Baseball Looks to Expand Wildcard
October 11, 2011Ohio State and the Quarterback Dilemma
October 11, 2011So it finally happened. For the 2nd time in his reign as Commissioner Supreme of the National Basketball Association, David Stern has cancelled regular season games.
In theory there was an 11th hour Hail Mary negotiating session Monday night in an attempt to leave the regular season unscathed. In reality, the parties talked about fringe issues and never got to work on the main stumbling block, the BRI split.
So it is, then, that if there is an NBA season, 2 weeks worth of games will be lost. David Stern has said that they will continue to lop off games in 2 week increments. So there could still be a partial season. Don’t cross your fingers, though. This standoff is now likely in it for the long haul.
The fact that the two sides didn’t even discuss the BRI split in the waning moments of the full season’s reality speaks volumes. Chris Sheridan talked about this on his site, writing:
But those talks never proceeded to the closure stage. In the 11th hours, Sunday and Monday, the principle players ended up being lawyers instead of humans. They wasted valuable time and many billable hours on side issues instead of the real issue, the money issue – the financial split.
The reason this is important is because it illustrates just how far apart the sides actually are. Despite trying to sell rays of hope the last two weeks, the truth is, this thing isn’t even close to being over. Cancelling two weeks is insulting to fans. We all know this won’t be over in two weeks. Not when the sides aren’t ready to discuss the BRI split.
As always, though, because this is a Cleveland sports site, we will look at this from the Cavaliers’ point of view. For the Cavaliers, or at least for Dan Gilbert, this hasn’t been so much about a BRI split. Sure, every owner would probably like to make more money. But since so many in the media and in blog circles seem to feel that owners shouldn’t be entitled to a return on their investment (since evidently owning an NBA team is only about ego and not about business), it would seem silly to lose regular season games over a BRI split.
And indeed, there’s actually truth in that. It would be infuriating if the NBA really loses even one game over splitting up money. The fact is, there’s a larger truth here. A larger issue that is actually worth fighting for. An issue that is worth losing games over. That issue is the NBA’s flawed system of parity. For the Cavaliers and their fans, this is the issue that matters the most.
Those who would be confused by Cavs fans’ indifference toward the loss of NBA games seem to not grasp what it is that Cavs fans want. To some degree, that goal is in alignment with Mr. Gilbert’s goals. The Cavaliers just want the same opportunity to win as everyone else. And when the league’s biggest superstar passes up both money and success to leave his home area where he grew up, there’s a fundamental problem. When other elite players feel the only way to win Championships is to form super teams where a small handful of large markets and/or warm weather markets are the lucky, select few, then there’s a fundamental problem.
Parity is a tricky thing to achieve in the sport of basketball. It’s the sport where one player makes the most difference. It’s the only sport where the best players impact every aspect of the game (offense, defense, transition) for the vast majority of the minutes of the game. It’s why the sport is the sport of dynasties.
It’s also why a new system is needed. Unless the NBA wants to just be an 8 team league and contract all the others, then something needs to be done. You can’t tell fans that every city in the Association has a right to expect their team to be able to compete, but then turn around and allow players to collect their talents in a small number of big markets. The NBA needs to decide what it wants to be.
Making it extremely hard for teams to collect superstars into these mega-conglomerate teams may or may not have an impact on the lack of parity among Championship teams. The fact will always remain that if you have Bill Russell, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, etc on your team, you’re going to have a very good chance of winning the Championship. Those are the most dominant players in the history of the sport which caters the most to dominant players. But what a new system would do is allow for the proper dispersion of star talent among all the franchises, thus giving every team a better chance to build around their talent into contenders.
I wrote before about the glory days of the NBA in my lifetime, the late 80s/early 90s, and how talent was spread throughout the league. Sure, Magic, Bird, MJ, and Olajuwon won all the Championships, but almost every team had impact players worth watching, and every team could sell their fans on the idea that contending was possible. I don’t want to watch the league become like baseball, where you have the Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies, and everyone else. A sport where the talent pools in a small number of teams. Sure, all those teams are out of the baseball playoffs right now, but never the less, they were the teams that drove public interest all year long and the sport of baseball as a whole suffers for it.
That’s what the NBA is close to becoming. A sport where you have the Lakers, Celtics, Knicks, Heat, Bulls, and everyone else. Oh sure, just like the Rays in baseball you might still have your Memphis Grizzlies who surprise and inspire, but they are really just the outliers who can be held up as proof that everything is just fine.
