Author: John Paulsen (Page 18 of 937)

There’s a good chance that both the NFL and NBA will be under lockout once the NBA’s current CBA expires on June 30. There hasn’t been much progress made in the NBA labor negotiations.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the union proposed a five-year deal in which the players would receive $100 million less per season in salaries, and the owners countered with a proposed 10-year deal that would set a target of $2 billion in player salaries each season — a reduction from the $2.17 billion the players earned in the 2010-11 season.

The same story says that the two sides are “several billion dollars apart” but it appears that the players are offering a $100 million per season reduction (for five seasons), which was deemed “modest” by commissioner David Stern, while the owners want $170 million per season (for 10 seasons). That’s a total difference of $1.2 billion ($70 million * 5 years + $170 million * 5 years) if one assumes that the players aren’t willing to give back any salary for years 6-10.

The NBA as a whole would benefit if contracts were shorter (max of four years instead of six) and weren’t fully guaranteed. A team should be able to cut an underperforming player and save (say, 50%) on the remaining years of his contract. That way, the player still benefits from the deal, but his contract isn’t an albatross that keeps the team from contending.

I’d also like to see a hard cap in the NBA. The NFL has a hard cap and there isn’t a league with better parity. Small market teams like Cleveland, Sacramento and Milwaukee have a tough time competing in today’s environment unless they luck out and land a player like LeBron James in the lottery. San Antonio and Oklahoma City are examples of how small market teams can compete, but the Spurs were lucky to win the #1 overall pick to draft Tim Duncan while the Thunder were fortunate to have Kevin Durant fall into their laps at #2. Without those two picks those franchises wouldn’t be any better than the Bucks or Kings. (Give credit to the Spurs and Thunder for not screwing up those picks, but those were pretty much no-brainer picks at the time, unlike the Bucks’ selection of Andrew Bogut at #1.) The soft cap enables big spenders like Mark Cuban continue to add salary until he finds the right mix of talent to win a title.