In short, a Lockout in NBA means that players and team officials, including coaches, owners, staff, are not permitted to talk to their players. Ultimately, the league gets shut down and no games are played. As the collective bargaining agreement CBA expired, the team owners stopped doing their work. The Lockout lasted days, beginning on July 1, , and ending on December 8, During the lockout, teams could not trade, sign, or contact players. Also, players could not access NBA team facilities, trainers, or staff.
Moreover, the start of the NBA —12 regular season got delayed and instead of November, the season began in December. Also, the number of regular-season games was reduced to 66 games than the normal 82 games. There were several issues that triggered the NBA Lockout. Before , over the past two years, NBA as a whole lost a massive amount of money. Due to the continuous losses, the salary cap dropped and teams had less money for players , coaches, and other important things.
Hence, the NBA needed to re-evaluate its business model, to try and appeal to more people, so that the league can make a significant profit. They have huge fan bases, thus generating a large market, which enabled them to go over the luxury tax to acquire players. Big teams mostly signed or traded for the best players, based on where these players wanted to play.
As in any sport, NBA players, organizations and owners come into dispute continuously, whether publicly or behind closed doors.
Player power continues to grow in the league and with the hold that many stars have over their franchise and in the public sphere, it is no surprise that issues often boil over. The most recent example of this came this season when long-time Houston Rockets star James Harden was finally able to force a trade away after years of struggling to reach the Finals. However, NBA lockouts are a far rarer occurrence. Nevertheless, they have halted proceedings in the past, which we will look into in this article.
The first NBA lockout didn't occur until In fact, there was a time when the NBA was the only major sports league in America not to have been interrupted by labor disputes. When the league's collective bargaining agreement expired and no new agreement could be resolved, commissioner David Stern was forced to stop all proceedings and lock out the players.
As with the other NBA lockouts that we will discuss, the primary source of debate surrounds players' salaries, their contracts and free agency rules. All league business was terminated, except for the draft, and teams were unable to sign players or compete in summer competitions. Once a new agreement was resolved between the league and the players' union, proceedings resumed and no contests were lost with the season beginning on the 12th of September.
Just a year later, the NBA experienced another lockout, yet this one was far shorter in length and less impactful. The NBA lockout started seven years ago today. Players had no access to teams or facilities. Steve Kauffman agent : You had people like Kenny Anderson saying he has to make payments on his car notes. Now 48 years old, Anderson is the head coach at Fisk University, a historically black school in Nashville.
It was pathetic. Kenny Anderson Boston Celtics guard : Those were very immature statements. It was really childish of me to say things like that. Perdue: Patrick Ewing also made a stupid statement. Terry Porter Minnesota Timberwolves guard : There was pushback. Thomas: It was hard to have sympathy for the players because of the amount of money they were making, relatively speaking. I think the typical fan, if you want to call them blue-collar, would say these guys are playing a game they love, which they would play for nothing.
Neither side is super sympathetic. Kauffman: I got some negative feedback in my regular life. Kessler: People get like that about sports, but they never get like that about movie stars.
Williams: You should be able to make as much money as somebody wants to pay you, right? Although in the last three years, who knows, my opinion of the country has changed.
I mean that. In retrospect, who knows. I just think that the color the public resents is green more than black or white. Do people resent the fact that black people are making a lot of money? At that time, I was naive to that. He was MJ. Air Jordan. A six-time NBA champion. Six-time Finals MVP. The GOAT. He did not, however, seek a leadership position in the union.
Upon becoming executive director of the players association, Hunter says that he asked Jordan to run for union president. Jordan declined, but he was a productive presence at the negotiating table. Suddenly, they were ready to talk and negotiate. You would start to understand which owners felt we were truly partners and which owners felt like we worked for them.
At that point, a small-market owner had a very emotional response to what was transpiring. He started crying. It elicited a response from the players. Some guys started chuckling. Hunter: Michael then suggested to him that if he was having cash flow problems, maybe what he should do is sell his team.
No Abe! I think he was afraid that Abe was going to say something that would have destroyed the league. We then all separated. I think the man was ready to drop a bomb. Kessler: The irony, of course, was that Michael ended up playing for him. Tensions were heightening every day. On October 22, players attended a meeting in a Caesars Palace ballroom in Las Vegas that devolved into an argument between union hawks and doves.
Leonard Armato agent : I was vocal in saying we should try to get a deal as opposed to, you know, Armageddon. They said I was selling out. Falk: We go this meeting in Vegas with all the agents. We get there a couple of minutes late; the plane was delayed. And Dan [Fegan, longtime agent] was up. Dan was a very smart guy. Shut it down! If Stern wants a hard cap—fuck Stern! If Stern wants this—fuck Stern! Great speech. Get your ass back in the ring. We have nine more rounds to go. This is not a game.
This is a billion-dollar business. I have a hundred million dollars in the bank. How about you? Falk: This is how Billy ran the union. The agents had a meeting. The players then had a meeting.
