The NBA arms race is leading us down a path to Cold War.
The leveraging of power between players and owners will inevitably lead to a standoff, and we all know what that means. In all likelihood, there will be a lockout before next season arrives.
Look no further than Carmelo Anthony for confirmation. In refusing to sign a $65 million extension with Denver, Anthony steered which franchise he’d play for.
At its root, the overhyped Anthony trade underlies a simple communal feeling among owners: Players have too much power over their billion-dollar, white-collar counterparts.
When collective bargaining proceedings commence, owners will do all they can to halt the proletariat revolution and restore order to the system. Except this new phenomenon of player autonomy is just reinforcing the dominant capitalist system. The NBA’s soft salary cap, which enables big-market teams to pay a luxury tax, a penalty, to exceed arresting financial cap constraints, is forcing small-market teams to rethink the current bargaining agreement and take a hard look at what they’re losing out on.
What exactly are they losing out on? The ability to keep financially excitable superstars tethered to their organizations. It’s a simple prospect: Financially strapped organizations are forced to pour most of their resources into a franchise player.
But what happens when the team can’t fill out the roster because of a tight budget? And then it struggles through a grinding season in which the franchise player must overexert themselves to keep the organization treading above water? You guessed it. The franchise player uses the threat of free agency to force the team to upgrade talent or send the superstar to a more attractive destination.
We saw Kobe Bryant do this in 2007 — with, of all organizations, the Los Angeles Lakers. Together with the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees, the Lakers have never been an organization to skimp on acquiring talent, no matter the expense.
Yet here was Bryant complaining to an amateur cameraman about the Lakers’ backdoor managerial maneuverings, how they refused to trade a young center in Andrew Bynum for veteran point guard Jason Kidd. Later, Bryant went on record demanding a trade, but later relented on the request. It’s of little coincidence that the Lakers traded for Pau Gasol less than a year later.
And if you go back to 2007, that’s when the congregation of the NBA’s constellations formed. Finally, players started recognizing the free-trade market. Spawned when Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen departed their respective teams to team up with Paul Pierce in Boston, joining forces became an accepted ethos, and it has evolved into an unsettling trend that endures into the present.
Parity strewn aside, the Celtics, thanks to the star-studded assembly, went on to win the 2008 NBA title — setting the foundation for a swift paradigm shift in professional basketball.
Anticipating a future clash with the Celtics, the Lakers had enough foresight to acquire Gasol in February 2008, making them relevant again.
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Then there was the 52-card reshuffling during the summer of 2010, when the Jazz lost out on Carlos Boozer’s services to Chicago;
Amare Stoudemire left the desert for the Garden in New York; and Chris Bosh ditched Toronto just in time to watch league MVP LeBron James saltily turn his back on Cleveland to “take his talents to South Beach.” And it hasn’t stopped.
More recently, with the trade deadline approaching this year, teams spent the last few days speedily casting away superstars: The Jazz packed up All-Star point guard Deron Williams for Derrick Favors and Devin Harris; Anthony, the tortured Denver soul, got his Broadway wish at the expense of his reticent-to-leave compadre Chauncey Billups, and the two will team up with Stoudemire in New York.
Bizarrely, in a system where the argument has been made that players represent nothing more than $60-million slaves, how is it they suddenly have so much gravity over franchises?
Opt-out contract clauses have become the great social equalizer.
Hostage-holding organizations have seen the tables flip. Now these organizations are painted into a corner where fear is omnipresent: They can either ship their superstars off and get something in exchange, or risk not resigning them when free agency rolls around, then losing them to a bigger-market team and recouping nothing for all the courting.
Madison Avenue and Wall Street, symbols of what these corporate-modeled organizations can offer, have monopolized the player talent market. It is of little debate that in a society that champions true market value for corporate bigwigs and CEOs, players, too, should be entitled to this American value.
But in the end, in this moneyball quest, mom-and-pop organizations are caught in a large-scale game of tug-of-war. And unless the arms race stops, the war is just starting.
