NBA Tip-Off : How Much Bratwurst for No. 1?

Thanks to the great good sense of David Stern and Charles Grantham and the army of attorneys around them, we have an NBA season. They chose to talk instead of walk--a revolutionary concept in modern sports labor relations--and for this they must be saluted.

Because they are reasonable men, Stern and Grantham bought themselves a year or so to work out a new collective bargaining agreement. And don’t be surprised if, when they complete the document, it includes some kind of rookie salary scale.

If the NBA has any economic trouble--a doubtful premise--it has nothing to do with established stars who’ve demonstrated their value. Instead, the problem involves the hotshots arriving out of college and signing contracts that would take care of the national debt for some Third World nations.

Top to bottom, no league is more generous with its rookies than the NBA. A first-round pick is guaranteed a $200,000 minimum salary and no one can remember the last time one of them got that little.

The penultimate first-rounder in June’s draft was Charlie Ward, voted the best football--not basketball--player in the land. Chosen No. 27, he got a five-year $4.4 million deal, which translates to $800,000-plus annually from the New York Knicks.

That’s not bad but still considerably less than the payoff at the other end of the draft class, where lottery teams routinely treat their picks like lottery winners. Dallas paid No. 2 Jason Kidd $54 million for nine years. No. 3 Grant Hill got $45 million for eight years from Detroit. Donyell Marshall, picked No. 4, signed with Minnesota for $42.6 million over nine.

That left No. 1 Glenn Robinson and the Milwaukee Bucks locked in an ugly holdout. Robinson, blessed with wondrous basketball skills, looked at the other contracts and figured $100 million would be entirely appropriate. That, Milwaukee decided, is an awful lot of bratwurst.

John Steinmiller is the Bucks vice president for business operations, charged with signing players. He signed Vin Baker, Milwaukee’s first-round pick last year at No. 8, to a 10-year contract, paying him between $650,000 and $700,000 for his rookie season in a deal that averages a reported $1.5 million per year. He signed Eric Mobley, the Bucks’ other first-rounder this year, for four years and a reported $4.64 million.

He fielded Robinson’s $100 million bid coolly. “He has a right to ask for it,” Steinmiller said. “It’s a question of where we end up.”

Milwaukee countered with $60 million offer for nine years, an average of nearly $7 million per season. That’s a lot of bucks for the Bucks, a team where nobody made over $2 million last year.

The two sides wound up somewhere in between, finally agreeing to terms on Thursday, one day before the start of the season. If Robinson did not break the bank, he came close enough--closer, in fact, than Dallas’ Kidd, Detroit’s Hill and Minnesota’a Marshall.

The rookie numbers are stunning. Something seems a little whacky here.

“Everybody in the league wonders about it,” said Steinmiller, chancellor of the exchequer for the Bucks. “It evolved over a period of time. These guys come out of college to teams that need them and they put a premium on them. Starting at the top, agents try for 20-30% increases from year to year. Teams are in the 5-10% range. This is why there is talk of a rookie salary cap.”

Not in union leader Grantham’s office, though.

“That’s an easy solution, not necessarily the right one,” Grantham said. “It’s not the fault of the rookies. It’s the cap on the other side that causes the problem. We are opposed to caps within caps.”

Grantham’s players have noticed the fancy numbers tossed around to the new players. “No question, the veterans feel it’s a question of resource allocation,” he said.

“The bottom line is this: You are worth what someone is willing to pay.”

There’s another way to look at all of this.

The league charged Toronto and Vancouver $125 million apiece for their expansion franchises. Put a couple of rookies together and they could buy the next expansion team and have plenty left over to spend on incidentals.