Most stories about the NBA lockout and its competing parties have portrayed Commissioner David Stern as lugubrious, dishonest, cruel, all three, or something similar. A lot of good reporting has built this case. Beloved truth teller Nate Silver famously scrutinized league revenues while arguing that the NBA has exaggerated the supposed plight of floundering owners. That same week, Deadspin published an expose about the New Jersey Nets' accounting practices. And with meticulous rigor that should be a model for all journalists on any beat, the SB Nation team has captured every twist and turn. (If you scroll down, that link has all of the coverage from stalwarts like Tom Ziller and Andrew Sharp.)
Common to these reports and a majority of the coverage is the sense of disappointment: that basketball may go on a prolonged hiatus; that sports is again marred by legal wrangling; that NBA teams and their agents are being dishonest. Stern, as a representative for the owners and a face of the league, gets chided most severely. Memories of Stern's negotiating victories and solemn invocation about his pugnacious demeanor seem to drive the consternation. All those years of acerbic wit and Corleone-like calm leave Stern as the bully finally vulnerable. Each episode in the saga fuels the enmity. Bruce Arthur of the National Post, commenting on the NBA's bad-faith-negotiation NLRB filing, earned traction last week with his latest Stern scolding:
Now, the king seems old, all of a sudden; he seems hardened and grumpy, flat-eyed and mean. But perhaps that just has to do with his mission, which is a grim one. On Tuesday, one day after their first meeting in the month since the lockout was launched — one day — the league launched both a suit in federal court and a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board accusing the union of bargaining in bad faith, which presumably means Derek Fisher spiked the coffee with ecstasy tablets or something....
And to do that requires some ruthlessness, and a smattering of intellectual dishonesty — really, David, comparing NBA salaries to NFL salaries, apples to apples? — and it’s a shame, really. Stern tends to do what he believes is right, whether the rest of us agree, and now he is caught between the owners and the game, and he’s chosen a side. As one person who knows him puts it, “You don’t think he knows he’s 68, and this is his last deal? You think he doesn’t know he’s putting a blowtorch to his legacy if they lose a season?” It looks like it’s killing him. It probably is.Arthur, like many commentators, is getting the story wrong, though. To be fair, every party involved is off the mark right now. NBA basketball does not suffer because of David Stern's ego or hard heart. Nor will the lockout drag on (no Ruff Ryders) solely because Stern and the owners avail themselves of common mechanisms, through the courts and the press, meant to facilitate agreement. The real problem is that everyone--players, owners, commissioners, writers--is neglecting the root problem.
The war going on outside is between different classes of owners, regardless of whether they realize it or even care. NBA economics are broken because a plurality of owners can afford to overpay for talent, and all the rest have to pay prices they can't afford in the aftermath.
Teams have spent years throwing too much money at everyone who is not a true franchise player. The result: almost everyone not named LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Deron Williams, Derrick Rose, or Dwight Howard earns more than he's worth. (Almost--there are, of course, players justly compensated.) In a league with a salary cap complicated by byzantine exceptions that reward the wealthy, well-managed teams can survive, but only the rich have a true margin for error. San Antonio can game the system while New York wanders into one salary morass after another. Dallas or Los Angeles can pay too much for a player and either point to an already skewed market rate when seeking exoneration or embrace the role of an alpha market player unembarrassed to shift the salary scale upward. That's how positive our cash flows are. But Sacramento goes broke, New Orleans requires a bailout, Houston is forced to play sabermetric basketball, and Golden State must be sold.
NBA players should be hammering home this point in every possible format: in the press, on television, on Twitter, and on their sneakers while playing pickup hoops. Owner vs. Owner should be the wedge issue that the National Basketball Players Association drives into the heart of the labor stalemate. In lieu of narratives about billionaires versus millionaires or an iron-fisted commissioner seeking to break a union, the lockout story should be about revenue sharing, safe-harbor provisions for bad contracts, and finding a system that demands responsible ownership. Only, the players and the NBPA cannot fully advance this story; the players would lose too much money.
While the NBA's labor market has made operating costs unsustainable for most teams, it has enriched the players. A system in which owners with regular returns pay too much and drag every other team along has revised the compensation upward, leaving it at an artificially high level for second-tier stars all the way down to the most marginal of the rotation players. Spencer Hawes can poke Stern with as many sticks as he wants, but it would be far more courageous were he to tweet about how the contract he'll want when he becomes a free agent should be more reasonable than what today's market would otherwise deliver. Correcting what hurts the NBA is not in the players' collective best interest.
Collective bargaining is another culprit. NBA teams are competing businesses that happen to work together to set terms for the industry (how many minutes per quarter, standard player contracts, etc.) Normally, this would be illegal collusion, but collectively bargaining with the players union insulates the NBA and its labor process from antitrust scrutiny. An agreement that arises from good-faith, non-coercive bargaining in which everyone affected had a say is kosher. Collective bargaining is a great venue out of which a multi-employer bargaining unit like thirty aligned NBA teams can reach an accord with its workforce. Since conflicts between management and labor are such common concerns, the collective bargaining process makes sense. It is not a naturally great venue for settling differences among owners, though, and the adversarial nature of management versus labor can push intra-management issues into the background.
For all these reasons, then, most of the loud, angry criticism of Stern has seemed ill-considered. A nuanced problem like the NBA lockout has a solution that lies at the nexus of owner accountability, revenue parity, and players acting against their own interests. That's tricky stuff. There is neither an obvious villain nor any use for the simple, binary language employed in too much reporting. Further, a collective bargaining agreement can codify many portions of an ultimate answer, but it will not provide a panacea. Those seeking to cast Stern as this story's primary antagonist would be wise to badger away about revenue sharing; that is something that should be a part of the lockout conversation everyday. However, turning the NBA lockout into the David Stern psychodrama is silly, and it likely works against the latent fan interest at the heart of so much coverage.
Misguided Stern portrayals also too readily dispense with a critical point: the commissioner works for the owners. Fans, and apparently many writers, tend to view Stern as a steward of basketball. He is the sport's protector and advocate, equally accountable to a panoply of constituencies. This vision of Stern is partially correct. Stern has served as a basketball ambassador, and common sense dictates that what's good for the sport and its fans is ultimately good for its owners. However, amorphous basketball good will is fairly attenuated from the operating margins of most NBA teams, and when the business of basketball is in a crisis, Stern's primary constituency is the ownership group that keeps him employed.
Right now, NBA owners have given Stern a mandate to change a dysfunctional system, and to usher in that change through the document that drives so much of the NBA's business, the collective bargaining agreement. Amid the ongoing upheaval, Stern could inject many outstanding issues into the conversation, even if they are not in the owners' best interests. So far, he has seemed loath to even acknowledge them, and that surly disposition is what many people find galling. But the lockout process seems likely to drag on for a while, and the finished product may reflect the sensible compromise for which fans and writers are pining. You wouldn't know this from the reporting, though. Media coverage seems to regard a hard-line negotiation strategy--like that which Stern has pursued--as dishonest and unfair, never mind the realities of billion-dollar negotiations. And never mind that Stern and the owners are just as entitled to use all of the leverage they can find. It would almost be negligent not to do so.
Perhaps the hysterical reactions to fairly mundane posturing should be laid at the feet of President Obama, himself a basketball fan. Obama, after all, has taught the country that negotiation is about starting where the other side wants and then giving up even more. Just another way in which the media has been taken in, I suppose.
