On to the Next One

No matter how the rest of the NBA lockout plays out, it has become increasingly clear that new leadership is sorely needed on both sides by the time the next negotiation rolls around in seven to ten years. David Stern and Billy Hunter showed far too little urgency until it was far too late to salvage a full season.

Why, if both Stern and Hunter new a massive overhaul to the system and the BRI split was coming, did they not start negotiating in earnest until September? Why didn't they even meet until August? If, as Hunter claims, he knew for two or three years that we'd be where we are right now, didn't he have his people working on a plan to combat what he knew was coming? Why, if Stern and the owners didn't want to miss games, didn't they sit down with the players association and try to work this all out earlier?

Stern and Hunter are so entrenched, and having been going at this in public and private for so long that they let the lockout devolve into a battle of rhetoric and ultimatums and may have ruined the momentum of the greatest season the NBA has had in over a decade.

NBA fans worldwide are anxiously awaiting a deal to be agreed upon by the NBPA and NBA. (Photo: Source Unknown)

Stern became the Commissioner of the NBA in 1984 and has ushered the league through an enormous period of growth. He's expanded the game both domestically - the league has added teams in five new markets since '84 - and internationally; he instituted drug testing and the dress code; and he has weathered controversies from the 1985 lottery to the Malace at the Palace to Tim Donaghy with class.

But he's also presided over four lockouts, two of which have led to missed games. He continues to push - and finance - the WNBA, despite long-mounting evidence that it is an unsuccessful venture. He allowed, and maybe even encouraged, Clay Bennett to steal the Supersonics from Seattle and move them to Oklahoma City.

Whenever Stern retires, he'll likely go down as one of the greatest - if not the greatest - commissioners in the history of American professional sports, but he hasn't nearly been perfect, especially not lately, and especially if his main job is to represent the interests of the owners.

Stern was the lead negotiator for the owners in 1998 and 1999, when most of the recently-expired collective bargaining agreement was authored. In the wake of that negotiation, many said that Stern had wiped the floor with NBPA Executive Director Billy Hunter, but the opposite turned out to be true. The owners now claim to have lost hundreds of millions of dollars per season in the last few years of the agreement, which was renewed with some slight modifications like the age limit and dress code in 2005.

If this is true, then why have they again trusted Stern to negotiate for them? Would a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company - which is essentially what Stern is - be allowed to stay on if the company experienced multiple years of that type of loss? Maybe Stern's still there because he, as he says, "know[s] where the bodies are buried," or maybe he's still there because he's still negotiating against Billy Hunter. Stern can sit across the table from Hunter with both men knowing that Hunter got the much better end of the deal last time, and that it's time to even the score.

If the union had different leadership, it's possible they wouldn't have been as immediately concessionary as they were at the start of these negotiations. The NBPA's first offer already included a reduction in the percentage of BRI they would receive from the previous deal. New leadership may not have immediately dropped the percentage because they weren't the ones who so badly beat Stern and the owners in the previous negotiations. (NOTE: This is obviously not guaranteed, and economic realities dictate that the players' share of BRI would be less than last season's no matter what. But they didn't have to open their offer that way if they knew, as Hunter claims he did, that the owners would be angling for concessions the players would never make anyway.)

If the union had different leadership, maybe they would have had a comprehensive public relations plan. Maybe they wouldn't have allowed Stern to hijack the narrative of these negotiations. Many casual fans still think the players are holding out for more money, when the truth is probably the diametric opposite. A vocal group of players wants to decertify and another vocal group wants to take the offer on the table.

Hunter is currently under siege from seemingly all angles as agents, rank-and-file players and possibly - if you believe reports from Fox Sports and/or Yahoo! Sports - union President Derek Fisher are undermining his authority. I've written before that Hunter and Fisher made a grave mistake by not coming into this lockout with any sort of plan to win the public relations battle whether it substantially affected negotiations or not, and I continue to hold that belief.

This has been bungled from all sides, and nearly everyone is to blame. But it doesn't have to be that way next time. With new leadership, and most importantly with trust between the two sides, a lockout can be avoided.

The process of working on the next collective bargaining agreement needs to begin will in advance of the still-to-be-finalized one expiring. They simply can't wait until July 1, 2019 or 2022 to start working on whatever it is that needs to be fixed. Ideally, there should be people on both sides dedicated to this right from the start. Work to quickly identify tweaks that can be made to benefit both sides and grow the game and the league.

There needs to be more trust and more honesty and less rhetoric and less animosity. Both the owners and the players are needed for the NBA to thrive. The players are the revenue generators, but the owners allow the games to happen and sign the checks. A partnership needs to be formed. The relationship should never come to what we've witnessing now.

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