“What’s a fair amount of money to pay the best basketball players in the world? That’s something that would take a team of experts to determine, and even then it would be one part guesswork. Maybe they are paid too much. Maybe they are paid too little. Maybe the owners who lose money are victims of the economy and the cost of international expansion. Maybe they are victims of failing to control their own spending. Maybe the owners have been bleeding cash, and some of the hurt must be passed on to the players. On the other hand maybe it was just a couple of bad years, and this is all a negotiating tactic.”

Abbott wants answers for meaningless questions.  How much should a player make?  What’s fair?  Without a free market a player’s true value cannot be determined.  While there is a salary cap in place, binds on bidding for international players (gee, where does Ricky Rubio play again?), and all those trade restrictions, the value of players is guesswork at best.  (Especially considering that player value is relative to team need—Antwan Jamison represents a huge waste of money for DC but might be of value to Cleveland.)  Trades can also help to correct stupid mistakes by general managers.  Without trade restrictions, players simply move to where they are most valued.  For example, this summer Rudy Gay will be given a maximum salary (mark my words) to be the cornerstone of a franchise.  By the time the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in summer ’11 it will have become apparent that Gay can’t do the job and is just costing a team a bunch of money for limited returns.  But to a contender that’s looking for that last piece to put them over the top—the role Richard Jefferson was supposed to play for San Antonio this year—the price might be worth it.

Of course a player’s value isn’t limited to his ability to help his team win games.  It’s not unreasonable for a player’s marketability, among other things, to come into play.  And yeah, that thinking led Memphis to sign Allen Iverson, but that doesn’t mean the idea is invalid.  It just means Memphis Grizzlies management is stupid.  Also, I suspect that since there are merely thirty potential bidders (teams), with disparate spending capabilities and revenue streams, even dissolving restrictions would only give us a good, not great, sense of a player’s value.  If there were a thousand potential bidders, we’d have a more accurate valuation.  (This and the prospect of French cheerleaders are the only points for European expansion.)  But since expansion of any sort isn’t immanent, the best way I can think of to deal with this small v. big market value and ownership means disparity is to impose a powerful revenue sharing system and luxury tax.  How and how much?  I don’t know; I can’t; we can’t.  Abbott says owners are very secretive of their balance sheets.

But whether it’s a two dollars-for-dollar luxury tax or whether taxes and league revenue are distributed on a sliding scale correlating to market size, there’s a way to balance the playing field.  They don’t even need to make these details public; figure out amongst themselves how they want to split up the pot—no one other than team owners care.  Instead, the salary cap, owners/players revenue sharing plan, and other stupid aspects of the CBA makes it seem like there are moral questions to consider, like what percentage of total league revenue is it fair for the players to get.  It’s an utterly meaningless question: players should make whatever the market will bear; the balance sheets of owners are between them and the IRS.  It’s not like this thinking is so radical; Art Modell once said NFL franchise owners were Republicans who vote Socialist.

Why have owners never come up with this step?  Off the top of my head I can think of three quick possibilities:

1) they feel it’s just too complicated (and requires too much effort and annual tinkering) to come up with a tax/revenue sharing system that enables owners with a net worth of $80 million (Peter Holt – San Antonio) to compete with billionaire owners.

2) their claims of losses and hardship are complete bullsh*t and the system currently in place is very beneficial for them.  Or at the very least, the current system isn’t hurting them.  In this case, their labor negotiations are just about making more money—I don’t have a problem with this.

3) they are (as a group) far less intelligent than one might expect from some of the richest people on Earth.  This would indicate that a good number of these owners owe their fortunes to fortune—that they’re just a bunch of lucky bastards.

My guess?  A combo of all three, but more the latter two.  Yes, balancing the playing field might be tricky, but it’s doable.  But more than that, I think some owners are probably doing quite well in this system and have no interest in changing it to benefit their competition.  And there’s no question about the third, at least in some cases.  Some owners are fortunate sons—Charles Dolan’s bills are mostly inherited—and perhaps some are just incredibly lucky, and their wealth isn’t indicative of their business acumen.

Really, I wouldn’t care a wit about this stuff, if it didn’t have a direct impact on the quality of the NBA game.  But it does, and I do.

For one thing, showing losses on your books doesn’t mean your company/business model is failing.  The NBA offices and owners are spending capital to make long-term improvements in the league, and that costs money.  Why is that the concern of the Player’s Association?  It is, sort of, but only because of past blunders.

