If NBA owners have their way in their collective-bargaining fight with the players, the league landscape will change so that, in the future, so-called “superteams”—like the one LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh formed in Miami—probably won’t be possible. Tougher salary restrictions, coupled with limiting contracts to force NBA players to stay with their original teams, would make the continuation of this trend difficult.

“The competitive issues for us as owners are as big as the economic issues, particularly in the small markets,” Spurs owner Peter Holt, who chairs the league’s labor relations committee, said. “We have been going back and forth for two years and we’re still far apart. This is extremely important for all owners, and for players and in particularly our fans. We want to get to a point where all 30 teams have an opportunity to compete and make a few bucks.”

The goal, commissioner David Stern has suggested, is to have star players populate rosters all over the league, with teams filling out the rest of the lineup with a secondary star and role players. That sort of set-up, the league feels, will keep teams from stockpiling too many good players, and ensure competitive balance.

Scientifically speaking, they’re right. And while Stern’s aim has been to curb total spending, a study conducted by professors at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and Stanford business school shows that, in the NBA, one of the deciding factors in team success is not just total money spent, but “pay dispersion.” That is to say, the teams that win are the ones that have a top tier of pay going to a small number of players, who are surrounded by lower-paid role players. Players then establish an instinctual hierarchical structure based on how much they’re paid.

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For NBA followers, the utter lack of optimism surrounding the labor negotiations is bad enough. What emerged from, and about, the league’s owners after the latest talks crashed and burned last week is even worse.

Never mind the fate of this season. Whether the next game is played this year or next, the fans really have to wonder what kind of NBA everybody will come back to. With the tone of numerous reports following the end of the talks, there’s reason to believe that a segment of owners are involved in this only to better the sale price for when they unload their franchises after a new labor deal is signed.

NBA commissioner David Stern was absent from the most recent NBA labor meeting.
Meaning that this is not, in fact, about the long-term health of the NBA, as the league has put out to the public for years. This is about the short-term payoff for the very people holding the sport hostage.

And there doesn’t appear to be anything anybody can do about it. Not even David Stern. Actually, if what was reported a few days ago by Yahoo! Sports is true, his reason for missing the last day of negotiations last week—a bout of the flu—was a smokescreen to allow Portland owner Paul Allen to impose his presence on the talks.

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In the wake of the inability of the NBA and players’ union to come to an agreement to end the three-month-old lockout Tuesday, both sides have positioned themselves as prepared to hunker down and wait out a long labor stalemate.

But a key point to remember is this: The league has not yet canceled regular-season games, and commissioner David Stern was careful to say that he would not take that step until Monday.

That could open the door, sources told Sporting News on Wednesday, to a solution that comes down this weekend on the most contentious issue of the negotiations—the split of basketball-related income (BRI). On Tuesday, the NBA formally made an offer of 47 percent of BRI to the players, while the union said it would not go below 53 percent. The source said that, over the weekend, the two sides could land on a split of 51 percent to players-49 percent to owners, down from the 57 percent that players received under the last collective-bargaining agreement.

In Tuesday’s negotiating session, the league floated an idea for a compromise with a 50-50 split of BRI. It was

not a formal offer, but either way, the union turned it down before the idea could advance.

The union was willing to go down to 52 percent, meaning, essentially, the two sides were just two percentage points apart on BRI.

Logically, that is far too thin a margin over which to risk losing games. Comparing this lockout to the one that cost the league 32 games in 1998-99, union executive director Billy Hunter said, “The cost is much more significant now as opposed to 1998 simply because the revenues the league generates. We know that if we’re locked out for a year, each side stands to lose about $2.2 billion. In the case of the players, every month that we’re locked out, it amounts to $350 million. So I think the owners feel the same kind of impact, coupled with the overall damage to the system itself—to what extent are people willing to come back if the game is lost?”

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NBA Commissioner David Stern emerged from last week’s first collective-bargaining session in a month with a message: We’re going to keep talking.

For many observers who have seen the gap remain wide between labor and management, that’s about as positive a tone as could have been hoped for.

Since the lockout was declared on July 1, there have been a total of two negotiating sessions. There hasn’t been as much public verbal jousting as there was in the NBA talks, nor the social media debates that took place on the football side. But there also hasn’t been a dedicated negotiating schedule and the sides remain far apart.

The sides are expected to meet this week.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that as the clock continues to tick, the possibility of an uninterrupted season grows increasingly remote. Stern said after last week’s bargaining session that there is enough time to negotiate a new deal to keep the regular season intact, but that it would take warp-speed labor negotiations to avoid lost games.

Consider the recent NFL labor deal as a point of comparison. Talks began to seriously take shape after the league and the union held secret meetings in Chicago in early June, but even after those productive covert sessions, it still took the NBA two months of regular meetings to come to a deal just before training camps opened. That time frame certainly doesn’t bode well for the NBA, even after last week’s negotiations, though more talks are planned.

“When both parties are ready to make a deal, it can happen in 48 to 72 hours after they call the lawyers in, but, unfortunately, neither side is ready to make major concessions, and I’d be very surprised if the league doesn’t miss games,” said former NBA Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik, who is now vice chairman for Galatioto Sports Partners. “During the 1998 (NBA lockout) there was the sense that somehow it would work out and that the league would never go that far. Nobody will be surprised this time around.”

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With Deron Williams’ lockout contingency plan in place — the Nets’ All-Star point guard intends to play in Turkey if games are missed — at least one elite NBA player has decided to head overseas.

Also willing to listen to foreign offers: Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant, according to Yahoo! Sports.

Bryant, who spent much of his childhood in Italy, where his father played professionally, is open to playing in both Europe and Asia, Yahoo! reports.

Ergin Ataman is the coach of Besiktas, the team Williams is signing with, and he has told multiple media outlets, including Yahoo! and the New York Times, that his team wants to make a run at Bryant.

“If there’s a possibility, we’ll talk with Kobe (Bryant) if he’d like to play in Europe with Deron and with other guys to play we can talk with him,” Ataman told the Times. “If Kobe would like to play with us, we will also contact his agent and maybe with him.”

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