Kobe Bryant won’t be playing for Besiktas, and that means “Told ya so” is a trending topic for Monday. Two things stick out as the saga twists.
Kobe Bryant
If Kobe agrees to play overseas during the lockout, the owners will have reason to flinch. In terms of global fame, he is a singular star. He’s not the best player in the league, and hasn’t been for some time. But if the NBA were to watch him now, in the final throes of his dominance, suit up for a different league and make a serious run (instead of a few glorified exhibitions) … that would hurt. It wouldn’t push for an end to the NBA lockout — the structural issues are too great for one simple excursion to fix it — but it’d provide an awesome impetus to negotiate with hearts open. There goes your last title run, Dr. Buss, starring for the Guangdong Tigers.
The other storyline that emerges is that, no, Kobe does not seem like the kind of guy who is just going to accept some cash to play for a second-rate team in a second-rate league. This is the guy who demanded to be traded to the L.A. Lakers as an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. The latest reports from Spears and Woj at Yahoo! sound more like it, with the reporters citing sources who say Kobe could play in China … for $1.5 million a month. The highest-paid player in China last season made $1.5 million for the whole season.
In retrospect, it looks more clear: Kobe Bryant isn’t going to go into this half-cocked. There’s going to be a plan, a clear path to foreign prominence (beyond “rely on your name”) and, for nothing else than respect, a whole lot of money. Kobe doesn’t need $1.5 million a month. But he needs to remind everyone that he’s worth that much more than everyone else. If he gives some teams false hope to keep his name on top of Hoopshype in the process? Eh, collateral damage. (Ask the Clippers, circa 2004.)
As for the fate of Besiktas? Well hey, you still have Deron Williams.
NOTHING TO LOSE
That the national debate has centered around a fiercely negotiated subject with a hard deadline is interesting in comparison with the NBA lockout. A debt ceiling deal was reached by Senate leadership and President Obama on Sunday, just about 24-48 hours before economic armageddon came to our shores via credit default. There was no wiggle room on the deadline, and only one of the parties had major elements within who were unafraid of skipping right through that deadline.
Sound familiar?
It’s been widely reported that a number of NBA franchise owners would save money if the 2011-12 season were lost, because they’ll still get some revenues (local TV, in particular, but also naming rights and a fat share of the league’s TV revenue) but won’t have to pay out player salaries or fund arena operations or travel for games.
Do you think these owners are concerned with the September deadline for saving the complete 82-game season? You think they’d be OK with playing hardball, making the players sweat and going back to January, as the league did in 1998-99?
If you assume players have more to lose in the way of game checks than owners do in full revenue sourcing, you have to be concerned owners will treat the September deadline to save the season exactly how the Tea Party treated Tuesday’s debt ceiling deadline: as a bargaining tool to extract more concessions.
The difference is that unlike liberals and moderate conservatives (I use that term loosely), players aren’t going to forfeit all of their bargaining chips to get the season started on time. They didn’t in 1998, and the players are more prepared to survive a long lockout this time, thanks to strong awareness efforts by Billy Hunter and the specter of overseas jaunts by at least a few players.
That’s not good for fans. Vast swaths of the elected government, including employee No. 1 (Obama) realized and understood how awful default would be. I don’t see vast swaths of the NBA hierarchy having the same realization … until it’s too late. Just like 1998.
DEADLINE DISEASE
Last nod to the debt ceiling debate: the Washington Post ran an op-ed by political scientist Daniel Carpenter last week. (Via Ezra Klein.) The piece regards deadline culture in high-stakes negotiating, and how deadlines themselves give us worse results. A snip:
When deadlines are imposed, decisions and bargains that could happen more quickly – because of momentum or normal work flow – often end up getting put off until the last minute. Social scientists have referred to this as the “eleventh-hour effect,” and we see it both in experiments and in real life. This April, for instance, Congress and the White House agreed at the last minute on the fiscal year 2011 budget and narrowly averted a government shutdown.
Because of the eleventh-hour effect, a deadline can actually slow things down. In the debt-ceiling battle, partisans on both sides expect their representatives not to back down until the very end. An early solution or compromise from either side is interpreted as giving in. The Senate’s “Gang of Six” provides an example of this phenomenon. The bipartisan group is working on a plan that could lead to raising the debt limit; it’s been in progress for months and appeared to have been abandoned two weeks ago. Yet in the face of the Aug. 2 deadline, the group may come to agree on essentially the same type of spending-reduction plan it first took up as early as January.
I bet you can see the implications for the NBA: once David Stern indicates a hard deadline in September to save the season as a whole, the entire focus on negotiations will be getting to that deadline either with a deal in place or not. I can assure you that neither side will want to sell the house to get to that deadline.
Meanwhile, the two months leading up to that will feature little in the way of concessions and compromise, because you don’t want to fold early. It’s sad that we can see it play out in advance, isn’t it?
(Of course, a major difference is that while progressives and the Tea Party have something like a blood feud in Congress, the major players in the NBA lockout actually like each other. A little.)
PROFILES IN $WAG: DAN GILBERT
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about high player salaries, which reflect badly on both decision-makers and players. The union can’t deny that the Eddy Currys of the world make the players’ position more difficult, and team rulers can’t deny that they cause many of the problems they now face.
But a side effect of that focus is that we ignore how well many of the NBA franchise owners are doing.
Let this mini-series correct that. Our first Profile In $wag looks at Dan Gilbert’s casino … right outside of Quicken Loans Arena.
In 2009, Gilbert backed a statewide ballot measure in Ohio to allow casinos in the state’s four largest cities. Once it passed, a partnership between Gilbert and Caesar’s won the right to develop the casinos in Cleveland and Cincinnati. Guess where the Cleveland casino is going? Yep, just east of Quicken Loans Arena, where Gilbert’s Cavaliers play.
Of course, both buildings are in Cleveland’s downtown area, lining the Cuyahoga. It’d be silly from a business perspective to build the casino out halfway to Akron. But consider the power Gilbert derives from owning and running the Q and the Cavs, consider how much he will profit from the casino based on its proximity to the arena — I can imagine how game nights are going to look once the team recovers — and consider that not a dime of it will be considered basketball-related income when it comes to share revenue with NBA players.
NBA players aren’t asking for a cut of Gilbert’s casino business. But they aren’t dumb, they know NBA owners make lots of money off of owning a team outside of the NBA itself, and that’s why they don’t exactly feel like giving up their hard-won revenue split. The Cavaliers are certainly one of the 22 or 23 teams that lost money in 2010-11. But Dan Gilbert isn’t exactly hurting because of it, is he?
