A committee of NBA owners will meet Tuesday in New York with representatives from the players union to open up negotiations on the league's collective bargaining agreement. The contract is set to expire in 2011, and with fiscal strain high, the L-word -- "lock-out" -- has been floated about.David Aldridge of NBA.com has a primer on what each side wants. A few of the rumored points of contention are a bit shocking.
Players are currently guaranteed 57% of basketball-related revenue generated by the sport. According to Aldridge, owners want to bring that to 50%. A few owners even want to flip the script and promise themselves more than half of the revenue. Aldridge also mentions that an NFL-style hard cap is favored among the owners, and a 200% luxury tax (in lieu of the current 100% tax) will initially be on the table.
Players will bristle at any major changes in the revenue split -- they already leave up to 9% of their salary on the table in escrow funds never recovered. As for the hard cap: that has less to do with the players than it does the owners. Even with the harsh penalty of the dollar-for-dollar luxury tax, owners still go way over the threshold for a competitive edge. (Aldridge notes seven teams have $80 million in payroll locked up next season -- that's $10 million over the tax threshold.) It's the arms race -- every contender trying to one-up each other -- that drives these salaries ... not player holdouts. Rasheed Wallace and Ron Artest both signed for the mid-level exception, for criminy's sake.
I don't believe a hard cap will go over among the owners -- the rich, easy spenders like Mark Cuban and Jerry Buss have a competitive advantage in being able to pay lots of luxury tax. The real battle, it would appear, will come in sliding the revenue split line. I imagine it will fall -- the union's in a pretty bad negotiating position, according to popular opinion -- but the owners who think it will swing south of 50% are either high or dead serious about locking out the players in 2011.
