NBA Lockout Rumors: Fairer CBA Needed, Even If It Means Losing 2011-12 Season

The NFL and NBA face very difficult CBA negotiations this year, and the NFL talks are already underway. 

What many people do not realize is the situation surrounding the NBA labor talks is far worse than that of the NFL. 

The only reason people are focusing all of their attention to football is their current CBA is set to expire this week, while the NBA regular season is still ongoing. 

Once the NBA Finals are over and the basketball summer commences, the landscape of the NBA will be forever changed, for good or bad. 

The majority of NBA owners have almost everything at stake. This majority represents the owners of small market teams who are repeatedly losing star players to big market franchises. 

This year’s trade deadline showed us how five or six big market teams are forming squads who will be the only true contenders for the foreseeable future. 

When small market teams draft players who develop into superstars, they find retaining them very difficult when that player is close to or already at free agency. 

The league is going through a potentially permanent path where there will always be five or six teams who are real championship contenders and the rest are left to watch the Finals on their couch. 

NBA commissioner David Stern will soon face his most difficult summer since he began his commissioner role in 1984. 

At no other time in its history has the NBA faced a summer of such great future importance than this year. 

The owners will likely lock out the players after the Finals, and they will explore several options to help smaller market teams compete. 

Number one on the list is player salaries. Players make too much money. Everyone says that about every sport but in a league with a salary cap, salaries are a big deal. 

Teams that have two or more players making over ten million dollars per season often find it very challenging to construct a roster that can have consistent success. 

The task of making a quality roster is further complicated when nearly every NBA contract is guaranteed, meaning someone has to pay them. This makes trading players making a salary more than what their skills would warrant quite hard to do. 

Another challenging situation is when a team has drafted very well, they have multiple stars that will demand large contract extensions. 

Atlanta, for example, has several young players who have signed or will want to sign large contracts. This prohibits teams from having the flexibility to create a winning roster because they must invest tens of millions of dollars to keep the stars they originally drafted. 

The aforementioned salary cap is another issue which owners will address this summer. The MLB does not have a salary cap, and the NFL and NHL have what is called a “hard” cap.

A hard cap means big markets cannot outspend smaller markets. The NBA's current salary cap allows several exceptions to allow teams to spend more than the cap on player salaries. 

The idea of a soft cap is good in some ways because it helps teams sign players they drafted so that a player can remain in one city his entire career, developing a positive relationship with the fan base and establishing a consistent image of the team. 

But too often large markets bully small market teams into trading their superstars because of the notion that superstars prefer large markets for a variety of reasons. 

This is true to an extent. If two teams are equal in terms of chances of winning a title, a free agent will likely choose the team that plays in a location where the weather and/or nightlife is better than the other. 

That’s human nature and understandable. 

Bulls center Joakim Noah said last year that, and I’m paraphrasing here, “no one vacations in Cleveland.” This was said in regard to Lebron James’ much maligned departure from Cleveland last summer. 

Noah’s right, and the owners will attempt to create ways to help these small market teams, many of which do not play in desirable locations, to be able to build a competitive team. 

The construction of a hard cap would be the fairest way to create parity in the NBA. This way no team can go over the cap, making sure each team, no matter the type of market they play in or amount of revenue they generate, follows the same rules. 

The NBA could be a league of five or six super teams in the very near future, creating little interest for the sport in over two thirds of the league’s cities. 

This is terrible for the sport and the league, and if the entire 2011-12 season needs to be erased to fix the current problems, so be it.