The Hornets, who are owned by the league which acquired it from George Shinn a year ago, realized it was unlikely they would be able to retain Paul with a contract extension or in free agency after he opted out of his contract after this season.
So New Orleans general manager Dell Demps, a respected player personnel man who came from the respected San Antonio Spurs, went to work, hoping to get something for Paul instead of nothing if he left in free agency. Or in Stern’s words, “Getting something more for that player in the event he will leave than if he stays.”
Demps, in his second year as GM of the Hornets, arranged a huge three-team trade with the Lakers and the Houston Rockets: Paul to the Lakers; Los Angeles forward Lamar Odom to the Hornets and Los Angeles forward Pau Gasol to the Rockets, who would have sent forward Luis Scola, guards Kevin Martin and Goran Dragic and a first-round draft pick to New Orleans.
Stern got serious pressure from a number of owners, including Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, who fired off a letter to Stern and other owners calling the trade a travesty.
This trade should go to a vote of the 29 owners of the Hornets.
Over the next three seasons this deal would save the Lakers approximately $20 million in salaries and approximately $21 million in luxury taxes. That $21 million goes to non-taxpaying teams and to fund revenue sharing.
I cannot remember ever seeing a trade where a team got by far the best player in the trade and saved over $40 million in the process. And it doesn’t appear that they would give up any draft picks, which might allow to later make a trade for Dwight Howard.
The executive director of the National Basketball Association players’ association, Billy Hunter. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson (UNITED STATES – Tags: SPORT EMPLOYMENT BUSINESS BASKETBALL)
Adrian Wojnarowski has the latest on the turmoil within the NBA players association, and the picture isn’t pretty.
After Billy Hunter made the grand stand of marching out of Friday’s bargaining session, refusing to negotiate below 52 percent of the NBA’s revenue split, a strong movement within the Players Association emerged that vowed the union will never let him act so unilaterally again.
From superstars to midlevel players to rookies, there’s an unmistakable push to complete the final elements of the system and take this labor deal to the union’s 400-plus membership. Beyond that, there’s an even larger movement to push Hunter, the Players Association’s executive director, out the door once these labor talks are done. All hell’s broken loose within the union, and no one is exactly sure how they’re going to get a deal to the finish line.
“Billy can’t just say it’s 52 or nothing, and walk out again,” one league source involved with the talks told Yahoo! Sports. “That will not happen again. It’s time that the players get to make a decision on this, and there won’t be another check lost before they do.”
Rest assured, there’s a vast gulf in the union, and it’s growing with the passing of every day. Players Association president Derek Fisher’s(notes) letter to the players convinced no one otherwise. NBA commissioner David Stern and the owners know it, and it’s part of the reason they won’t raise their offer of the BRI revenue split to 51 percent. There are system issues that need to be resolved for players, but this deal gets done at 50-50, and that’s been true for a long, long time.
In the end, there are two courses for the union: Take the deal largely on the table or blow this up, decertify and lose the season fighting the NBA in the federal courts.
Only, it’s too late to decertify. Everyone wanted to do it back in July when the lockout started, and Hunter refused. His decision had nothing to do with legal strategy, nothing to do with leverage or getting the best possible deal for the players. It had everything to do with what it always does with Hunter: self-preservation. He worried about losing power, losing his job, and he sold everyone on a toothless National Labor Relations Board claim that’s going nowhere.
Jason Whitlock has a different view, putting more blame on Fisher.
Either way, the whole situation is a mess. I tend to think Fisher is right here, realizing that the players can only push this so far.
NBA commissioner David Stern attends an NBA preseason game between the Minnesota Timberwolves and the New York Knicks in Paris on October 6, 2010. The Timberwolves won the contest, part of the annual NBA Europe Live tour, by the score of 106-100. UPI/David Silpa
David Stern visited Bill Simmons’ podcast on Monday and discussed a wide-ranging set of issues, including a potential lockout and the possibility that the Hornets are contracted.
Whether the NBA will try to prevent locked-out players such as Kobe Bryant and Dirk Nowitzki, while still under contract to their NBA teams, from playing abroad during a potential work stoppage
“If, in fact, there’s a lockout, then the player is free during the course of the lockout to do what he wants to do if his contract is in effect. I don’t want to play that game with anybody. … If we have a collective bargaining arrangement with the union and there’s a lockout, then last time around [in 1998] players were free to do what they’re going to do, because they’ve been locked out.”
Conspiracy theories suggesting that one of the league’s motivations in buying the Hornets was to give itself the ability to easily contract one team for leverage in upcoming labor negotiations
“Well, I guess all I would say to that is that wouldn’t be a conspiracy. I know that there are some owners who might share that view. … Anything that we do gets done by a majority of the owners. All you’re stating is a potential third option. But right now we are steaming full speed ahead with every single possible [intent] to make that team successful in New Orleans, and I think we’re going to succeed. So we’re going to make it unattractive to move it or contract it.”