I want the NBA to get back to a league where the talent is spread wide throughout the league, meaning any given night you could watch almost any game and see stars battle head to head. I don’t want to see LeBron/Wade/Bosh vs Pierce/Garnett/Allen, I want to see LeBron vs Pierce or LeBron vs Wade or Bosh vs Garnett. If the owners can give us a system where this happens again, then I will gladly accept what is happening right now with the lockout.
Now that games have been lost, the owners and players will likely both hunker down and dig their heels in. This gives the owners a real chance to do what the NHL did, which is show the resolve to give up a season to get real changes that will improve the overall product. That’s the owners only real option now.
If the owners and players come back in a couple weeks with a resolution where they agree on a BRI split and give us nothing more than a modification to the Mid-Level Exception, it will be a spit in the face to fans everywhere. It will tell us the owners gave up regular season games just for a little more money for their teams.
If, on the other hand, the owners fight for real changes not only in BRI splits, but also in how talent is divided in the league, then all of this might actually have been worth something. As an absolute fan of the game and the sport as a whole, I want to believe that losing these games means something. The thought of carving out an actual season for no reason other than greed is just too much to bear.
29 Comments
I really don’t think many people are going to miss the NBA until after the NFL is done. I don’t really care at all at this point, but I’m probably in the minority. The NBA season is too long, anyway.
“I really don’t think many people are going to miss the NBA until after the NFL is done.”
tell that to the people who will not be working now due to the cancellation of games. security, ticket agents, vendors, servers, area bars, areas restaurants, etc.
the people getting lost in this whole shuffle are the ones truly affected by the lockout.
i was a hard stance before of cancelling the whole season until i have really realized who it will be hurting…..us.
Fair enough. I was speaking strictly from a fan perspective.
“the principle players ended up being lawyers instead of humans”
What a great line.
“They wasted valuable time and many billable hours on side issues instead of the real issue,
Lawyers wasted time and racked up billable hours? Well color me shocked.
It does not matter in the end what side you are on.
The players union is going to get crushed and they have no idea just how bad it will be. They will never get that money back from the missed time. They will never get a better deal then they would have got last night or last week or last month.
The writing has been on the wall for a long time. The NBA hiring all of the NHL lawyers. The new owner of the Wizards (and owner of the Capitals) talking about the coming hard cap.
The sooner you realize that the owners and players care nothing about you it is easy to just look at this and laugh. They know you will come back. The labor problems that the NHL and MLB have had in the past have no real effect on them anymore.
If you want some real humor read the article on cleveland.com about lost tax revenue. Finance director Sharon Dumas states that she does not have a plan for replacing the whole season’s revenue and is not worried about a worst case scenario. Really? No plan? Anyone who has a Madden awareness rating above 5 knew that this was coming.
Whoa, forgive me if you addressed this better because I overlooked the rest of the article as I couldn’t get past this point.
“And when the league’s biggest superstar passes up both money and success to leave his home area where he grew up, there’s a fundamental problem. When other elite players feel the only way to win Championships is to form super teams where a small handful of large markets and/or warm weather markets are the lucky, select few, then there’s a fundamental problem.”
First off, LeBron leaving is his prerogative. I thought we were united in the idea that it was they he did it that made us angry, not the fact that he did. The first sentence sounds more like sour grapes and less like anger at the Decision. Free Agency is not a fundamental problem.
Second, there are plenty of ways to win Championships, the Heat just found a way that may or may not have been collusion. Provided there wasn’t any collusion, there’s nothing wrong with them joining forces either. We may not like it because we suck because of it, but small market teams always have it like this and to some players, not even money can change that.
That paragraph makes it seem like there’s something wrong with players using free agency to play with each other. As long as there’s no collusion, I disagree wholeheartedly that what the Heat did was a fundamental problem.
I don’t think that I disagree with a single thing you wrote.
I do want to add, though, that I would do exactly as the owners/Stern have done in this instance. The split will end up being in the neighborhood of 51/49 or 52/48, but it will include the changes that the league NEEDS. The owners already to the split they want, now they leverage that and get the other changes.
Negotiation 101.
