David Stern appeared on the B.S. Report with Bill Simmons and had this to say about the state of the lockout.
This is the time to have a reset. This is a time for us to hold for the players what they have and sort grow our way out of this situation we find ourselves in. The players very strongly disagree and to this point, don’t even want to discuss it. We’ve said to them, the average salary is over $5 million dollars. We think we can keep your compensation including benefits at that number, that makes you the highest paid union in the world. And we’re gonna keep it at that level while we grow our way out of this…
We need a reset in the amount of compensation, we need shorter contracts so we can align pay with performance and we need to get a little bit more competitive. It’s not brain surgery…
They have a lot of education to do with their players.
We have asked the players to take an 8% cut…from the $2.2 billion dollar total. Our proposal was $2 billion, and hold it while we grow out of where we find ourselves. And if we do very well, and we grow more than, say, 4% a year…they’ll do better than $2 billion and it will start to grow… When they came back and said we’ve got a better idea — you give us a 35% increase over six years and it should go from $5.1 million…to $7.1 million, we said, “Whoa, we’re not even on the same planet much less the same ballpark.”
We’ve given them our books…
This is what the lawyer for the union told us: “We don’t think you should do better than break even. And we think your problem is that you’ve lost X and we’re prepared to help you by delivering half of X. You make up the other half and then you’ll be at break even.”
On contraction, Stern said…
Actually, it’s not a subject that we’re against… A number of teams have said that if you have a team that is perpetually going to be a recipient [of revenue sharing], aren’t you better off with the ability to buy them in, between the revenue sharing and the split of international, and the TV money, we could almost buy them in with their own money.
I am not exactly sure what “buy them in” means — I guess it means contraction — but those words sound a bit ominous for those franchises on the edge.
