2011 NBA lockout

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2011 NBA lockout stretched for 161 days, from the 1st of July to the 8th of December, wiping out the preseason and cutting the regular season from 82 games down to 66. It was the fourth lockout in NBA history, and the longest. Two sides sat across from each other for months: team owners led by commissioner David Stern, and players represented by director Billy Hunter and NBPA president Derek Fisher. Between them lay a gap measured not just in money, but in competing visions of what professional basketball should look like. The questions at the center of this story are deceptively simple. Who deserves the money? How competitive should the league be? And what happens when the game goes dark? The answers dragged through an entire summer and fall, touched players in more than a dozen countries, and left thousands of arena workers without paychecks they could not recover.

• 2. The Money at Stake

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  The 2005 collective bargaining agreement had guaranteed players 57% of basketball-related income, known as BRI. When that deal was about to expire in June 2011, the owners arrived at the table with a stark opening position: reduce the players' share from 57% to 47%, and impose a hard salary cap of $45 million per team, down from the existing soft cap of $58 million. The league claimed it was losing $300 million per year, with 22 of 30 teams losing money in the most recent season. The players' union disputed those figures entirely.

  Hunter advised players to prepare for a lockout months before it began. In May 2011, the NBPA filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing the league of bargaining in bad faith by withholding financial data. The NBA rejected the complaint, saying it complied fully with federal labor law.

  By the time preseason was canceled in October, the gap had narrowed but not closed. Players proposed receiving 53% of BRI; owners countered with 47%. A 50-50 split was floated, with owners offering 49% plus incentives that could raise the value to 51%. Players pushed back asking for 51% base, rising to 53% with the same incentives. That was rejected. On October 28, Stern announced that Hunter was unwilling to go a penny below 52% of BRI, while Hunter described the concessions the players had already made as substantial. Stern confirmed that an 82-game season was no longer possible.

• 3. Fractures on Both Sides

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  Derek Fisher sent an email to more than 400 players on the 15th of September, 2011, asking for unity. The email revealed something: Fisher believed the real disagreement was not between players and owners, but among the owners themselves. Some owners thought the players' proposal of 52% of BRI was fair. Others, led by Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert and Suns owner Robert Sarver, were hardliners who refused any compromise near that number. Knicks owner James Dolan and Lakers owner Jerry Buss were more willing to settle, though they remained publicly united with small-market teams on the issue of the league's long-term finances.

  Miami Heat owner Micky Arison made the fracture visible in a different way. He responded to a fan on Twitter who complained about greedy owners and players, writing "You are barking at the wrong owner." Stern fined him $500,000 for the comment, five times larger than any previous fine against an owner for public comments on the lockout. Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis and Charlotte Bobcats owner Michael Jordan had each been fined $100,000 earlier for similar remarks. Jordan, who as a player during the 1998 lockout had told Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin that he should sell his team if he could not make a profit, was now among the hardline owners pushing to cap the players' share at 47%. Sports columnist Jason Whitlock called Jordan a sellout, pointing to his executive decisions to draft Kwame Brown and Adam Morrison.

  Fisher himself became the subject of internal suspicion. Reports surfaced that he was privately negotiating a 50-50 split with Stern without Hunter's knowledge. Fisher called the reports absurd and demanded retractions through his attorneys. Hunter publicly said his relationship with Fisher was good and denied any confrontation, but the episode showed how much pressure was fracturing the players' own leadership.

• 4. The Union Dissolves

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  Five sports agents representing one-third of all NBA players had begun discussing decertification as early as September 2011. Decertifying would convert the union into a trade association and allow players to file antitrust lawsuits against the league as individual employees. Hunter initially said players had not considered that option, but by early November, around 50 players were openly threatening to push for it if the union accepted less than 52.5% of BRI or agreed to additional contract restrictions.

  On the 14th of November, after owners presented what they called a final offer and said they were done bargaining, the NBPA dissolved the union and converted into a trade association. Attorney David Boies, who had represented NFL owners during their own lockout that same year, agreed instead to represent the NBA players alongside union attorney Jeff Kessler. The next day, one group of players including Carmelo Anthony, Chauncey Billups, Kawhi Leonard, and Leon Powe filed an antitrust lawsuit in a California federal court. A separate group including Anthony Tolliver, Ben Gordon, Caron Butler, and Derrick Williams filed their own suit in a Minnesota federal court. The 15th of November was also the date players would have received their first paychecks of the season.

  The California lawsuit was dropped on the 21st of November to consolidate with the Minnesota case. Boies believed merging the suits would speed the process. The legal pressure achieved what months of negotiation could not: four days later, on the 25th of November, both sides agreed to resume talks.

• 5. The Deal and Its Terms

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  After 15 hours of talks on the 26th of November, a tentative agreement ended the lockout. The NBPA re-formed as a union on December 1, receiving support from over 300 players, well above the minimum 260 signatures required. Signature cards went to roughly 440 players on rosters at the end of the previous season, plus the 60 rookies drafted in 2011 and players who had signed at least two 10-day contracts. The deal was ratified on the 8th of December by a 25-5 vote among owners; 86% of the more than 200 players who voted approved it. Miami Heat owner Micky Arison and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban were the two owners who publicly disclosed they voted against the new agreement.

