Players aren’t wrong to continue to fight

The players have every right to feel they have moved enough on all the key labor issues. (AP)

Here’s a question for the NBA and its owners: If the league preserves this season and is wildly successful over the length of the next collective bargaining agreement, will it ditch that CBA as the starting point for the negotiations over the next one?

Because that’s what it did this time, to the disadvantage of the players. The league is losing money, with claimed losses of $300 million across all 30 teams last season, and those losses pushed the NBA to demand a sea change in the way it operates. The just-expired CBA guaranteed players 57 percent of basketball-related income (BRI) and included a soft cap system in which 24 of 30 teams exceeded the $58 million salary cap last season and seven exceeded the $70 million luxury-tax threshold.

As the starting point or these talks, the league offered a $45 million hard salary cap and a share of about 38 percent of BRI for the players. That essentially bore no relation to the old CBA as only one team, the Kings, spent less than $52.7 million last season. The proposal included no exceptions, no luxury tax, no goofy trade rules — nothing to link it to the old CBA, except that it dealt with basketball and money. It did include rollbacks of current salaries, the strongest indication possible that the league was ripping up the old CBA and starting almost from scratch.

Those $300 million in losses, plus an amorphous goal of increased “competitive balance,” served as the league’s justification for such a drastic change. And several experts have argued that the NBA is perfectly within its rights — if a bit impolite — in claiming that the old CBA ceased to matter as a negotiating floor upon its expiration.

And so my question, again: If the league turns around those losses and succeeds beyond even its rosiest projections, will it allow the union to tear up the soon-to-be-written CBA and start the next talks from scratch, citing a new financial landscape?

The answer is probably “no,” which is one reason the union is fighting for every last inch now. The players, of course, will share in the league’s growth because aggregate salaries will still be tied to a set percentage of league revenues; as revenues increase, so too will those salaries. But the league is still seeking (and will probably get) what on paper looks to be a blowout win: a reduction of 7 percentage points in the players’ share of BRI and several changes to the cap and tax system that should redistribute money away from mid-level veteran players.

The union and league have crept closer on those system issues, which has created the illusion that the two sides are close enough for the players to simply cave and make a deal. My in-box and Twitter feed are filled with angry comments either calling the players greedy or wondering why they won’t just sign the damn thing (or both). There is a cold dollars-and-sense argument for why players should sign now. If they lose even half a season, they’ll cost themselves more in overall salary than they would by signing the owners’ current offer. And that offer stands to get worse in about 47 hours, if you believe commissioner David Stern.

But the union — at its highest levels, at least — is serious about fighting for both principle and future players, and getting on the road to a potential late-December decertification vote could provide a jolt of short-term leverage. That isn’t just noise, even if it might not make dollar-for-dollar economic sense to current players, many of whom have short and/or fragile ties to the league. The union is allowed to behave that way, even if you don’t like it. Doing so doesn’t make the players greedy or stupid or even shortsighted. Think about how allegedly “close” the two sides are on some of the deal-breakers.

For instance, the league wants to tax teams $1.50 for every dollar they spend over the tax threshold (and the rates jump in intervals of 50 cents and $5 million from there), and it wants to jack up those penalties by $1 across the board for teams that pay the tax at least three times in a five-year span — the repeat offenders. In the old system, the tax remained at a dollar-for-dollar level no matter how much a team spent, and there was no penalty for repeat offenders.

On Saturday, the union said it would agree to penalize repeat offenders to the tune of 50 cents instead of $1 for the first $10 million they spend over the tax line. “Are we really arguing over 50 cents?” people shouted. “We’ve crept to within 50 cents, and that is going to hold up a deal?”

But if you step back and look at the bigger picture, you’ll see that the union is the one doing the creeping on every issue — at least if you use the just-expired CBA as a reference. It’s going to win on some things (like restricted free agency and a bonus pool for guys on rookie deals), but it’s going to lose on the mid-level exception, contract length, raises, the BRI split and on the openness of the spending/player movement rules in general. The league has certainly crept down from its original positions on all of those issues, but those positions had almost no connection to the previous CBA. The league, less than a month ago, wanted to tax repeat offenders at ratios of $10-to-$1 and higher.

The NBA has come off that, but on this issue and others, the league’s “move down” still represents a win in relation to the old CBA. And so even if the union has gotten close to the league’s position, the players are justified in saying they have moved enough. Both sides have moved, but only one side can feel comfortable with where those movements position them in relation to the old CBA.

Again: The league will say the old CBA failed financially, and plenty of experts have said the previous agreement lost is relevance as a negotiating foundation the moment it expired — or, rather, the moment the league chose to let it expire.

If the new CBA proves an insane boon for owners, I wonder if the league will argue that it, too, is irrelevant for purposes of the next negotiations.