Category: News (Page 20 of 199)

Kevin Love commented on the recent NBA/NBAPA meetings, per ESPN…

The consensus coming out of an NBA players regional meeting attended by nearly 60 players Tuesday was that the current offer from the owners is unacceptable, especially the call for a hard salary cap.

“I want to play basketball,” Love said. “I want us — the players — to sign a great deal. I want us to make a compromise with the owners but not sign what they’re proposing. We’ll play hardball if we have to. I want there to be an NBA season but it’s also apparent that we’re going to miss games.”

Love said the players don’t want to see years cut off guaranteed contracts and are not pleased with a proposal that they could lose money if not playing up to their contracts. He also said that the proposed revenue split (50-50, rather than the 57-43 split in favor of players) is unacceptable.

Love said the main issue was the proposed hard cap of $62 million. Love called it a poor idea that would cause mayhem because only a few players would get a high salary, with everyone else getting the lower end of the wage scale or the league minimum.

Okay, so the players don’t want a hard cap (which works great in the NFL) or non-guaranteed salaries (which means players will lose money if they underperform — unacceptable!), and a more even revenue split isn’t going to work.

Sigh.

…here is an overview of just how far apart the two sides are:

Among the economic issues that caused the lockout to go into place were the owners seeking a larger share of the basketball-related income (BRI). Player salaries took up 57 percent of the BRI in the last CBA. Owners wanted to lower that number to approximately 55-45 in their favor, while players offered to lower their take to 54.3 percent — giving up $500 million in total player salaries over five years, a concession that NBA commissioner David Stern characterized at the time as “modest.”

There were also disagreements over how long the next CBA should last — owners proposed a 10-year deal while the union started with a five-year proposal, later stretching it to six. There was also a fundamental disagreement between the union and owners over the $340 million the league claims to have lost during the 2009-10 season and whether revenue-sharing amongst owners would be a more appropriate means to recoup those losses in the future rather than slicing player salaries.

Read more about the NBA lockout.

The headline is the good news. This is the bad news…

When the sides last met on June 30, the players offered a six-year agreement in which they would cut their take of basketball-related income (BRI) from 57 percent to 54.6 percent — or $100 million per year over the six years.

Owners are seeking a 10-year agreement with a hard salary cap, and their most recent proposal targeted paying the players at least $2 billion in salaries in each of the 10 seasons.

Players have argued that their cut of BRI would be cut from 57 percent to less than 40 percent under the owners’ most recent proposal, while owners have maintained they need fundamental financial changes to an operating system in which they claim 22 of the league’s 30 teams lost money last season. The union disputes that contention.

As Larry Coon explained a few weeks ago, the two sides are miles apart. They can’t even agree on which numbers to use.