Owners vs. Owners: The Key to Settling the NBA Lockout

Owners vs. Owners: The Key to Settling the NBA Lockout

http://sbn.to/pI5fm8

On the evening the NBA lockout started, our conversation centered around
owners vs. players. Did you favor the owners' attempts to force a hard
cap on the players, or the players' refusal to accept the huge cuts the
owners were demanding? Frequent commenter jc79 astutely noted that:

An excellent point, and one that Kelly Dwyer echoed in a piece posted
this morning to Yahoo Sports. The NFL lockout was settled with the loss
of only one preseason game, the only other impact being that their free
agent signing period has been tightly compacted. All in all, the NFL
lockout left most parties largely unscathed. That probably won't be the
case in the NBA labor dispute, in large part because NBA owners haven't
figured out revenue sharing the way NFL owners have.

For good measure, Dwyer pounds on our beloved owner Robert Sarver for his
perceived mismanagement of Suns' finances, and questions why other owners
would be willing to share revenue with Sarver only to see him "needlessly
overpaying for middling talent".

Follow the jump for more on the potential infighting among the owners.



Much like Wil's story Sunday night regarding the players potentially
decertifying the union, I'm sorry to report that there isn't a lot of
optimism in Dwyer's piece. As neither the owners or players are unified
among themselves, and since little is being lost by either side yet,
meaningful, productive negotiations are not close to starting. Dwyer:

The factions are just too far apart -- and we're not talking about the
players and owners. The owners and owners have to come up with a better
revenue sharing system, and swallow the fact that certain owners ignored
the dozens of ways small market owners failed to take advantage of the
myriad ways to improve a team all without spending like the New York
Yankees.

The interesting twist here is that Dwyer's not blaming large market
owners for helping to ensure their teams' success by using their
bountiful resources to hold onto players even as they go over the cap,
driving salaries up overall. Instead, he's blaming middle and small
market owners for failing to take advantage of ways to improve without
spending a lot. Here, he calls out Sarver specifically:

You think the Los Angeles Lakers want to send a single penny to Phoenix's
way after Suns owner wildly overpaid for the team years ago, then spent
the next six years either needlessly overpaying for middling talent or
outright selling off draft picks to add to his bottom line? Why should
they help fund Phoenix's stubborn choice to hang onto Steve Nash(notes)
instead of parlaying their best asset into something that can help them
become a better (and, holy cow, cheaper) basketball team?

At the risk of sounding like a Sarver apologist (I'm not really, and
freely acknowledge his mistakes), this isn't entirely fair. First, yes,
it's possible to field a competitive team without being in a huge market
or going overboard on salaries. Teams like the Spurs, Jazz and, yes, the
Suns have helped prove this point. But the fact that the highest paid
teams seem to always reside at the top of the standings is evidence that
having the ability to spend a lot sure provides an advantage. Building a
sustainable winner can be done without a huge market enhancing a team's
revenue stream, but it leaves little room for error.

As I have noted earlier, all 9 of the teams who exceeded the salary cap
last year made the playoffs. When those teams are in doubt about whether
to pay a player, they err on the side of keeping him. Smaller revenue
teams don't have that luxury, and that luxury helped the Mavericks to be
one of the league's deepest teams in their championship run last year.
Making the best of the salary level you can afford to pay is one thing,
but lower revenue teams are still screwed when the high revenue teams
also maximize their value. It's not possible to compete, at least not for
a championship.

Dwyer's suggestion that the Suns trade Nash, and that doing so would help
them become a better and cheaper team is oversimplified at best, and
asinine at worst. There is little chance that trading a 37-year old Nash
will return the Suns a bevy of blue-chip young players or premium draft
picks. Nash is almost certainly worth more to the Suns than he is to any
other team. Furthermore, it's highly unlikely that the Suns could replace
what Nash provides on the court and at the box office for the $11M Nash
is due next year. The conventional wisdom that a team on the decline
should trade its most valuable veteran player doesn't always hold true,
and it doesn't in this case.

It's true that the owners need to put their house in order and get
serious about revenue sharing to be able to arrive at a lockout
settlement anytime soon, and for the league to have more competitive
balance. Blaming the middle and small market owners for the way they're
being streamrolled by large market owners won't help the owners get to
that point.