Baron Davis: Barometer of NBA Owners Sanity

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.

The teams that he put on his short list of teams he’d play for is truly laughable. When the NBA does resume, the Lakers will no doubt be one of the Vegas line favorites to win the championship. Plus they already have an aging point guard on the roster (don’t get me started on him and his role in the lockout) so I’m not exactly sure why they’d want anything to do with him. The Knicks also have a lot of money invested in an aged point guard, not to mention the fact Baron would have to be doing a lot of running, so I can’t see that being a good fit. Charlotte could be a fit because it would reunite him with former Warriors assistant coach Stephen Silas, but the Bobcats are far from a championship contender, which seems to be what Baron is looking for in a team. The best part is the only reason these 3 teams were named was because the initial rumor was he wanted to sign in Miami, which apparently didn’t make the cut in his top 3.

I’m not trying to pile on Baron Davis. As a Warriors fan I owe plenty to the man who gave us the We Believe season and the subsequent season’s team that somehow won 48 games and missed the playoffs. But he clearly isn’t the same player as he was then, and he most certainly does not deserve to make roughly $30 million over the next 2 seasons. That combined with the fact that the Cavs drafted point guard Kyrie Irving with the top pick of the draft makes Baron an easy candidate to be amnestied (maybe a word?) so he should be thinking like a free agent and where he wants to play next season.

I am using Baron as an example here though. I thought of the owners after reading that report because if I was an NBA team owner considering whether or not to sign Baron, I’d be thinking along the lines of a 1 year contract at the veterans minimum (I’m a heartless, frugal guy, what can I say). However, I am fairly certain that some NBA owner will get “bold” and offer Baron a multi-year deal at or higher than the mid-level exception figure (roughly $6 million per year). Maybe they’ll think that number is a steal since he was scheduled to make around $14 million. Maybe they’ll think THIS is the situation that Baron will play his hardest. Whatever the reason, I can’t help but think it will happen.

And then we will back at square one. Being an NBA fan for a long time, I’ve come to the realization and acceptance that NBA owners are largely insane. I mean you’d have to be insane to pay some of the players what they are making (see: Lewis, Rashard. $118 million). I have had the joy of being a Warriors fan so maybe I was exposed to terrible ownership quicker and more obviously than fans of other teams. But the whole point of this lockout is the owners don’t want to pay out such crazy deals to players yet also want to keep a bigger percentage of the money that these players bring in. I’m failing to see how that makes sense.

Therefore I will be using Baron Davis as the barometer of the sanity level of the NBA owners once this lockout eventually ends. His numbers don’t lie. They’ve been steadily going downhill for the last several years. His lackadaisical play on the court is as apparent as ever. There is almost no doubt he will be the Cavs amnesty player and become a free agent. If he ends up signing a multi-year deal with a team, I am confident his play will continue to go down hill and his team will be stuck paying an aging point guard money they don’t want to spend. And they will complain about it.

And they will have learned nothing and we’ll be back where we started…