Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506060039
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: E6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE GILMARTIN THE PHOENIX GAZETTE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In sports, it's always dawnest just before the dark - which is why the good folks at NBA headquarters have every reason to be worried these days.
Things never have been so dawn-gone good in pro basketball. And that's bad.
Ratings and revenues are soaring, licensing income around the globe already is off the charts and is projected to go so high it may cause a shortage of commas and zeroes, and the playoffs are drawing rave reviews.
So with bad news like this, who needs good news, right?
Wrong!
It is basketball's proud boast that it is the only major team sport that never has had a work stoppage, but then basketball never has had this much prosperity before.
So?
Every work stoppage in football, baseball and hockey had one thing in common: prosperity.
Or, to put it another way, every stoppage occurred at a time when things were going so well for labor and management that it was assumed a work stoppage would be unthinkable.
But one of the first principles of sports labor law is that the less thinkable a stoppage seems, the more likely it is to occur.
You could, as they say, look it up.
What immediately preceded the hockey strike that wiped out a large chunk of this NHL season?
Right, prosperity. Unparalleled prosperity, which is the very worst kind.
The NHL was coming off a spectacular Stanley Cup triumph by the Rangers, which had raised interest in the sport to a fever pitch in New York (always the most fertile place for a sport to be raised to a fever pitch). Expansion franchises were opening up the Sun Belt and everybody agreed the sport was on the brink of a major breakthrough.
This, they said, would be the worst possible time for a stoppage, especially in a sport that barely was beginning to dip its big toe in the mainstream.
So, naturally, there was a work stoppage.
As for the NFL, it has known nothing but prosperity since it was transformed into a quasi-religion by television, so all of its stoppages have been triggered by prosperity.
The bigger the pie got, the bigger the piece everybody wanted.
Some might argue that with the owners pleading poverty, the last baseball stoppage was an exception to the rule.
But when the strike started, the average income per player exceeded the gross national products of 27 countries, and the poverty-stricken owners had seen the value of an expansion franchise go from $7 million to $150 million in less than 20 years.
It isn't hard times that cause stoppages, it's good times.
And when you consider that for hoops these are the very best of times, it is no wonder that for the first time in his brilliant reign, commissioner David Stern has permitted pessimism to creep into his public pronouncements on the chances of avoiding the NBA's first stoppage.
The man who hitherto has put the happiest face on even the toughest problems now says things like, ``The players don't want the owners to make any money at all.''
These may not seem like gloom-and-doom words to a nation that has overdosed on the saber-rattling rhetoric of Don Fehr and Bud Selig, but to longtime Stern-watchers they are very unsettling.
The NBA's collective bargaining agreement expired a year ago, and this year's season and playoffs were made possible by a no-strike, no-lockout agreement.
It was hoped a new agreement would be in place by the end of the playoffs, but the two sides remain oceans apart on two key issues: the so-called ``Bird rule,'' which permits teams to pay unlimited amounts to re-sign their own free agents, and how to divide the ever-growing licensing fees pie.
The owners want the Bird rule replaced by a ``hard cap,'' while the players want the present ``soft cap'' to stay put. And they feel they made a bad deal on licensing fees the first time around and are determined to make up for that mistake this time.
The problem with prosperity is that while it is an effective cure for poverty, it also is the leading cause of greed.
by CNB