Semi-humerous look at lock-out.

["Nathan A." <nj13@navix.net>]

Who do you root for in lockout?

 By Mike Littwin 
 Scripps Howard News Service 

  Like many of you, I am a huge fan of sports labor strife. There are few
thrills to match the sight of a room stinking with lawyers in full Armani
gear, sipping their decaf lattes while discussing the relative merits of the
soft cap (no relation, by the way, to the fashionable, bill-in-the-back,
soft baseball cap).
  I want to see it in slo-mo. I want to see it in reverse angle. I want to
see Bill Walton describe the NBA lockout action: "What a bunch of miserable
punk-losers. Show me some guys with desire. Some guys who can board. Some
guys with tattoos. I want to see somebody get on the floor who's not
unplugging his computer."
  It's a tattoo-free zone, and the only important bull in the room is the
one who works for Merrill Lynch.
  The lockout begins -- we should synchronize our
          watches -- at midnight ET Tuesday. NBA
          Commissioner David Stern put the news out Monday,
          apparently so as not to get in the way of anyone's
          weekend plans.

          This strategy is a huge gamble for Stern, whose
          league has never lost a game to labor unrest and
          whose owners have never lost a weekend in the
          Hamptons.

          Yes, the stakes are high, particularly for the fan who
          sees it as his God-given right to watch Dennis Rodman's hair
change color.
  Because this is a sporting event, you want to know which way to root.
Well, as it turns out, this business of choosing sides is complicated.
  You could root for the owners. But only if you could muster up some
sympathy for Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf. The owners -- and I want to put
the best spin on this I can -- are typically blood-sucking, jock-sniffing
egomaniacs who, when you tell them there's no "i" in owner, want to see if
they can get the spelling changed.
  These renowned capitalists want the players to sign a contract saying the
owners can't pay them as much as the owners desperately want to pay them.
Show me the next owner who favors a cap on his stock options.
  Of course, you could root for the union, but only if you could muster up
some sympathy for Latrell Sprewell. Patrick Ewing, who makes something like
$18 million a year, heads the union, which is actually run by the big-name
agents, particularly David Falk.
  Ewing, who can talk for hours on the career of center/activist Big Bill
Haywood, is joined by guard/activist (and Falk client) Michael Jordan. Until
a few years ago, Jordan was openly contemptuous of the union. Now, he's all
for the worker, unless, of course, he works for Nike or McDonald's.
  Actually, there are some players you could root for. About 20 percent of
the players make the minimum -- a not-exactly-starvation-wages $272,500.
Still, they're not getting much of an ever-growing pie, which now has a
yummy $22 million-a-team TV contract on top. And older players -- a Byron
Scott, a Jerome Kersey -- are forced out because all the money is going to
Shaq and Mike.
  The owners would like to recruit these players to their side, but it
wouldn't matter. It's a star-driven league. What I mean is, nobody's
chartering a plane for Priest Lauderdale.
  The issues won't surprise you. There was a contract, signed three years
ago, that the owners pushed because it limited rookie salaries. Those were
the only salaries it limited, however, and the owners put in a re-opener
clause if the players' share of revenues grew too large. The owners say that
share has reached 57 percent, which fits the too-large profile.
  The owners' problem is the soft cap on salaries. The cap is less than $30
million and yet Jordan makes $33 million. This can happen under the Larry
Bird exception, which I don't have space to explain except it says you can
pay your own players whatever you want to keep them.
  The owners now want a hard cap, although they might be willing to settle
for a cap on any one salary or some combination of that. The union -- in
other words, the richest of the rich players -- doesn't want any cap,
although it's willing to settle for some version of the soft one.
  There's also the issue of rookies becoming unrestricted free agents after
three years. These are big issues, because they're about money, big money.
  Who will blink? It's easy for Jordan to sit out because he might be
retiring anyway. But how many paychecks do the other multimillionaires want
to miss? And although the owners don't want to lose any games, how important
exactly are NBA games in  November?
  I give the owners the slight edge. This is not the baseball union, with
its long winning  streak forged in the fires of a long losing streak.
  The NBA union is untested, and the players split a pot of about $1
billion, which works out to $2.5 million a player. I wonder if that's where
you take a stand. Of course, as the lockout wears on, you could pay someone
to stand there for you.

          (Mike Littwin writes for Rocky Mountain News in Denver.)