COMMENTARY : NBA Lockout Makes the Least Sense of All

Just when you thought it was safe to go to a game, here comes another round of lockouts, posturing by people in suits and just possibly an actual strike.

For those who don’t have the stomach for another of these, here’s a handy guide to help you figure out who the good guys are:

There are none.

President Clinton’s description of baseball’s warring owners and players--a few hundred people who couldn’t decide how to split several billion dollars--applies to the NBA, multiplied by 10.

The NBA has no hard-pressed small-market teams nor exploited players. A cap is already in place.

Last season’s minimum salary was $175,000. Franchise values are leapfrogging. Expansion fees skyrocketed from $32.5 million in 1988 to $125 million in seven years.

The Clippers, with the lowest gate in their history, made money. When they got their first cut of the expansion pie this spring, they started calling players to whom they owed deferred payments and offering early payments (discounted, naturally), just to get the cash off their books.

The commissioner makes $3 million a year. The average player makes $1.25. If the recently repudiated agreement had been accepted, the players’ average would be going up to $2 million.

This is all about business and the incentive that drives it: greed.

David Stern, knowing he had the union where he wanted it, demanded give-backs, offering a cap raise that looks enormous on paper but is modest compared to what teams are already spending.

The players, fat and happy, were apathetic. Their union was a joke. Isiah Thomas led it for years, despite a feud with the game’s most influential player, Michael Jordan, that cost him his standing with players.

The union’s director, Wharton-trained Charles Grantham, wanted to overturn the cap, had to backpedal when his membership all but announced it wouldn’t strike--then was forced to resign in the middle of negotiations in a dispute over his expense account.

The emergency-replacement director, Simon Gourdine, was the union’s lawyer, a mere part-timer in its office--and a former NBA deputy commissioner.

Gourdine, already lacking credibility, then froze out the powerful agents committee.

Enraged, the agents united under the banner of the Greed King, David Falk, whom most of them dislike even more than they usually dislike one another. (One, asked how he could bear to ally himself with Falk, said, “That’s how bad this agreement is.”)

Falk trotted out his stars, Jordan, Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning, whose objections at the player-representatives’ meeting in Chicago torpedoed the deal.

Not surprisingly, the Falk Trio trained its fire on the new luxury tax--Falk’s issue. Two of his biggest tickets, Jordan and Mourning, will be free agents in a year and expect mega-million dollar salaries.

This is the same Jordan who’d always said he wasn’t in it for the money, who announced when he came back he was offended by young players’ failure to nurture the game.

OK, pick your side.