Owners say: “We need cost certainty. The player’s salaries as a percentage of revenue has reached an unacceptable level.” Truth: High salaries are the owner’s fault. No one held a gun to their head and made them pay $21 million to a young man who had been in high school 16 months before. Businessmen know that if you can’t afford it, don’t pay it. How did they get so rich? Paying a few players like Shaq and Michael Jordan that kind of money is not the problem. Those players draw the fans and TV money. They have produced great seasons and are assured of doing it again. Paying players who have had one partially good season big bucks on speculation is the real problem. Most teams have embarrassing salaries of anywhere from 4 to 8 million dollars a year committed to players like Eldon Campbell, Chris Childs, Jim McIlvaine and Stojko Vrankovic. These players have never had one good, full season, but teams wasted big contracts on them. Pay them their true value and the owners would have the “cost certainty” they want. If the owners think that limiting players like Scottie Pippen and Karl Malone to only $12 million a year will solve this problem, they are sadly mistaken. They will continue to overpay mediocrity because of one simple reason: some are better judges of talent that others.
Union says: “We aren’t going to take a bad deal”. Truth: Having the top players receive only $10 million a year versus being able to get $20 million, and having the minimum salary raised to $300,000 per years is not a “bad” deal . They may not consider it an acceptable deal, or they may say it is “a step backwards”, but to imply to ordinary people that dollars in that range is somehow “bad” is only going to provoke anger and resentment.
Union says: “People don’t come to see the owners, they come to see the players so we should be compensated as partners.” Truth: You are partners. Even if you only get 50% of the revenue, not the 60% you want, that is more than fair. Remember, as “partners”, your salaries are going to be paid to you whether you perform well or not. You take none of the risks. The owners bought the team, took the risk, and will be there long after you leave. They will suffer if the economy falters, or the game is tarnished. They deserve a return on their investment, and it is not guaranteed. Do the players share all their “basketball related income” with the owners? I am talking about all that money they get paid to endorse shoes, french fries, soft drinks signing autographs. Would they earn that if they didn’t play basketball?
Union says: “Rock stars get huge salaries and people don’t complain about that.” Truth: Entertainers get paid only if they perform. If Charles Barkley plays only 67 games, he gets paid for 82. If I went to a game to see him and he didn’t play, too bad for me. The public pays to see entertainers and players like Michael Jordan. They don’t care whether Eldon Campbell plays or not, so paying him $7 million is different than paying Mick Jagger. We pay to see the game and a few selected stars.
Union says: “Players only have so long before they lose their ability and need to earn as much as possible as quickly as possible.” Truth: Where does it say athletes must retire early and never work again. The embarrassment to us as a society is that these men were given full scholarships to the country’s most prestigious universities and they wasted the opportunity. Spending your time studying hard to achieve a 4.0 GPA will not get you a scholarship to most of these schools, but if you can dunk a basketball or throw a pass, you can go to college, skip classes and waste the potential for a wonderful, free education. If you did not take advantage of that scenario, tough. The average NBA salary last year was $2.6 million, more than most of us will make in a lifetime, for playing a game that my friends and I play for fun at the gym 3 times a week. If that isn’t enough (not counting the endorsement contracts), and you don’t get a network studio job as an analyst, then you may have to resort to getting a real job. Being an ex-NBA player might give you an advantage there, also.
Fans know the truth. Owners and players don’t care. So now it’s in the hands of lawyers. We all know what the public gets when lawyers take over anything.
