The NBA and NBPA are tentatively scheduled to resume CBA negotiations this week, though plans have not been finalized due to Hurricane Irene and her impact on travel up and down the East Coast. If the league and players do meet, it will be just their second face-to-face since the lockout began 60 days ago, and their first since August 1.
We can only hope this session is more productive than the last, which ended with David Stern lobbing lawsuits at the union, charging Billy Hunter and company with bad faith negotiating and attempting to prevent the union from using decertification as a strategy.
But it's hard to imagine the sides will make much progress; the gap between the owners' and players' proposals is Grand Canyon wide at this point. The league has offered the players a $2 billion share of league revenues that doesn't necessarily grow as quickly as the NBA's overall income. They also want a hard cap on player salaries, and have pushed aggressively for ways to reduce the number of "dead" contracts taking up space on team payrolls.
I like to think of that last bit as the Eddy Curry problem.
The players are willing to reduce the overall share of basketball related income they're getting from the current 57 percent, but want to keep many elements of the current system, including the soft cap and full guarantees on player contracts.
There's another fundamental disconnect between the players' and owners' positions, that Tim Donahue illustrates over at Eight Points, Nine Seconds. The NBPA insists on discussing the CBA in terms of what they're giving up. But that's deceptive at best.
For example: Maurice Evans, a member of the NBPA's executive committee, claimed that the owners' proposal actually amounts to a 40 percent reduction in salaries over ten years. That would be true if we project the players' revenue share over the next decade using the terms of the last CBA... but that's a deeply flawed assumption, because the last CBA expired at the end of the 2010-11 season.
The owners, on the other hand, want to wipe out every gain the union has made in 50-plus years of collective bargaining and start form a completely blank slate. Good luck with that.
What happens next? This may ultimately come down to the fact that, though the NBA's offer isn't particularly palatable to the union, it's a better deal than the players will get anywhere else. There simply aren't enough jobs in Europe or Asia to go around, and they don't pay as well as NBA jobs will even under the owners' proposal.
The best case scenario - for fans, at least - is that the NBPA realizes this is a no-win situation and accepts the basic framework as laid out by the league - and soon. According to Steve Kyler of Hoopsworld, a deal must be in place by September 15th, or training camps and preseason games will start getting cancelled.
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