The NBA lockout began last week as David Stern decided Roger Goodell shouldn't have all of the fun. The NFL lockout has gone on since March. How are the stoppages similar and different?Jul 5, 2011 - The NBA decided last week to stop letting the NFL have all of the fun and instituted a lockout to shut down the league until a new collective bargaining agreement can be reached. Given that these are two multi-billion dollar leagues with fairly similar set-ups, there are some comparisons to be made in the NBA lockout and NFL lockout. But there are just as many differences.
What's the lockout about?
NBA: The NBA lockout is focused almost completely on cutting player salary to help struggling teams -- the league claims 22 lost money last year -- make a profit. A line you hear often from the league is that while players are collectively guaranteed more than $2 billion in salary every season, team owners are never guaranteed a profit, and in many cases, are guaranteed losses because of extraordinary expenses.
NFL: The NFL lockout is focused on a number of issues, the biggest being how to split the over-$9 billion figure in annual revenue. The owners feel they need a larger slice of the pie, since they're taking the larger financial risk, while the players have called for the current system to stay in place. NFL teams aren't claiming poverty, like some in the NBA, but they do want a bigger cut of the pie in order to grow the game.
What are the major issues?
NBA: The NBA's biggest two issues are the revenue split and the hardness of the salary cap. Currently, players receive 57 percent of basketball-related income, which was about $2.1 billion for the 2010-11 season. This is taken from gross receipts and includes gate, TV revenue, merchandise and more. The NBA has a soft salary cap around $60 million; through cap exceptions and the ability to re-sign their own players in excess of the cap, teams easily surpass the soft cap, and it's rare that more than two or three teams end the season under the cap. The NBA is trying to turn that soft cap into a hard or harder cap to shrink overall salary levels and expenses at the team level, and is trying to shrink the revenue split to something closer to 50-50. The players have been willing to go down to 54 percent without a hard cap. The hard cap is seen as unacceptable by the players' union.
NFL: The biggest issue, by far, is how to split the money. The players were previously receiving a little over 50 percent of all the revenue, and recent reports say they have given in to the tune of a 48 percent slice of the pie. It's believed that, once the money issue is figured out, the rest of the deal will fall into place relatively smoothly. Another major issue is the rookie wage scale because the owners feel that the players at the top of the draft are receiving a disproportionate amount of money. The players have been receptive to changing the model in which the rookies are paid by funneling some of that money to established veterans. One more major issue is retired players and increasing the amount of money they're given. The owners have reportedly been open to the idea of giving more money to the retired players and this issue has not become one of the most divisive on the table.
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