I don’t know much about common business practices, deals with unions, and such, and I don’t know the details of the NBA’s CBA; but it seems to me that the salary cap is the biggest problem here.  As I see it, it’s not the responsibility of labor to worry about the overall income of the company.  That’s management’s problem.  But in submitting to the owners in previous agreements, accepting a salary cap, they also agreed that that cap would be based on league revenue; the players get 57%.  That doesn’t and never did make any sense to me.  They’re agreeing to receive a percentage of the overall revenue, but they don’t have a say in how the league’s business is conducted, how the owners choose to invest revenue.  Basically, the players allowed themselves to be subject to the ups and downs of the league without getting a seat at the table.  I don’t think having a seat at that table is really anything the players ever wanted, or should want.  Leave the direction of the league to ownership, sure, but players allowing their salaries to be directly tied to the owners decisions about expenditures is just silly.

Now of course employee payroll is always based on the state of the companies for which they work, but not directly, not as a collectively agreed percentage of revenue.  Rather, without a salary cap, the free market would determine the value of a player.  Why not just let supply and demand determine value?  Of course, that an old issue, fifteen years old, to be exact.  Ever since Kevin Garnett signed that immense contract (it was what, $126 million over 7 years?) back in ’95 (I believe) ownership has been loudly freaking out about player salaries.  The real problem there is that owners couldn’t keep other owners from breaking ranks and offering huge salaries without colluding.  But small market teams and owners who are only $100 millionaires, not $800 millionaires or billionaires, didn’t want to compete with Mark Cuban or big market teams.  The answer to this was never to institute a salary cap and unnecessarily entangle league income with player salaries.  The league should have just instituted smarter revenue sharing practices with huge luxury tax penalties.  The luxury taxes are currently dollar for dollar.  Well, go ahead and get rid of the salary cap and require owners to pay $2 for every $1 they go over the luxury tax line.  So when the Knicks spend $100 million and the cap is $50 million, instead of the other owners crying foul, they can just divvy up the $100 million in luxury tax the Knicks will be paying them.

This is way too long already, so I’ll just stop here.  In the end, the labor discussions for the next CBA will probably look like they always do: owners being dishonest about their financial burdens, players being stupid enough to put themselves in a position to be smacked around by ownership.  That Billy Hunter is still the head of the Union ten years after he f#cked up the last CBA indicates how things will turn out this time.

And I wouldn’t give a damn about any of this, except that it directly impacts the quality of play, the quality of talent the teams can put on the floor.

Sure, when Ruben Patterson is released by the Clippers and Rockets fans on clutchfans.net wonder whether it’s a good idea to sign him, well, I generally feel compelled to argue against signing violent sex offenders who get involved in police-horse-punching incidents; but guns in the locker room is just eye-roll inducing stupidity and almost as bad as the socially conscious articles from socially conscious writers that follow.  And also, it involves one of my favorite players (Arenas, not Crittenden) and ruins his comeback from serious injuries.

I just find the whole thing mildly depressing—seriously, power through a few Nicholas Kristof articles and try to tell me this incident is more than “mildly” depressing—and one more thing that sullies this NBA season, along with Tracy McGrady’s tenure with the Rockets ending and Yao Ming making babies instead of game-winners—congrats Yao, and may your first child be a masculine child.

As much as anything (a throwaway phrase I’ve always enjoyed) this incident reminds me of Jayson Williams’ foibles.  No, there’s no comparison between displaying a gun and drunkenly shooting and killing your employee.  But yeah there is, in the same way that there is a perfectly valid comparison between my sex life and Wilt Chamberlain’s.  Arenas and Williams are/were favorite players of mine, as much for their off the court hilariousness as their hardwood successes.  Both f#cked up.  Reading Williams’ classic memoir, Loose Balls, you have to conclude that it was only a matter of time until he went completely nuts with a gun in his hand.  He was a gun toting alcoholic before injury forced him to retire.  After he left the game, Williams just more opportunity to booze and play with guns.  Something was bound to go wrong.  And Arenas?  Until now, Arenas has only been silly nutty, (seemingly) not dangerous nutty.

As for the claim that he welched on a bet with Crittenden, that’s hardly surprising, given what we know of his previous gambling behavior (below).  Now, this clip is hysterical, in part because he’s blatantly cheating, in front of a crowd, and being silly about it—and come on, one millionaire ripping $10K off another millionaire in a (basketball) shooting contest is funny in itself.  And accusations Arenas cheating at Halo* prompted him to spend 2,300 words on nba.com, defending himself.  That’s priceless, and nothing says, “I did it!” like mounting that kind of rambling defense.  But breaking out the guns just spoils the joke.

*[after clicking on the link, search for "don't call me"]