One thing I know for sure is
that the NBA will lockout will end. It might take weeks, months, or years, but
there will definitely be a National Basketball Association again at some point.
Another thing I’m pretty sure of is that when the NBA returns, there will be an
amnesty clause that will allow teams to drop one contract off the books.
They’ll still have to pay that player but for salary cap purposes, the record
is struck clean.
One thing I have absolutely
no idea about in regards to the NBA lockout is whether or not NBA owners will
have learned anything from this experience. Obviously the biggest hurdle in the
negotiations between the owners and the players has been how to divide
basketball related income (BRI). However the one thing that affects what the
owners pull in from BRI is how much they have to pay out in salaries to their
players. Long story short: the owners need to be saved from themselves by not
giving out egregious contracts to players who don’t deserve them in order to
maximize their BRI share.
I thought about the owners
today randomly when a report came out that Baron Davis said that if he
were to end up as a free agent as a result of the amnesty clause that he’d
prefer to play for the Lakers, Knicks, or Bobcats. Initially I thought this was
funny. I enjoyed the idea of Boom Dizzle thinking that he’d be in such demand
in the upcoming free agent session that he could somehow control his own destiny
and decide which team he wanted to play for. All fat and out of shape jokes
aside, Davis is a soon to be 33 year old point guard with a ridiculously long
injury history that barely managed to shoot over 40% from the field the last 2
years.
