The NBA Lockout

"It's, uh, a very complicated negotiating process..." - NBAPA President Derek Fisher, demonstrating one small part of why no one cares that the NBA season is all but cancelled.

News today is that the top NBA players, most on the 2008 Olympic Dream team, will be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to over a million dollars each to participate in a two-week, international exhibition game tour. There are really four takeaways from this:

1. Top NBA players are probably the most comfy with this lockout, more so even than David Stern and the owners, since they still have a lot of ways to make bank; no one is paying for tours of the role-players and bench guys. There are 450 members of the NBAPA, and I count 14-17 of them on the list of the Chosen Few.
2. There may be more demand abroad than at home for the NBA right now. At home, we at least have the start of the NCAA men's and women's basketball seasons to sate our taste for hoops.
3. The top players are hurting the NBAPA's negotiating position by making fans think that all NBA players are greedy bastards and not suffering at all from the lockout. They might not be--more below on that--but that's not the point. The point is that NBAPA President Derek Fisher has no control over messaging, and public sympathy is wearing thin.
4. I really, really have a hard time caring and following the lockout news.

With the NFL lockout but a distant, almost-forgotten bad dream, and the new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the NFL and NFL Players Association guaranteeing football through 2021, and with that whole "end of the U.S. economy" thing out of the way (until Thanksgiving, at least), basic cable and bloggers can turn their focus to the next example of intractable assholery, the NBA Lockout. But it's taken me nearly two months to write this post, because I just. can't. care. (It's not just me; Beau has been trying to write a post for over a month now, as well.)


Yes, there is STILL an NBA Lockout, 111 days old and looking uglier than ever. There's no hope in sight, with David Stern having already cancelled the first two weeks of the season, and the NBA deciding that the best way to deal with the Players Association's lawsuit alleging unfair labor practices is... their own lawsuit alleging unfair labor practices!


Unlike NFL Players, NBA Players really are (mostly) rich. You might remember that I kept beating the dead horse to get the word out that NFL players actually make an equivalent lifetime average salary of $89,000/year, but in practice probably less than that, not to mention their much-higher-than-average medical costs. Not so for for NBA players.

• Average NBA player salary: $5.8 million
• Median NBA player salary: $3.1 million
• Average NBA career length: 4.8 years
• Equiv. 30-year career avg. salary: $496,000/year

It is pretty well-known that NBA players, as a group, are the best paid in professional sports, in the world. Even considering how short the average career is, they are still earning the equivalent of the top 2% of American income earners. This is for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there are many fewer players per team.

So, on average, it's not quite fair to call them The 1%, but they're pretty damn close. Given everything that's going on in the country and the world, that makes it pretty hard to care about a lost 2011-2012 season.

I'd rather spend my time thinking about how the Niners are 5-1. Seriously, 5-1, on track to a possible first-round bye?!? I can hardly sleep.