How United are the Owners?

[e_blazer]

I'd love to be a fly on the wall listening when owners and their reps have conferences to discuss what they want in the CBA. Stern is very careful to control the message and make it sound like the owners are united in their demands, but I don't see how that can really be the case. The "haves", the third of teams that made money and are in major markets can't be thrilled with the prospect of losing a season so that the poorer franchises can get a better deal.

The teams that have made major investments in their rosters and who are well above the current cap so that they're in a position to compete for a title in the next few years, can't be excited at the prospect of being forced to dump salary to come down to even the limits of a flex cap. The Heat, for example, could possibly be pushed into a choice of having to use the amnesty clause to dump one of their Big 3 (Bosh) or else have those contracts consume virtually all of their cap space ($57 mil by 2013). The Lakers are committed to around $63 mil on Kobe, Gasol, and Bynum alone by 2012.

Teams that find themselves in a situation of watching as franchise players pursue signing with teams in Europe or China must be feeling pretty nervous as well. Given all of the disparate situations around the league, it seems to me Stern's going to be pushed pretty hard to try to keep things from flying apart as this drags on.

 

[3RA1N1AC]

there is no revenue sharing as of now, so teams like LA cant be too happy in possibly having to share their $175 million a year in TV money either

 

[Nikolokolus]

The thing is that there are far more small market teams than large, so regardless of how "unified" they are with Jerry Buss and James Dolan, they hold a majority of the votes. My guess is that that lion's share of these small market, low revenue teams are going to push for a long hold-out and a hard cap and that in the end they are probably going to get most of what they want.

Whether or not any kind of revenue sharing system gets put into place is probably a separate issue from the player lockout -- the league's owners seem to be unified in wanting to get their pound of flesh from the players before they even begin to worry about how they want to divvy up revenues.

 

[Draco]

Lakers, Heat, Mavs, Knicks all are perfectly happy with the current system and don't want to lose any games.

There are 26 other teams. Most of those owners are new ones who weren't around for the '99 lockout, they overpaid for teams before the recession hit and have lost much in their other investments.

I agree that once games could be lost those owners in big markets or aging rosters will be pushing very hard to give into the players demands.

But on the other side, how unified are the players going to be? Right now the owners are offering deals that basically pay the same amount to players over the next 4 years, but let the owners keep most of the additional TV revenue in years 5-10 when a new bigger TV contract is negotiated. How many players are going to be willing to lose huge sums of money, or all of their money, during this season because of flat salaries 6 years from now? Most of those players will be out of the league by then.

I bet in the end we get a deal done before any games are lost.