NBA Lockout Begins

The NBA's summer of labor discord is officially under way.

The lockout began Wednesday at 12:01 a.m., signaling the halt of all business: No trades, no free agent signings, no practices, no resolving the Michael Jordan question.

After going more than a week since the last talks on a new collective bargaining agreement, the league announced Monday what everyone knew was coming -- a lockout that could wipe out games for the first time in NBA history.

"We need a way to slow down salary growth to bring it in line with our revenue growth," commissioner David Stern said. "The current system does not work."

"We can't afford to play next season under the current system. That's just the reality. That's why owners elected to lockout," Stern said.

The move came as no surprise. Players were told throughout last season to expect a long work stoppage, and talks were going nowhere before breaking off.

The biggest question now is when it will end.

"We spent all of this year urging players to save their money so they would be able to survive a lockout," union director Billy Hunter said. "We've taken continuous polls among the players, anthey are prepared to go the distance."

Stern even acknowledged that the impasse could last into November, when the season opens, or even into 1999.

"Yes, that is fair and accurate. There are a number of clubs that will do better not operating than operating. That's something the players don't seem to understand," Stern said.

This will be the third lockout in league history. A lockout in the summer of 1995 lasted three months; in 1996 it lasted only a few hours.

The old agreement was to run for six years, but the owners had the right to reopen it if the amount of designated revenue being paid toward player salaries exceeded a certain level - 51.8 percent of basketball-related income.

The owners say they are now devoting 57 percent of those revenues to player salaries, a total of almost $1 billion.

The impending lockout already caused 12 NBA players to be removed from the team scheduled to compete next month at the world championships in Greece. USA Basketball, the governing body for the national team, will replace them with a team of Americans currently playing overseas, minor leaguers and possibly some collegians.

Despite meeting nine times since April, the owners and players have made only minimal progress on a new agreement to replace the one expiring at midnight tonight.

"We've made four different proposals, all involving player salaries going up every year," deputy commissioner Russ Granik said. "The players made one set of proposals, and have never moved off those proposals in any way on economic issues."

Stern and Granik said the league's profit margins have been shrinking for the last five years, and almost half of the 29 teams stood to lose money in the just-completed season.

"The final numbers aren't in, but for first time, as a whole, we believe the league was actually unprofitable last season," Stern said.

He also said the NBA would accept an agreement similar to the NFL's, in which a salary cap could not be exceeded for any reason.

The players have vowed to resist any form of a "hard" salary cap and want to keep the current "soft" cap, especially the rule known as the "Larry Bird exception," which allows teams to exceed the salary cap to retain their own free agents.

Such an exception allowed the Chicago Bulls to pay Jordan more than $33 million last season despite the salary cap being set at $26.9 million.

"At the last bargaining meeting, the union said that unless the owners were prepared to agree to maintain the `Larry Bird exception' as is, they had nothing further to talk about," Granik said, referring to the June 22 session, which broke off after only 30 minutes. "We need an agreement that is not totally open-ended, and if there's a way to do so that keeps the exception -- or some elements of it -- we're prepared to do that."

Hunter pointed out that only 10 percen of players signed their current contracts under the Bird exception.

"For the other 90 percent, it's a fixed cap. Without the exception, teams wouldn't have room to accommodate most of the players," he said.

The lockout means teams cannot conduct practices, summer camps, workouts, coaching sessions or team meetings. A handful of players who were to be paid part of their salaries this summer will not receive those paychecks until the lockout ends.

Unlike the last lockout, teams will not be barred from working with players rehabilitating from injuries as long as those sessions take place outside of NBA facilities.

Also some previously scheduled charity games will be allowed to proceed.

Hunter said he expects to meet again with Stern in mid-July.

"If there's a softening in our position, we'll let them know," Hunter said. "But the league is profitable, the commissioner and the deputy commissioner are the highest paid in professional sports, the number of league employees is growing and the average salary of coaches is higher than that of the players. So why are things so bad?"

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