If the league put in a true franchise player “tag” where only one guy on a team could make more than the max (say $25 million per year), it would prevent what happened in Miami because neither Wade nor LeBron would take $10 million less per year. And it reward the stars who deserve to make more money than the Joe Johnsons and Larry Hughes of the league.
@Wacman there is a major problem with player movement in the NBA. It might have been OK if LeBron was the only one. As it turned out he left. Bosh abandoned Toronto. Carmelo barked his way out of Denver. Everyone expects CP3 to be next.
It would be just sour grapes if we all complained about LeBron leaving the Cavs if he was the only one, but what we’re seeing is a pattern that indicates true and actual dysfunction in the system.
So, yes, the major issue with LeBron leaving was “The Decision” but it is also a contributing factor to the obvious problem league-wide regarding player movement via free agency. This doesn’t even mention the meaningless sign-and-trade loopholes that moved Antawn Jamison, Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd, etc…
@wacman: I don’t think free agency is bad as a whole, I just think a system that allows the best talent to pool on 5 teams is a fundamentally flawed system, and that system is a big reason why LeBron left Cleveland. A hard cap wouldn’t eliminate free agency, but it would dramatically hinder what’s going on right now with teams like the Knicks, Heat, etc. The inclusion of the LeBron example was used because it relates to the Cleveland audience, but this is about a systematic problem, not a LeBron James problem.
Hah, Craig beat me to it. And yes, the sing and trade loophole definitely needs to be closed. It’s so ridiculous.
perfectly put andrew, thank you.
there is a right side here. this is not a ‘they’re both wrong’ situation. this *is* about ensuring that all franchises can compete. the owners are 100% in the right in fighting for this and they’re fighting for the fans of smaller market teams in colder parts of the country.
if the current system stays in place and plays to its logical conclusion, youre 100% right — it will be an 8 team league. for the players ‘union’ it would seem to be better for their membership to have 30×12= 360 roster slots versus 8×12= 84. their short-sightedness is breath-taking. the ‘union’ leaders are speaking on fighting the fight for lebron and carmelo and also for arn tellums and david falks. the surely aren’t looking out for the 10th, 11th, 12th men on the rosters.
Pretty much everything Craig said…the NBA is broken and if it takes a year to fix it, then so be it.
let’s not forget that there are 2 underlying wars that are not written about enough (every now and then they become a story)
1. smaller market owners vs. bigger market owners – smaller market owners are fighting for what Andrew wrote about along with better ways to share the financial pie to reduce their debt from more recent team acquisitions (smaller markets tend to change hands more often).
in ’99 the big market owners controlled the process and made sure they could easily circumvent the cap with sign-n-trades along with the MLE, BI-A-E, and the Larry Bird exception. They kept alot of their financial interests separate as well so they wouldn’t have to share their profits (we can argue if they should or shouldn’t, just stating what happened).
2. star NBA players vs. the rest – the star players won in ’99 by getting the ‘max deal’ system built in even as it was sold as a loss to that group. it opened up more players entering that stratosphere (in pay at least) and allowed that group to dominate a team’s cap if it didn’t go over. the ‘other’ players won in ’99 by getting the MLE and BI-A-E added as ways to get the more average players better paydays.
with the MLE and BI-A-E possibly going away, the middle NBA players are going to want some assurance that they will not be left out of this. they don’t want the NBA to become a bunch of star players and a bunch of minimum salary guys either.
Thanks for responding guys. I totally agree about the sign and trade loophole, that needs to go. In both the LeBron and Bosh cases, all that happened was the team didn’t resign the star, and the star left. This happens all the time in other sports but I think because of the 5v5 nature of basketball/shallow player pool, it seems like a huge deal. Neither team was proactive in dealing the star for draft picks before so the crater is much bigger than it had to be (In Cleveland’s case, who could blame them? We were really good).
Carmelo’s behavior was deplorable, but again, this happens in other sports too. See Carlos Tevez lol. Players will always flex their muscles to get what they want, so I don’t see how what he did means the system is flawed. I think the concentration of these incidents makes it seem worse than it is (and much more interesting).
I personally don’t think that stars pooling on a few teams is an indictment of the free agency system. I think it has more to do with how the game is played these days (where stars can legitimately carry scrubs to near championships). While the hard cap doesn’t completely hinder free agency, it does restrict player movement. The question is, how much do you want the owner’s bankroll to affect their teams success? Right now, I think the soft cap with a luxury tax walks the line between baseball’s free for all and football’s super hard cap.
