We bow, once again, before the National Basketball Association, and its ability to get things done.
They are not dumb, these hoop folks. They package their product brilliantly. They market their stars better than anyone. They sucker expansion franchise purchasers to the max, while making sure that the check will clear. (Sure they might mess up on the fine points - like whether arenas will ever be built - but this is not the time or place for nitpicking.)Rebuilding from the ashes of an era when the game was dying, when the off-court activities of some players made the goings on at that Michael Irvin house party look like a kiddie birthday bash, David Stern et al have engineered a small miracle.
And labor disputes - they've got those down pat as well.
In the past 12 months, there have been two player lockouts, and two victories for management. Not total victories, not union-crushing victories, because in the long term there's no up side to that. Instead, they wind up with something that looks like a compromise, as if reasonable people have come to reasonable conclusions, which allows for face-saving all around.
If you can do that, and if you can do it without losing a single regular-season game, without interrupting the flow of a season, without making fans aware that anything untoward is taking place, you are several steps ahead of folks playing and running other games.
Those would be the people who force strikes just before the most significant part of their season, trying to rewrite the rules of their business in one fell swoop - only to damage it almost beyond repair. Or the ones who lock the players out mid-year, losing games, losing good will, without ever really achieving their goals. Or the ones who once foisted scab players on the paying public, and wound up busting a players union, to the detriment of all.
But if you want a real measure of the NBA's smarts, just wait until Thursday evening, when it will be business as usual again (after Tuesday's 2-hour-38-minute lockout helped iron out the final point in the new, six-year collective agreement with the players). The best crop of free-agent talent imaginable will be on the block, in a sport where the individual star has more real value than in any other team sport.
The dollars will be stacked to the stratosphere for the Michael Jordans and Shaquille O'Neals and the handful of others whose celebrity extends far beyond the game itself. Or at least they would, but for that which makes free agency not quite so free: the cap.
No use trying to figure out the fine points, since great minds now make a specialization of capology. Suffice it to say that the NBA already has in place that for which owners in other sports pine: a true, enforceable ceiling on salaries that gives teams an advantage in retaining their own stars while suppressing real free market activity.
It was achieved during a time of crisis, when the players didn't have much choice (sort of the way income tax slipped in during wartime), but it's sure not going to be abandoned even now when times are so good.
What's Jordan worth in 1996, the greatest player in the game, the greatest single attraction in all of sport? What price would reflect the real value of O'Neal, now and into the future? That you won't find out even after the great free-agent auction begins.
To sign any of the superstars who become available this week, teams would have to have commitments to salaries for the coming season $10-million or $15-million below that, just to get into the bidding. So the market, to begin with, is limited.
Then add the so-called Larry Bird rule, which allows teams to exceed the cap to any degree they see fit in order to re-sign their own players. If they choose to, Chicago, Orlando or any of the other clubs in danger of losing their marquee attraction will be able to outbid whichever teams come a-courting. That makes free agency in basketball much more restrictive than in baseball, more restrictive, even, than in the new collective agreement in hockey, despite the NHL having had the benefit of a house union all those years.
NBA players will move if their current teams decide they can't afford them, or decide they simply don't want them any more. Players will move if they decide it's worth taking less money to change teams and change cities. (O'Neal, heading for Los Angeles, with the spinoff benefits of playing in a major market, might well make that choice.)
Players will get huge raises from their current teams to make them happy, or if they've been grossly underpaid - as Jordan has. But the kind of market forces that sent baseball salaries spiraling upward can't fully come into play.
A nice deal if you can get it, if you're an owner, if you're a commissioner. And no revolution in sight.