Commissioner David Stern exudes confidence, even when he’s telling the press that the NBA is going to lose an estimated $400 million this season. Bill Simmons thinks that teams regularly screw over their fan bases by unloading good players at the trade deadline, tanking games late in the season to get a better lottery pick, all without any discount to the season tickets. If a team gives up on the season, why do the tickets remain the same price?
Any team that misses the playoffs cannot raise ticket prices the following season. Miss two straight playoffs, season-ticket holders get a 5 percent discount for renewals the following season. Miss three straight, it goes to 10 percent. Miss four straight, it jumps to 25 percent. Miss five straight, it jumps to 50 percent.
Let’s say the 2009-10 Clips knew that, if they missed the playoffs a fourth straight year, they would be looking at 25 percent discounts across the board. Is there any way they keep Dunleavy? No. Is there any way they dump Camby at the deadline? No. Financially, it wouldn’t make sense.
If I were running the NBA, eliminating the illusion of regret would be my biggest initiative. I would give every nonplayoff team the same odds for winning the lottery, just so these teams wouldn’t destroy six to eight weeks of a season for paying customers. Then, I would cut the season by four games, guarantee only the top 12 playoff spots, then decide the seventh and eighth seeds in each conference with a double-elimination tournament for every nonplayoff team that I call the Entertaining As Hell Tournament (see my 2007 column for the gory details). Boom, we just killed the tanking and salary-dumping issues.
Couldn’t that work? Has it even been discussed? Wouldn’t it generate a ton of interest and extra revenue? Wouldn’t you watch? Wouldn’t it put a ton of pressure on teams to stop shutting their best guys down or giving away contract-year guys for no real reason? You can’t give away Camby! We need him for the Entertaining As Hell Tournament in April! And who knows, maybe a wacky 7-seed would gain momentum and pull off a Round 1 shocker in the playoffs. You never know. It’s never a bad thing when those three words are involved.
Ticket discounts for non-playoff teams, equal opportunity in the lottery and a double-elimination tournament — these are all good (albeit fairly radical) ideas. The lottery idea was actually the way the NBA used to do things, and they should go back to it. Tanking at the end of the season is one of the biggest problems with today’s NBA.
As for the length of the season, I wouldn’t stop at cutting just four games. I’d go with a 66-game season. Every team would play each of its division rivals four times (16 games) and all the other teams twice, once at home and once away (50 games). Cutting back on the regular season would make it matter again. Right now, it’s rare for a regular season game to hold much significance.
Fewer games would also mean more schedule flexibility, so I’d set it up so that NBA teams would only play on certain days, say Tuesday (to avoid Mondays during football season), Friday and Saturday. That means there would be 15 games on each night, so NBATV could bounce around from game to game like the Red Zone Channel catching the best action and furious finishes. This would generate interest in the league and make fantasy basketball more appealing. Fantasy football is something that has really helped the NFL increase its popularity over the last decade.
Lastly, I’d cut guaranteed contracts down to a max of four years to re-sign a team’s own players and three years for free agents. This would limit the impact of mistakes, and while I agree with Houston GM Daryl Morey that it’s not a system that favors the prepared, it would increase parity by allowing teams to recover from mistakes more quickly, which is another thing that makes the NFL so popular. (Mediocre teams would benefit from a lottery system that would give equal opportunity to win the #1 pick to all of the non-playoff teams, so you win some and you lose some.)
The problem with Stern is that he’s too conservative in his thinking when it actually comes to the structure of the NBA, its regular season, and its postseason. He helped to usher in a new, more free-flowing game when the league passed stricter hand-check rules, and he has made the NBA an emerging global business, but when it comes to a relatively boring regular season, playoffs that are too long and too inclusive, and a lottery system that encourages tanking, he’s not very open-minded about trying something new.
According to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Arenas also told Stern that he would tell the players’ union not to fight the suspension. Stern will announce his ruling later this afternoon.
Arenas met with Stern at the league offices in New York for nearly an hour this afternoon. He was accompanied by his attorney, Ken Wainstein.
The meeting came nearly two weeks after Arenas pleaded guilty to a felony gun charge and was expected to provide Stern with the final details before he determined a punishment for Arenas and teammate Javaris Crittenton, who were involved in a locker room dispute in which guns were displayed at Verizon Center on Dec. 21.
Arenas was suspended indefinitely for his behavior after the incident was first reported, including his decision to mockingly pretend he was shooting his teammates with his fingers before a game in Philadelphia on Jan. 5. Arenas has missed the past 12 games while serving the suspension. The Wizards have 38 games remaining, which would put the total of suspension at 50 games.
The article also notes that Arenas has no desire to play for Wizards’ President Ernie Grunfeld again, which is why it makes sense that Arenas wouldn’t fight the suspension.
According to Yahoo! Sports, the NBA is planning to provide guidelines for their players that are using the different social media outlets to communicate to fans.
“Obviously, there is a happy medium between tweeting before the game and tweeting from our bench during the game,” Stern said by phone. “You want to make sure that pop culture doesn’t intrude on what brought us here, which is the game, and that we show the right respect for the game.”