@buckeyedawg
totally understood, i agree with you in that the “fan” outcry will be less overwhelming for a cancelled NBA season than that of an NFL one.
it just has really started to hit me as to who the real casaulties of a locked out NBA season will be.
Tend to agree with Wacman’s overall position. Before Lebron left we were comforting ourselves that money was the ultimate issue for players, we had a rich owner and the current system permitted us to pay him more. San Antonio was the poster child for small market success under this system. And don’t really agree that Lebron or Bosh “abandoned” any place. Contracts were up, they had a right to leave, they left (if Carmelo was obnoxious with his leverage, owners never are with theirs?). So now we’re hoping the owners have a system where star players just can’t work the system and leave small markets. It does sound like some sour grapes to me.
Not following closely what changes the owners ideally want, but the reality of cancelling two weeks means that basketball players, the worst spendthrifts and money managers, have huge overhead and now the first significant income loss. There’s no way this will last close to a full season once they wrap their heads around the loss of their lifetyle.
So, once we have a position on an issue we’re never entitled to change that position, even if new data comes to light that causes us to question that position? Even two months before LeBron left nobody was taking the possibility of these super teams seriously. When Stephen A Smith broke the news that it was going to happen, he was laughed at. This wasn’t something we saw coming, and yes, it changed the way I view the NBA system.
I’m not going to defend a position I don’t believe in just because “well, I felt that way when LeBron was here, so I guess I have to feel that way now.” Sorry, that’s just not how I work.
It’s not even about stopping players from ever changing teams. I’m ok with free agency. What I don’t like is all the star players playing for 5 teams. I want the stars spread out among the franchises. This lockout gives the owners a chance to achieve something to that effect, and I hope the owners succeed in getting it.
Quick Question: Didnt Bird, Magic and Jordan each have hall of fame players on their teams? Also its impossible to go back to the glory days of the late 80s/early 90s because their simply arent enough stars to go around, each time cant have one.
In the LeBron situation, a franchise tag would have been unbelievably beneficial to the Cavs organization. They would have had to force LeBron to stay an extra year, and then over the course of that year either convinced him to stay, or traded him to a team looking for a shot at the title and gotten a hell of a lot better package than what they walked away with from Miami. Anyone that doesn’t think the NBA doesn’t have a problem doesn’t understand that at least NFL franchises have a way to protect themselves when it comes to players they drafted and developed wanting to leave. Franchise tags aren’t the best thing for the player, but they are the best for the owner, franchise, and fans.
Word, Andrew – I totally agree.
But lets talk about who this is really affecting…
my fantasy basketball team 🙁
WFNY is doing great today with barstool debates. We just need a college realignment thread going and we’ll be all set 🙂
@Wacman, totally agree.
@Tron, Why should we be taking any more away from the players? The players are already making concessions on BRI, why should we hold them captive a year longer than they sign for? Teams should be proactive and deal stars before the contracts run out and not cry when they’re left holding nothing. The thing I will concede is that maybe we give teams draft picks from the team that signs them after their contract is up. The problem with that is that you can get more draft picks with a proactive trade.
“Teams should be proactive and deal stars before the contracts run out and not cry when they’re left holding nothing.”
this works when you are not in contention and your star makes it clear he is not re-signing. it is less clear when you are in championship contention and your star is making overtures that he may re-sign.
either way, I agree that there should just be some sort of draft pick compensation (MLB and NFL already have such things in place).
@mgbode, Cleveland’s situation was pretty unique. As a general rule of thumb though, I would not let a player end his contract without signing or trading him (unless there was some awesome draft pick compensation rule). I’m glad Denver and Utah learned from Cleveland’s experience though.
I agree it was pretty unique so far, but another possible mirror situation could happen in Orlando (if they play up to their potential and there is a season this year).
Utah learned from Toronto and Denver more than Cleveland. They were not in contention, so they traded Deron before they could get stuck in the Denver situation or end up in the Toronto situation. Unless you were referring to Utah learning from the Indians dealing Cliff Lee 🙂
Denver basically didn’t learn from anybody. Melo made his situation so toxic there that they had to deal them. I think everyone involved was happy to just end that catastrophe and the Nuggets play after the trade seemed to reflect it.
Please don’t agree cancel more you league of clueless overpaid babieS!