Comfort in uncomfortable times: On the new NBA labor agreement

The league and players' union ignored all the flashing signs of trouble around the NBA to keep the river of money flowing. Hard to blame them, but don't disguise what this is.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Head of a Man Going Senile, Paul Klee, 1922

With record profits, soaring franchise valuations and expectations of another big jump in player salaries within a couple of seasons, it’s no surprise that the NBA, its team owners and representatives from the players’ union found a way to agree on a new labor agreement and avoid a work stoppage heading into next season. When the status quo is good for just about everyone involved, staying the course is pretty attractive.

This will not be one of those hugely consequential new labor agreements for the modern NBA. It’s not the 1999 deal. It’s certainly not the 2011 deal. In those agreements, management lockouts that steamrolled into the traditional NBA calendar resulted in heavily pro-management deals. In 1999, the NBA placed massive individual caps in place, completely rewriting the nature of team-building by artificially limiting what the league’s best players could make. That set up boom times for the NBA’s middle class and eventually the super-team era. In 2011, the league wrested away a huge chunk of guaranteed revenue from the players, instituted tougher luxury taxes for high-spending teams and set up the era of massively increased franchise valuations just as the cable television market was undergoing rapid disruption.

The labor deals in between tweaked the formula without massive upheaval or — importantly — lost regular season games. There were important clauses with significant impacts on the league that arrived in other labor deals along the way, such as the rookie scale in 1995 and the age minimum in 2005. Whenever the league’s power brokers felt the NBA was at a crossroads, or death’s door, we ended up with a management lockout and enormous changes to who got paid and how much.

Based on what we currently know this deal, reached on Friday, is not going to be remembered as one of those landmark labor agreements. It’s possible there are new rules in here that have long-lasting impacts on team-building or the shape of the league. But the sense I get from reading reports on what’s in the deal is that NBA franchise owners, the lawyers and marketers who run the league, players and the lawyers and marketers who run the players’ union, the people at media companies who currently carry or want to in the future carry the league’s games and are in the ears of the league’s power brokers — everyone involved — is comfortable with the state of the league.

My fear is that they shouldn’t be.

Despite record profits, soaring franchise valuations and expectations of another big jump in player salaries within a couple of seasons, it’s easy to stay positive. But with relatively poor attendance, relatively poor television ratings, a crumbling situation for regional sports networks that carry the bulk of regular season games, deep barriers to continued international monetization in a complicated political environment and lasting backlash around player rest protocols (which is likely impacting the attendance and ratings issues), the NBA’s power structure could have worked toward meaningful changes to correct the course of the league.

They clearly didn’t.