ranger001 wrote:And again, the players are employees not shareholders.
This is basically at the heart of the disconnect. These players are very much unlike most employees. They are not replaceable. You can absolutely correlate player quality with revenue. It's not the only factor. But it is the single largest factor.
They are going to be paid like premier entertainers. They are always going to be paid a big % of the revenue. Those who want NBA players to live in a world where they are the only premier entertainers who aren't paid that way, are doomed to disappointment. That's not how it works. No collection of owners have enough leverage to make that happen - the players WILL form a new league if you tell them all "You can be paid no more than a million dollars a season".
Once you understand that, you'll realize that the natural question to ask is:
What would player salary look like if there were no union, and the teams were competing against each other for their services? And given U.S. law, they would not be allowed to collude to hold down player salaries. It would be a free market.
The answer to that is that players like Lebron and Durant would make even more. Players like Jamal Crawford would make less. But the overall portion of the league revenue that the players took home would be the result of the natural free market. And it would be most of the revenues. Because for years the league has run at a profit while giving the players most of the revenue - we've already seen that. Even if you believe the owners losses, that is only over the last couple of seasons. And we have baseball and hockey to look at, where we have profitable leagues that pay the players over half of the revenue.
So we already know the answer, if there were an open market. >50% to the players. Probably around 55%, judging from the other leagues. And it's probably even more than that, because the player's union in those other sports have likely traded some $$$ for system rules that are amenable to player interests, like having guaranteed contracts, trade rules that keep a player from being jerked around too much, etc.
The farther the owners get away from that free market split of the revenues, the greater the incentive the players have just to opt out. That could mean decertifying the union, forming their own league, taking legal action against the owners, etc.
The owners are engaged in a careful calculus of shifting the most revenue they can from the players without having the players actually opt out. That's what is going on.
All the uninformed talk about "50/50 is fair", "22 teams are losing money", "the league needs 300 million more a year form the players".... that's all just talking points. The owners have been planning this for years. It's been preordained that the players were going to miss paychecks. It's been preordained that the last couple of seasons before this negotiation were going to show leaner league finances. This is a power play.