  Under the new CBA, players received 51.2% of BRI in the 2011-12 season, with a 49-to-51 band in subsequent years. The luxury tax became substantially more punitive: instead of a flat $1 for every $1 spent above the threshold, it would rise incrementally from that ratio for teams spending beyond the threshold, and climb higher still for repeat offenders. Teams could execute a one-time amnesty waiver to release a player without the remaining salary counting against the cap. The new deal also introduced what was immediately called the Derrick Rose Rule, named after the 2011 NBA Most Valuable Player Award winner. Under it, a player finishing his rookie contract could be re-signed at up to 30% of his team's salary cap, up from the previous ceiling of 25%, if he had been a two-time All-Star starter, twice voted All-NBA Team, or won an MVP. Maximum contract lengths for veteran players were also shortened from the 2005 agreement.

• 6. Players Abroad

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  FIBA announced on the 29th of July that it would allow players under NBA contracts to play overseas during the lockout, provided their new contracts included opt-out clauses that let them return once the work stoppage ended. The players' union encouraged members to seek overseas work, reasoning that owners would offer better terms if players appeared to have real alternatives.

  More than 90 players signed with foreign teams, though The New York Times described the migration as one of the most overblown stories of the lockout, noting that the majority were rookies, middling veterans, and fringe players. The genuine exceptions stood out. Deron Williams, the only 2011 All-Star to go overseas, signed a one-year deal worth $5 million with Besiktas of the Turkish Basketball League. Kenyon Martin, a former first overall draft pick then playing as a free agent, signed with the Xinjiang Flying Tigers of the Chinese Basketball Association for $500,000 per month, which made him the highest-paid player in that league's history. Three-time NBA champion Tony Parker took the opposite approach, playing for the minimum wage of $2,000 per month with ASVEL Basket in France, a team he partly owned.

  The average NBA annual salary was $5.8 million, with a minimum around $500,000. A player in Europe might earn $50,000-$75,000 per month. By October, after regular-season games were canceled, it was no longer expected that many additional players would sign abroad; overseas rosters were already full. The Chinese Basketball Association imposed an additional restriction, allowing its clubs to sign foreign NBA players only if those players could commit to the entire season, not just opt in temporarily. Chinese nationals were exempt, which is how Yi Jianlian was able to return to the NBA when the lockout ended.

• 7. Ripple Effects

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  The estimated loss from the shortened season reached $400 million split between owners and players. According to CNBC, the average player lost $220,000 after the first missed paycheck on the 15th of November, though each player received $100,000 from the NBA to compensate for BRI falling below the 57% level in 2010-11. By the 25th of October, roughly 400 NBA jobs had been lost through layoffs and attrition since the lockout began, with approximately 200 in the league office and another 200 spread across the 30 teams. Arena workers on part-time schedules had no means to recover wages lost from canceled games.

  The lockout also suspended an agreement between the NBA and FIBA under which the NBA covered most insurance costs for its players competing in international tournaments. Without that agreement, national federations had to source full coverage on their own. The Spanish Basketball Federation calculated that insuring all its NBA players for EuroBasket 2011 could cost as much as $5.67 million. An agent representing one unnamed player set to earn $10 million in 2010-11 said his client had been quoted $400,000 just to insure his contract for a FIBA qualifier. Andrew Bogut did not participate in the 2011 FIBA Oceania Championship after insurers refused to cover his remaining $39 million in NBA salary without excluding pre-existing elbow, wrist, and back injuries.

  The lockout's ripple through other sports drew speculation. Reuters and Bloomberg Businessweek raised the possibility that NHL viewership would grow among displaced NBA fans. The NHL had its own recent history of labor disruption; its lockout had canceled the entire 2004-05 season, and the league had been rebuilding its audience since. Fourteen big-city mayors wrote an open letter to Stern and Hunter urging resolution, citing the economic damage to their cities. Academic studies from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Lake Forest College, however, found no historically significant economic effect on cities from sports work stoppages, partly because consumers shifted spending to other entertainment.

• 8. The Compressed Season

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  When the season finally started on Christmas Day 2011 with five games, two more than had ever been scheduled on that date before, the NBA was running a schedule unlike any it had produced. The 66-game regular season had to be completed in 124 days, with teams playing on average two more games per month than a normal year. There were 42 sets of back-to-back-to-back games across the league, with 11 teams playing at least two of those brutal three-consecutive-game runs. The last time such a schedule existed was the shortened 1999 season, which featured 64 of those triples and noticeably ragged play.

  Each team played 48 conference games and 18 non-conference games, compared to 52 and 30 in a normal 82-game year. Interconference matchups were harder to schedule because arenas in Los Angeles and Chicago had already been reassigned for other events in October. There were 29 occasions when teams played five games in six days.

  The physical toll was visible in the postseason. The Chicago Bulls lost Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah to injuries and were eliminated from the playoffs. The New York Knicks lost Baron Davis and Iman Shumpert to knee injuries in their series against the Miami Heat. The Heat themselves lost Chris Bosh for most of the postseason before winning the championship. Stern initially denied any connection between the injuries and the compressed schedule. A week later, he backed off that position and said more research was needed. When San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich sat Tim Duncan during a back-to-back-to-back in March, he submitted the official description of Duncan's absence to the league as simply: "Old."