The NFL announced its own guidelines on Monday by restricting players, coaches and football operations personnel – or anyone representing them – from using social media networks like Twitter and Facebook from 90 minutes before kickoff to the end of traditional media interviews after games. NFL game officials are banned from using social media at all times.
“We just need to make sure when it’s OK to Tweet and when it’s not OK to Tweet so it at least focuses around the game,” [Stern] said. “It would look unusual for a guy sitting on the bench to pick up his cell phone, and I think we can agree that he probably shouldn’t be writing e-mails. It’s not about Twitter; it’s about the line of communication. That’s what we’re focusing on.”
It’s understandable why a team or a league would want their players to avoid “tweeting” during business hours. They’re being paid to do a job, not interact with fans. That said, Twitter is a social and marketing phenomenon, so when used correctly, it can enhance the fan’s experience. There’s no way for the league or team to filter a player’s comments, so the restrictions make sense.
- AWFUL ANNOUNCING says that Jeff Van Gundy is making it no secret that he’s rooting for the Magic in the Finals.
- SPORTSbyBROOKS has the lowdown on the three Texas high school cheerleaders who decided to pull a prank on one of their classmates by crapping in a sock and then smearing it in the victim’s locker. Man, high schoolers are really turning up the notch on pranks these days. I remember when knocking books out of the hands of unsuspecting schoolmates while they were walking down the hall was considered cruel. Now we’ve got kids crapping in socks and smearing it lockers…yikes.
- THE LOVE OF SPORTS compiles a list of five athletes they’d like to share a meal with and details how the conversation would play out.
- In wake of Cardinals’ shortstop Kahlil Greene being placed on the DL with “social anxiety disorder”, (the third major leaguer to miss time with this complaint) DEADSPIN tries to get to the bottom of what is wrong with our fragile baseball players.
- YARDBARKER details 100 things that NBA commissioner David Stern would enjoy more than a LeBron-less Finals.
Whenever I see the acronym “CBA,” I still think of the Continental Basketball Association, which is apparently still around, but only had four teams to start the season — the Albany Patroons, the East Kentucky Miners, the Lawton-Fort Sill Calvary and the Minot Skyrockets. Seriously.
CBA also stands for the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, which is essentially the agreement between the league, owners and its players regarding salary cap structure, trades, length/size of contracts, etc. Commissioner David Stern wants a major overhaul to account for the number of franchises in financial straits, but Billy Hunter, executive director of the NBA Player’s Association says the current system is just fine.
“One of the principle issues is that some owners are having a hard time with cash flow,” Hunter said. “I don’t see why that automatically means more give-backs from the players. It seems to me a new revenue-sharing plan among the owners is one of the things they have to look at. Then you wouldn’t be looking to the players every time there’s a shortfall.”
The current labor pact, signed in July, 2005, will expire in June, 2011. No substantive talks with the league on a subsequent deal will begin until after July 1, Hunter said, because union president Derek Fisher and other board members are involved in the playoffs. The current system guarantees the players 57 percent of basketball-related revenue (BRI).
Hunter declined to outline what the players might be seeking in the new deal, but a source said repealing the age limit, reducing the amount of player salaries held in escrow, loosening rules concerning restricted free agents and changing the league’s disciplinary system top the list.
The biggest points of contention are likely to be the age limit and the disciplinary system. The current deal requires a player to be 19 — and one year removed from high school in the U.S. — before he is draft-eligible. There has been talk that the league would like to raise the limit by another year, but one union source said “90 percent” of the current players are against it now.
FIBA (the governing body of international basketball) plans to extend its three-point line from 20’ 6” to 22’ 2” effective 2010. They’re also getting rid of the trapezoidal lane in an effort to standardize the game worldwide. The NCAA is extending its three point line from 19′ 9″ to 20′ 9″ starting this season. The NBA’s three-point line is 23’ 9” from the hoop.
I like the international line where it is. Doug Collins said during the Olympic broadcast that “too many players are able to shoot that shot” as a reason that it should be moved back. I say… who cares? I think most basketball purists agree that the international game (and the college game) is more fun to watch than the NBA game. I’m not talking about the talent of the players – I’m talking about how the game is played. Part of that has to do with the pressure that the three-point line puts on the defense. If a good portion of players can hit that shot, it forces more defenders to get out and guard those players. This, in turn, creates more spacing inside the arc and allows for more free-flowing, dynamic offense, which is good for the game.
Plus, the three-pointer makes the game more exciting. Underdogs have a better chance of pulling an upset, comebacks are easier, big scoring runs are more frequent and scores are higher. Aren’t these good things?
Then there’s the NBA’s shot from the side. It’s a different distance (22’) from the rest of the arc, which in and of itself is just silly. But at least once a game, a player will step out of bounds because he is trying to spot up behind the three-point line when he’s catching the ball. This is just a drag that slows the game down, and it would be virtually eliminated if the league moved the line in.
I’d rather see the NBA adopt the international 20’ 6” length than see FIBA extend its arc.
I know, it will never happen. People conform to David Stern and the NBA, not the other way around.
