
Well, you pay him. Quickly. You don't want to find out if he values his life less than you value yours.
Guess who had the leverage that whole time? That's right … the suicidal maniac driving the car. And really, that's how the latest NBA lockout played out. We have known for nearly three years that the NBA owners (a) wanted to change the financial structure of their business, and (b) didn't care how they did it, just that it happened. If they lost 30 games of the 2011-12 season to get what they wanted, fine. If they lost the season, fine. If they lost three seasons, fine. They didn't care. Just don't ask them a question like, "If you're so unhappy owning your NBA franchise, why don't you just sell it?" See, heading into the summer of 2011, your average NBA franchise was more valuable for the investment itself than for the revenue it yielded. That's pretty liberating — if you don't care that your business stops, how can anyone possibly negotiate with you? You're basically driving them towards that highway divider and asking for their wallet.............
..........You can't oversell how disorganized Hunter's side has been — especially last weekend and on Monday, when they never allowed the players to vote, failed to give them enough information and couldn't even wrangle every player rep to Monday's meeting in New York. It took them five solid days to respond to Stern's offer; instead of countering with four or five system tweaks like Stern expected (he would never admit that publicly because it would belie his whole "take it or leave it" stance, but it's true), the players simply shredded it and launched the NBA's "nuclear winter" (Stern's words, and really, his only inspired moment of the past few months). Anyone who commends the players for standing up for themselves should mention that, during those five days — which doubled as the five most essential days in the recent history of the players association — many players couldn't even get in touch with their team reps (much less Hunter or Fisher). Those players were standing up for themselves, all right — they were standing up to make sure they had cell phone reception because nobody was emailing them any updates. What a mess. If I wrote a book about the 2011 NBA Lockout, it would either be called Cluster****! or CLUSTERFUCK!
...............2. The Owners
Either they never wanted a season (and lied this whole time), or they badly misread the players' resolve and their growing contempt for Stern. It's one or the other. Hmmmmmmm. Let's lie and pretend they wanted a season. Who "negotiates" like that? Why were they going for Eff You touchdowns like the post-Spygate Patriots? Why weren't they more magnanimous? Why did they try to win every single issue? Whatever happened to the concept of "I want to win, but I also want to be fair because these are my partners for the next 10 years?"
............One thing's for sure: If Stern believed they were that close (and I know for a fact he did), then he totally failed and totally underestimated how the players felt. Not their resolve, just how they felt. Maybe that's why he seemed visibly stunned afterwards, blaming Hunter and Kessler when the reasons were so much more complex. The players know they have terrible leadership. Their agents have been telling them that for months and months and months. And at this point, they don't care. Even though Hunter was an unequivocal disaster these past few months — his lack of urgency was stupefying, his lack of a coherent strategy was almost criminal, his summer media strategy couldn't have been worse, and his inability to keep his 450 players in the loop from day to day was inexplicable — the players kept following him and Fisher if only because the other option (trusting Stern and the owners) was less palatable. How can someone run a sports league for 28 years and lose the trust of his players that completely? And how could he possibly expect to win that trust back?
(The short answer: He won't. It's gone.)
3. The Pampering Issue
Your typical NBA owner operates like a sugar daddy of sorts. He coddles his players, flies them on chartered planes, serves them gourmet meals on those planes, puts them up in five-star hotels, builds them state-of-the-art practice facilities, hires them the best possible training staffs, sneaks them extra tickets for every game, enables their entourages, builds ticket campaigns around them, kisses their asses and (in some cases) even allows their friends to hitch rides on team charters. That's the real reason Dan Gilbert was so pissed off two years ago — after giving LeBron everything he wanted for years and years, LeBron never had the courtesy to call before he picked Miami. Gilbert felt more like a spurned boyfriend than anything (and acted like it)......
................You know what the real irony is? The owners' last proposal actually made a ton of sense. Read Howard Beck's breakdown of what it would have looked like, potentially, and try to find ONE thing that isn't logical. Contracts should be shorter so fans aren't getting constantly turned off by that relentlessly overpaid mediocrity. The gap between big market teams and small market teams should be smaller. A team like Cleveland should have a more favorable chance to keep its best player. A star like Carmelo shouldn't be able to force a trade and get rewarded with a mammoth extension. The mid-level exception should be tempered — it spawned too many dumb contracts and made it harder for teams to improve. What's wrong with coming up with a smarter model in which the right money goes to the right people? That's a bad thing?
