NBA, Players Union Agree to End Lockout

A day before it was scheduled to become the first American sports league to cancel an entire season, the NBA reached agreement with its players Wednesday and began making plans for a schedule of about 50 games, starting in early February.

The league announced that its nine-man labor relations committee, which includes Laker owner Jerry Buss, unanimously endorsed the deal. If the board of governors meeting here today accepts its recommendation--which is considered a formality--the lockout will be lifted on its 191st day.

“I will say that I am elated that we will be playing basketball this season,” NBA Commissioner David Stern said.

In effect, the union gave the league caps on the salaries of its biggest stars in return for “exceptions” to the salary cap that will raise the pay of middle-class and low-end players. Also, salaries for players currently under contract aren’t affected; the caps only go into effect on contracts completed after the agreement becomes official.

Thus a star like the Utah Jazz’s Karl Malone, who will be a free agent this summer, will be capped at the new maximum for 10-year veterans--$14 million--rather than the $20 million he was thinking of.

No sports union had ever accepted a cap on individual salaries. However, no league had ever paid the kind of salaries the NBA was paying. Michael Jordan made $33 million last season, and union President Patrick Ewing of the New York Knicks made $20.1 million. Two more players, the Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal and the Miami Heat’s Alonzo Mourning, were to make $15 million this season.

In the rest of American team sports, only one other player makes as much--new Dodger pitcher Kevin Brown, whose seven-year, $105-million deal recently sent shock waves through baseball.

Middle-Class Players Gain

For those caps, however, the union got meaningful relief for its middle class, which began disappearing in recent years when unfettered free agency sent superstars’ pay spiraling to levels that even Danny Schayes, a member of the union’s board of directors, Wednesday called “obscene.”

Minimums will now be boosted. Ten-year veterans, such as Byron Scott and Jerome Kersey, who played for $272,500 as Lakers in the 1996-97 season, would now be guaranteed $1 million.

In addition, each team can sign one player for $1.75 million--the “average salary exception”--and one for $1 million--the “median player exception”--in the first year of the six-year contract, with those figures increasing in subsequent years.

On the other hand, the NBA, the last American professional league never to have lost a game in a labor action, will cancel at least 450 games, costing players about $375 million in salaries, and breaking the league’s bond with its fans, whose reaction across the nation to the NBA’s absence has been markedly apathetic.

“Everybody lost,” said the Houston Rockets’ Charles Barkley. “We lost three months of the season and we did a disservice to the game, so there are no winners and losers. There’s going to be a lot of damage.”

It was the longest, most-bitter feud in NBA history and seemed doomed to go the limit, with players expected to back their union leadership in a vote Wednesday, before today’s “drop-dead” date, on which Stern had promised that the league’s labor relations committee would report its 9-0 recommendation to cancel the season to the board of governors.

However, union director Billy Hunter called Stern on Tuesday night and asked if he wanted to talk. Stern invited him to the NBA offices. Joined only by small legal staffs and deputy commissioner Russ Granik, they talked until 6:30 Wednesday morning.

Stern, convinced at last the union hawks--counsel Jeff Kessler and powerful agents David Falk and Arn Tellem--were no longer standing in the way of a deal, more than split the remaining differences.

On salary caps for 10-year veterans, for example, where the union was asking $15 million and the league was at $12.25 million, Stern went to $14 million. On the revenue split, where the players wanted 56% of total revenue for salaries in years four, five and six and the league was offering 53.5%, Stern came up to 55%.

At Hunter’s invitation, Stern also addressed players Wednesday afternoon at Kessler’s offices.

“I asked the players to wait so David could make an appearance with the members of his staff,” Hunter said. “It’s time to put any and all disagreements and whatever we had behind us.

“We’re all part of the NBA family, and we’ve got to grow this thing together and I think it can be better than it was before. It’s a deal in which both made compromises. We got a lot of what we wanted, they got the relief they were looking for on the high end and with the rookies [whose three-year scale can now be extended to five, the owner gaining an option on their fourth season and the right to match any offers in the fifth].”

‘It Was Positive at the End’

Said the Charlotte Hornets’ B.J. Armstrong: “The commissioner came in and commended us on how hard we fought for what we thought was right. He said it was a hard-fought negotiation and it’s going to make us a more solid group.

“He said he wants to involve the players more in the growth of the league, not just make it the owners and the league. We should give them ideas. He wants to work with us more.

“It was positive at the end. He said it was a tough task but it was well worth the fight. And now we’re all looking to getting back on the court.”

In the end, one of the lions even lay down with the lambs.

“I want to congratulate David Stern and Russ Granik,” Tellem said, “for being statesmanlike enough to make the necessary concessions to get a deal done.”

The deal is for six seasons, with the league holding an option for a seventh. That’s about how long it will take the combatants to recover from this one.

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What Happens Now

Games Begin: Feb. 2

Length of Season: About 50 games.

Playoffs Start: About May 1

Schedules: Revamped rather than picked up*

* Lakers, Clippers schedules probably not available until next week.

*

In Sports: Effect on players, owners, fans and others. D1

* MARKETING REBOUND?: The NBA and companies linked to it face big challenges regaining the support of fans. C5