I’ll admit, it’s hard for me to be optimistic about the NBA lockout prognosis right now. As I explained on twitter, every time I get hopeful I feel like Charlie Brown running up to kick the football, and David Stern is playing the role of Lucy.
But there are some reasons to be optimistic that despite a number of preseason games being cancelled the regular season could start on time Nov. 1.
Former NBA head man Charles Grantham told PBT in an exclusive interview that first the two sides need to define what the pie is — that pie being “basketball related income” — and then figure out how to divide it. After that, everything else can be worked out.
The two sides seem to be moving closer together on ho to divide that pie. It’s happening — slowly, but it’s happening — according to Ken Berger at CBSSports.com.According to one of the people familiar with the bargaining, here is some of what transpired Thursday: After signaling last week that the players’ offer to move lower than the 54.3 percent share of BRI was a starting point that could lead to a deal on economics, league negotiators came back with their own number. Unsurprisingly, the number was lower than what the players had last proposed, though multiple people involved in the talks refused to specify by how much….
The owners’ number, one of the people familiar with the details said, represented a willingness to move off their most recent formal proposal to cap player salaries at $2 billion a year for the bulk of a 10-year proposal. So, do the math: Assuming 4 percent revenue growth next season to $3.95 billion, the owners’ $2 billion proposal represented roughly 50.5 percent of BRI for the players. If the players were willing to go down to, say, 53 percent with assurances that a soft cap would remain in place, that would be $2.094 billion -- leaving the two sides only $94 million apart in the first year of the deal.
If the two sides really have moved to a “problem solving” phase of the negotiations that is a gap that can be bridged. The form of the salary cap does tie into this — the harder the cap the higher the players will want their percentage of the cut to be. But if they can figure out the split, the form of the cap (as well as all the other issues like drug testing and any tweaks to the age limit) will fall in place. It’s all about the money.
I want to be optimistic about all this, but I still feel like Charlie Brown.