4. The Agents
If the players don't trust the owners or Stern, and they're losing trust in Hunter and Fisher, who's left?
You guessed it … it's those shrewd and lovable legal minds who negotiate for players, call them every day, know their kids' names, won them over years ago, spent the last few months quietly undermining Hunter, know how to butter up media members and curry favor, and currently have their clients lathered into an anti-The-Man frenzy. The agents despised the owners' latest proposal — they don't want the middle class compromised in any way, or sign-and-trades, or the luxury tax, because that might curtail player movement (their bread and butter). They would rather lose a season to protect what they have, knowing they have much longer careers and they'll make those commissions back over time as long as they can prevent the NBA's model from changing against them too drastically right now.
Make no mistake: The agents are the single smartest group involved in this lockout. They make absurd commissions working over general managers (usually ex-players) who are almost always unequipped to negotiate with them. You know that saying "laughing all the way to the bank"? That's what the best sports agents do. Trust me, they have done the math. They figured out exactly where this lockout needs to end for them — repeat: for them — and advised the players accordingly. Meanwhile, these players can NEVER get that lost season back from three standpoints: how it affects them financially, how it affects their playing careers, and how it affects their fans (especially the casual ones who hopped on the bandwagon these past two years and will just as quickly hop off). The agents were supposed to be protecting these guys; instead, they protected themselves. Of course …...
5. Jeffrey Kessler
The agents could never act more selfishly than Kessler, who waited his whole career for the right antitrust suit and finally found his patsy. It's his chance to become the focal point of an HBO documentary, bring the NBA to its knees and maybe become the Marvin Miller of antitrust lawyers. (It's a longshot, and we might lose a couple of NBA seasons in the process, but who cares, right?) Those just-as-ruthless NFL owners sniffed him out early, chopped his balls off and eventually shut him out of the final negotiating process, knowing he didn't totally care about getting a deal done. Now he's operating in a much bigger vacuum — thanks to a leadership void, Kessler kept amassing power even after his "plantation owners" comment backfired so spectacularly.11
6. The Veteran Superstars
That would be Steve Nash, Grant Hill, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce … seven of our wealthiest, most-thoughtful and most-accomplished NBA players. Five of them have been missing in action — most disappointingly, Nash, one of the smartest athletes in any sport. Kobe can't decide whether he wants to cross Fisher and Hunter or not; he's done everything but call them out, he's allegedly leaked information to writers, he pushed hard behind the scenes for the 50/50 deal, he obviously wants to play … and yet, there's an invisible line he won't cross.12 Pierce has gone the other way — he's been the union's most vocal "veteran star" voice, and if there's been a revelation these past few months, it's that Pierce carries more weight with other players than anyone else.......
..........I'm not surprised that Pierce emerged as a behind-the-scenes leader during this lockout. Every Celtics fan knows how he's wired. Here's what surprises me: Knowing how competitive he is, knowing how much he cares about one more title, knowing how much he loves playing in Boston, knowing how much he appreciates how Wyc Grousbeck and Danny Ainge stood by him over the years, knowing how he thinks about his career in a big-picture sense, knowing that he's a pretty rational guy … it frightens me that Paul Pierce cares this much about standing up to the owners and potentially losing a season. It makes me think the owner/player relationship (and the Stern/player relationship) is significantly more damaged than we want to believe.
I can't see the players caving at this point. They're too entrenched and too rankled. Stern and Hunter are too stubborn to step aside; it's like they're trapped in the same never-ending hockey faceoff, only the referee won't ship them off. Kessler and the agents only care about themselves. Same for the small market owners and even a few of the bigger market ones. If you're looking for a voice of reason13, a veteran star14 to throw his hands up and say, "Wait a second,15 we're not really throwing this season away,16 right?", you're going to be disappointed.18 That renegade player18 would have emerged by now.
For the owners, nothing has changed — it's strictly business. For the players, something has changed — it's almost entirely personal. You can't find a middle ground between those two worlds. You just can't. Maybe it's the opposite of how definitively The Godfather: Part II ended — with Michael Corleone sitting outside by himself, lost in thought, alone in every sense, a ruthless businessman with no personal connection to anything — but even so, that deafening silence sounds the same.
11/19/2011 11:41 AM