Then they get to take over the damn meeting. Elie: A lot of the stars wanted to get back and play. I remember John Stockton in Vegas trying to speak out, and a lot of the guys just shot him down. It got a little ugly at times. They got up and said we were making enough money and we should be happy with the 53 percent and take the 53 percent and this, that, and the other. McIlvaine: I remember that not being a popular sentiment. It seemed popular amongst guys with one particular owner.
Keefe: I was there. I was someone who definitely wanted to get back to work. I understood the dynamics. Hunter: David Robinson then got up and gave a blistering speech about having gone with his mother to the [National] Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and how she explained to him things he never knew.
He said that what he saw there was overpowering, how he saw what they had to overcome and where we were at a time when we should be taking a stand. They were the three. They came together. Somebody said they had been sent there by the owners, representing the owners. That was the first time they ever showed up. They kind of got shouted out of the room. McIlvaine: We once kicked Jack Haley out of a meeting because he had recently retired. He was there as a mole.
Years later he told me that ownership had somebody listening on every call and knew exactly what we were strategizing.
I got my eyes and ears. McIlvaine: For Billy to have some paranoia was probably a good thing. I think there was good reason to be paranoid. No player was more vocal about ending the lockout than New Jersey Nets big man Jayson Williams, and he loved the attention that came along with it.
He reportedly conducted 70 radio interviews and 30 newspaper and magazine interviews over that time. Williams had personal financial motives for pursuing an end to the lockout. He wanted to get paid. As an impending free agent coming off an All-Star season during which he averaged Hunter: We found out he was talking to the league after his name began to appear in articles.
He had gotten so blatant about it. Williams: I remember speaking with both Billy and David and asking them when the hell this lockout was going to end. Call David. My problem was with the stalemate—that was what was pissing me off more than anything. Brothers can disagree. I called both of them. He never was talking specifically about any deal that was proposed at the time.
Yeah, he never did that. That was disturbing. That was very disturbing. Wasserman: He got a maximum salary deal a week after the lockout ended. Williams: I was selfish in a lot of ways. I had a contract coming up. I also need structure in my life.
I needed a job to go to. As soon as I lost that structure, you see all the shit I went through. The union had more issues than just leaks and moles. Soon, more players were echoing Jayson Williams, and urging the union to cut a deal.
Wasserman: One of the issues during the lockout was that there was disparity in the salary between the high-end guys and the minimum. One of the mantras was to restore the middle class. There were a lot of players in the league who were not superstars and were not scrubs. I thought we should have gotten paid accordingly. Schayes: Patrick and I had a discussion about this.
He, of course, was on the David-Falk-no-max-salary side. Falk: I think the star players understood the importance of protecting the rank-and-file. Davis: As we went deeper into the lockout, guys were losing money. McKie: We would get on those conference calls and oh my God, guys would complain about this, that, and the other.
It was crazy. I got a wife. I got kids. I got family members that I have to help. Kauffman: A lot of players were scared. Ratliff: You had a lot of guys who had their own agenda and that agenda was getting that check. Glass: I had some of those guys [making the minimum]. They could not afford to miss checks. It might not affect you, but it will affect the guys in five years. It was money. It was all about money. During the lockout David Stern recycled his attack line from the lockout, accusing agents of sabotaging negotiations.
Yeah, I did. If David Stern would call that sabotage, I would call that advising. If you want to call it sabotage, OK, guilty. David Stern NBA commissioner : We believe with good reason that the agents of players who would be most affected by the high-end limitation have begun a campaign to defeat any fair deal. That was part of his thing of protecting the players. Thomas: I think the agents were behind it all. I think most of the players followed the lead of their agents.
Maybe someone like Michael Jordan, but I think the overwhelming majority of the players were doing just whatever their agents were telling them. Kessler: The agents had some advisory role in the negotiations as they should because they are very knowledgeable, but the idea that they were controlling or influencing Billy or the players on the executive committee was a false narrative created by David Stern and others.
Of course they should have been involved. Falk: There was a schism between the agents and the union. That was fomented by Isiah [Thomas] when he was the president of the union.
Isiah was an anti-agent person. I guess he had bad relationships with his own agents. And so he was extremely negative toward the agents. It almost developed like instead of being a two-front war between the league and the players, it was a three-front war between the league, the union, and the agents. And the league knew it. The league knew there was a complete divide with the agents. I was in a very strong position at that time. We represented the cream of the crop, so there was a tremendous level of jealousy.
Kauffman: David, who I greatly respect for his intelligence and what he accomplished, was like a bull in a china shop at times. I think a big problem was at some point a breakdown between him and Hunter occurred.
Falk: Billy was a solo pilot in a political job that required consensus. Kessler: Billy and I would get phone calls at 2 in the morning from David with his latest views on what to do and what not to do. He was very engaged. Hunter: Falk had greater access to David Stern than I did. And so you have to be suspicious of all that.
I had one agenda and one agenda only: I was committed to ballplayers. I had to be concerned about the little guys, big guys, superstars, guys who were not yet in the league. He frustrated me. I think Billy is an intelligent guy. I just think his approach was percent wrong. Though he was an accomplished lawyer from a fancy New York firm, Stern brawled like a street fighter during negotiations.
0コメント