If you follow politics at all,
negotiations to end the NBA lockout are proceeding in an eerily familiar fashion. With owners demanding that players accept a cut from getting 57 percent of league revenue to getting 47 percent, the players agreed to drop to 52.5 percent. The owners demanded a 50-50 split and loaded it up with tons of other player concessions. The players make concessions and try to negotiate; the owners issue ultimatums. The stakes aren't nearly as high as when congressional Democrats and Republicans start out miles apart on an issue, Democrats try to compromise, and Republicans demand capitulation. But the pattern is the same.
Nearly 24 hours of negotiations this week led to another ultimatum from owners. If players don't accept this set of concessions, they'll either end up accepting worse, or losing an entire season:
The offer is based on a 50-50 split of league revenues, which the union is resigned to accepting. But it also contains an array of new restrictions on player movement and team payrolls, all of which the union opposes, and which still threaten the approval of any deal.
Those so-called system issues were the primary focus of the last two days of talks. The league moved slightly on one issue – the use of the midlevel exception by luxury tax-paying teams – and made other adjustments to its offer. Union officials were clearly disenchanted with the final version, however, and are reluctantly taking it to their members.
“It’s not the greatest proposal in the world,” said Billy Hunter, the union’s executive director. “But I have an obligation to at least present it to our membership. So that’s what we’re going to do.”
Hunter will take the proposal to player representatives from all the teams, who will decide whether to accept, reject or ask for further changes to this deal. With other, less central issues worked out, the union could then move to a membership vote.
But there's another possibility. Some players continue to push for the union decertification vote that would allow them to file an antitrust suit against the owners:
A firm decertification timetable won't be established before Friday at the earliest, but sources said that Monday is the target date to file the petition, factoring in that Friday is the Veterans Day holiday.
Hunter himself acknowledged in a Tuesday night interview with NBA TV that the fast-moving decertification push -- fronted most notably by Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce -- has "close to" 200 players in the process of signing a petition that would trigger a decertification vote. [...]
The two-step decertification process requires 30 percent of the league's workforce -- an estimated 130 players -- to sign the petition calling for a vote. That petition is then forwarded to the NLRB, which would take up to 45 days to ratify the petition and arrange the vote, during which the union and league could continue to negotiate.
The hope is that this would put pressure on the owners to actually negotiate, not just demand concessions. While the NFL Players Association decertified during their recent lockout, that was a tactic planned ahead of time and discussed between union leadership and members and done by the union. In the case of the NBA, the decertification drive appears to be coming not from union leadership but from players in part seeking to keep the pressure on the union to continue refusing bad offers from the owners.
The union is expected to present the current shitty proposal to player representatives on Monday or Tuesday.