Basketball Legend: When Pride Still Matters

Chapter 870 870 538

?Chapter 870: 538 Chapter 870: 538 Looking back on the history of lockouts in the big four North American leagues, whenever labor disputes led to the cancellation of an entire season, both involving parties recovered their senses quickly due to the heavy losses and began to understand each other.

Because, the loss of one season is already massive enough.

No league can afford the risk of locking out for two seasons.

Therefore, in order to get the league back up and running as soon as possible, both sides are willing to make compromises within their capabilities to reach a new consensus as quickly as they can.

Now, the owners have realized that the players will never accept a 47% revenue sharing quota, so continuing to insist on it will only widen the gap between both parties.

Derrick Fisher has already stepped down, he was the biggest dove in the players’ camp, and his resignation successfully made the employers realize the bottom line of the labor side.

After clarifying each other’s taboos, negotiations began to go smoothly.

In mid-April, both parties resolved their biggest disagreement—they agreed to a 50-50 quota for sharing basketball income under the new CBA agreement.

This gave the outside world hope that the lockout would end.

The long-standing problems that troubled both parties no longer existed, so the subsequent negotiations were on the fast track.

However, the situation was not as ideal as the experts saw it.

There was still one issue to be solved.

That is, how to establish a set of effective rules to oppose the monopoly of big cities on championships.

At this point, the legend Yu Fei created in Seattle became an excuse for the League to actively promote anti-monopoly measures.

Yu Fei’s camp had a lot to say about this.

Claiming Seattle is a big city, and that Frye benefited from the big city’s bonus, could still be understood.

But is Milwaukee also a big city?

How do you explain Frye’s record of four championships in five years in Milwaukee?

However, the participants in the negotiations were well versed in the principle of “exaggerate the facts that favor me and ignore the ones that don’t”, and they insisted on putting together a set of rules to restrict big city teams.

Cavaliers’ owner Dan Gilbert believed that one major advantage of big-market teams over small-market ones is that they are carefree about spending money.

Gilbert presented a set of data that appeared very convincing.

Last season, both the Supersonics and the Lakers’ total payroll reached 1.5 times the salary cap. Under the current luxury tax rules, they needed to pay fines at a 1:1 ratio. By this calculation, both teams’ expenditures on wages and luxury taxes exceeded one hundred million US dollars last season.

If such a situation occurred in a small-market team, unless the owner had deep pockets, they would definitely lose a fortune by the end of the season. Yet, after paying salaries of over a hundred million dollars, both the SuperSonics and the Lakers still managed to make a profit.

So, what was the spark that caused the lockout?

Wasn’t it because the Supersonics were reported to have up to 1.4 billion US dollars in profit? The Player’s Union panicked: you make so much money, we are already very charitable for not making you share it with the players, and yet, you still want to speak up for the small-market teams and ask to reduce the players’ revenue share? The small-market team owners were even more dissatisfied; they saw an incompetent owner like Bennett, who coincidentally embraced the thighs of the Greatest of All Time, not only making a fortune but also winning championships, and naturally, they were green with envy. However, the big-market teams were not going to share their profits with small-market teams, so they had to choose to make the players bear this part of the money.

This is the root cause of the lockout.

It was the same with the Lakers, but the Lakers have long relied on Hollywood, taking advantage of Los Angeles’s unique geographical position to make a killing, and besides, the Showtime Lakers’ contribution to the commercialization of the league is meritorious, so everyone is used to their “superiority”.

And the Supersonics? Just a few years ago, they were making a fuss about relocating because they were short of funds, making the whole league endorse them, and Stern even devised a whole set of plans for this. Yet, Yu Fei’s return changed everything.

A dying team came back to life.

A franchise that was a long-term loss-maker turned into a hot commodity.

The Supersonics went from being the shame of big-city teams to becoming the role model of big cities in just a few short years, and all of this change was simply because this generation’s Michael Jordan was “fed up” with the hardships of Milwaukee and decided to return home to become the revered Savior.

The small-market owners have every reason to hate the Supersonics.

In their view, what happened to the Bucks will happen to them in the future.

The Bucks accepted all of Yu Fei’s terms: short contracts, large contract renewals for problematic players, spending a lot of money to maintain competitiveness, ultimately achieving four championships in five years.

Yet this record was still not enough to keep Yu Fei.

After becoming an unrestricted free agent, he flew directly to Seattle, although he had a lofty goal—to save the SuperSonics. But look at what he got now. His three years in Seattle far exceeded everything he got in five years in Milwaukee.

Under these circumstances, the owners won’t believe his original intention was to save.

Then, James’s “The Decision” made things spiral out of control.

The owners found that even if they went all out for the players, they still ended up with a complete betrayal.

Yu Fei could still say that he left Milwaukee with four championships, and leaving the Bucks was a difficult decision, because at the time he decided to leave, the Bucks were still a championship-caliber team.

And James? He didn’t bring the Cavaliers any glory worth mentioning; instead, he was arguably at his worst during critical playoff games, then left the Cavaliers in a way that was unacceptable to many.