What Was The Lockout All About?

And then, a day after Thanksgiving, as we went through a tryptophan detox, and while barely anyone was watching at all, they made a deal. Like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments, David Stern returned from the all-mighty negotiating room with a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) as we all stood in awe. There will be a 2012 NBA season — a completely logical solution consisting of 66 games, starting with a Christmas Day spectacular featuring many of the leagues big market teams. The same teams whose baleful influence over the economics of basketball was supposed to be the major point of management in explaining why we had this dreadful lockout. It might have been, had this whole lockout been about money anyway.

The NBA Lockout was solely about money as it was solely about nuclear physics. This can be simply explained: The settlement that was reached could have easily been reached five months earlier. In a nutshell, the deal came together because the players took less Basketball Related Income (BRI), and in return got more favorable rules pertaining to contracts and free agency. That became the resultant of five months of PR stunts and childish behavior in the media all in an effort to pull the public towards one side.

Another sign that it wasn’t all about the money was that as each week passed, the leagues public economic stance become more and more absurd, and eventually reached a point where the public began to notice how foolish it was. The hilarity hit its peak for me when David Stern began claiming that 21 of his 30 franchises were loosing money. Do you think that when Mr. Stern met with Nike or Reebok or any other powerful advertising and endorsement partners of the NBA he told them that 70% of his league was in the red? I wonder how that meeting would have gone. Furthermore, is there any chance of Herb Simon, the shopping mall billionaire owner of the “small market” Indiana Pacers — whom he bought for approximately $12 million and are now valued at around $267 million — is eating the crumbs off of the Sbarros pizza plate sold at one of his various food courts, begging the player to spare a dime? Obviously not, because none of that would make sense.

And the third and final reason as to why the lockout wasn’t about money was that there was a lockout at all. Because much of the younger generation believes that unions are useless, the idea that lockouts are brought upon entirely by management evaded the people in charge of covering the lockout. Lockouts are not a random occurrence. They aren’t circumstance. They aren’t unavoidable, and they certainly don’t happen because “both sides” are responsible. Lockouts happen when management thinks a union is too strong, too weak, or doesn’t want a union at all. They are byproducts of an attempt at economic change, not the other way around. They boil down to management trying to exercise control of their workers and nothing else.

Which brings us to David Stern. A man obsessed with outright control, Stern sought out to tame things from Allen Iverson’s rapping, to how the people of Seattle choose to spend their tax money. In 2005, he followed in the footsteps of many a nun and instituted a dress code so that the corporate executives sitting in the lower bowl wouldn’t think that a basketball game broke out at what was supposed to be a Snoop Dogg concert. I’ll let you figure out what that was all about.

The lockout was nothing more than a dress code. Stern wanted to show who was in charge. He believed that we believed that the players were “less dedicated” to the game than their other various functions. The press had been pecking at this loudly, more so after Lebron James took his talents, along with his disappearing acts in the 4^th quarter, to South Beach. Once again, I’ll let you figure what that was about.

The owners got most of what they wanted, meaning that they probably are unhappy. Meanwhile, the league suffered a public relations debacle that bordered on being a public relations nightmare. But, Stern found a way to “save” the season, even as unfair and unsuspecting variables (the agents, Billy Hunter’s wild incompetence, Jeffrey Kessler) presented themselves. Yet, it all worked out at the end.

Godspeed to my Knicks. There will be basketball.