Could the NBA's new television deal lead to another lockout?

The most important news this NBA offseason might not have involved LeBron James’s return to Cleveland, Team USA’s almost too easy victory in the Fiba Basketball World Cup or even the tabloid-friendly circumstances that led to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer replacing the much loathed Donald Sterling as owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. Instead it involved a mammoth new television deal that could have long term implications, including laying the groundwork for another battle between owners and players in the near-future.

On October 6, after years of speculation that a sizeable new television contract was on the way, it was announced that the NBA was signing a new 9-year, $24billion contract with ABC/ESPN and TNT. It starts after the 2015-16 season and will last to the 2024-25 season.

In the short-term at least, this deal means good things for both players and teams. The rise in the NBA profits will mean a rise in the salary cap. Theoretically, this should mean teams will be able to offer more money to players and will have more flexibility to make personnel decisions without hitting the dreaded luxury tax.

So, on paper, this deal should be an unconditionally good thing for the league, the deal almost triples its television income. However, with the new contract comes the distinct possibility that players will revisit the concessions the NBA Players Association, under the disgraced and ousted Billy Hunter, made in the agreement that ended the 2011 lockout. There’s a thought out there that maybe they should.

After the 2010-11 season, NBA owners were able to rework the Collective Bargaining Agreement to be more in their favor, cutting the players’ share of the Basketball Related Income from 57% to 51%. That CBA expires in 2021, but players have the option of opting-out in 2017, a year after the new influx of money hits the books, which they quite likely will.

Although current NBA Commissioner Adam Silver says that he does not expect that this will lead to a lockout, the players, the lifeblood of the league, have every motivation to fight back changes the next time around. As Kelly Dwyer of Yahoo! Sports states, the last lockout happened mostly to save owners from themselves and ended up being entirely one-sided:

Between 2005 and ‘11, however, quite a bit changed. Owners and general managers signed a series of overarching contracts with middling or even All-Star-type players who didn’t deserve them, general managers refused to utilize the bargaining tools the league initiated in previous agreements that would help them keep things sane, and a lockout resulted.

And, now, with the NBA tripling its national television payments in 2016, a year before the players can opt out of the collective bargaining agreement, we’re expecting things to sail “smoothed out?”

The players should have opted out of this CBA the second after they signed it, because they took in a raw deal as governed by a union executive director who was then voted out.

The players will likely have more of a case now than they did during that lockout. The owners cried poverty back in 2011, arguing that most teams would be struggling financially under the previous CBA. The NBA claimed that up to 22 teams would lose money, something which seemed unbelievable then, “unbelievable” in the John Oliver “we literally didn’t believe it” sense, and would sound utterly preposterous now.

After all, just this year, the Milwaukee Bucks, literally the worst team in the league, were sold for a then record $550 million dollars. This deal was trumped when Ballmer bought the historically dysfunctional Los Angeles Clippers from the Sterling Family Trust (i.e. Shelly Sterling) for a new record of $2 billion. It even seems inevitable that the Atlanta Spirit will be selling the Atlanta Hawks, one of the few teams that most likely is currently losing money, for a profit in the near future after a series of embarrassing racially insensitive incidents became public. One can only imagine what it would cost to purchase one of the non-severely flawed teams.

Unless something completely disastrous happens, it will be difficult for the NBA to claim the league is in financial straits, especially not after the ESPN/Turner deal kicks in. Already this news has sparked athletes rightfully complaining about a deal made just a few years ago under the pretenses that the NBA was in trouble.

— Jeff Zillgitt (@JeffZillgitt) October 6, 2014

While LeBron James wasn't ready to address split of money, he did say owners claiming the're losing money "will not fly with us this time."

— Kobe Bryant (@kobebryant) October 7, 2014

Players are "encouraged" per new CBA to take less to win or risk being called selfish+ungrateful while nbatv deal goes UP by a BILLION #biz

So does that necessarily mean we’re at risk for another lockout-shortened season, or, shudder to think, potentially an entire lost one? Not everyone is so certain, Vice Sports writer Jorge Arangure Jr, for one, reports that the worst case scenario is highly unlikely:

[A] source close to the union said the players would almost certainly opt out of the current deal. Then the fight will be to see just how much the players will try to get back of the percentage of revenue they gave up in the previous deal. But such a fight hardly belies the doomsday scenario many have predicted.

“I don’t necessarily think it’s the reality,” the source close to the union said of the possibility of a much predicted bitter labor dispute. “I think it depends how folks act over the next couple of years.”

A significant work stoppage seems unlikely at a time when most, if not all, the teams are profitable. The concessions the players made in the 2011 CBA discussions – the lowering of their share of the BRI being the biggest – were mostly based on the league’s claim that 22 of the 30 teams lost money during the 2009 season.

“They’re not going to be able to claim that anymore,” the source close to the union said.

This would be best the case scenario in the wake of the new television deal: the players would fight back for some of what they conceded during the previous CBA, the owners would be content with their absolutely massive piles of free loot and basketball would continue uninterrupted.

This new agreement with ESPN and Turner proves that the NBA, despite all of the league’s protests a few years back, is as healthy and profitable as it ever has been. It’s in everyone’s interest, including the fans, for everyone to benefit from it.