COMMENTARY : Joke’s on NBA and Its Players in Lockout

Unlike the baseball strike and the NHL lockout, there’s something missing from the NBA’s first work stoppage.

Someone who isn’t rich.

The NBA has no impoverished small-market teams or history of labor discord. The average NBA player is paid $1.25 million a year and, under the rejected agreement, would have gone to $2 million. The commissioner gets $3 million. The insurgent agents pushing decertification have office suites in Century City and Santa Monica with views halfway to Hawaii and homes in Malibu. The Clippers made money last season, drawing 6,000 a night, for heaven’s sake.

The participants may yet squeeze out a season, on time or otherwise, but we’ll have to listen to them rattling their sabers between now and then. If it takes two sides to tango, three have produced the stupidest labor impasse on record.

There are one NBA and two players’ factions. In reality, there are three armies of lawyers, a sure sign of trouble. If one lawyer poses a threat to any environment, 100 could trash paradise.

No single party is to blame but there’s enough to go around, so let’s get started:

--David Stern.

Remember when he called himself “Easy Dave”?

Insisting on a deal before the off-season, he added a little flourish to scare the players into line--a deadline, after which he said there would be a lockout.

He got the deal he wanted, a nice one for the owners, if merely tolerable for the players. Stern got a hard salary cap, apparently intent on making the league Shinn-proof, George Shinn being the Hornet owner who gave Larry Johnson that $84-million extension and demolished the salary structure.

The union, out of time, had to win quick approval. The agents blew up, and so did the deal. Stern’s date came around, so he had to lock the players out.

--Simon Gourdine.

You don’t want to blame the union, which got caught in the middle, but Gourdine, the executive director, tried an end run around the powerful agents’ committee, freezing them out at the end. Didn’t work.

However, Gourdine was an emergency replacement, thrown into the breach when Charles Grantham “resigned” in the middle of negotiations. Gourdine simply may not have realized how things worked.

--The players.

This doesn’t count the leaders such as Buck Williams and Charles Smith, who were on the front lines. However, the membership was apathetic, showed little interest and, worse, made it clear it wanted no strike, undercutting their leaders’ bargaining position.

Then, at the critical moment, they jettisoned Grantham, reportedly for expense-account irregularities. Grantham has never responded, indicating that he’s being paid to stay silent. However, one of the insurgent agents suggests this was a cover-up, that Grantham, who wanted to throw out the cap and the draft, was too far ahead of his union, which had become uncomfortable with him.

--The insurgent agents.

It’s not just that they fell in line behind David Falk’s no-surrender negotiating style and ran off to federal court to sue the NBA. (They have to destroy the village to save it?)

Why did they wait until the 11th hour to step in? Why didn’t they get involved when there was still time to be part of the negotiating process?

Where were they all this time?

One of the insurgents said last week he didn’t know what the deal was, the old Gourdine freeze-out story. However, the basics had been known for months. Jon Koncak, the Hawks’ player representative, blabbed the major points as long ago as the all-star break.

The insurgents dozed along with everyone else until that last weekend. Then they asked Gourdine to brief them in a conference call, and he refused. They blew up and decided to show him how powerful they were, and an impasse was born.

--Michael Jordan.

Let’s just say he’s miscast as a labor leader.

For years, Jordan disdained any active role in the union, wondering out loud why any player would accept the hassle of being a player representative. Accordingly, Jordan’s Bulls went two years without one.

Now he says he’s looking out for the little guy. It may only be coincidence that his contract is up next summer and he wants a balloon payment of the sort the new agreement would have limited.

Just to show how far things have gone, the insurgents brought in Gene Upshaw, director of the NFL Players Assn., to brief players at their informational meeting in Los Angeles last week.

NFL players went eight years without a contract, won their suit in court, then saw Upshaw hand the owners a hard salary cap his members are still arguing about. If the insurgents are looking for a union to decertify, they should try Upshaw’s and do football players a favor.

Though the NBA players’ association scheduled an 11th-hour meeting for today to discuss reopening negotiations with the league, the players are still up against it. The insurgents say decertification would end the lockout. Stern says the league would just shut down, a lockout by another name.

Assuming that Stern means it (he does) and can get away with it legally (he well may), the NBA would get a stoppage on its terms--at the start of the season, when the games are relatively meaningless.

The players would miss some checks, and then we’d see how tough everyone is.

In the meantime, to everyone who helped bring about this joke, thanks a lot.