| July, 2011 |
If he thinks there’s really a strong possibility that certain players will go to  Europe to play during the lockout: “I don’t think so. First of all, I’ve been discussing this with my own clients. I had a client in 1989 who was the National Player of the Year named Danny Ferry. He got drafted No. 2 by the Los Angeles Clippers, and he had personal reasons why he didn’t want to play for the Clippers at that time. His first year, he played for a team in Rome called Messaggero. It was owned by a very wealthy guy named Raul Gardini who was one of the three wealthiest men in Italy. And he made $4 million dollars in 1989. Very few NBA players will make $4 million in 2011 if they go to Europe. And if you ask him since he’s been a general manager, the floors were hard, the medical situation wasn’t very great, the guys smoked and drank after the games, practices were four hours a day and he really hurt his knees. I’m not sure he ever became the player he could have been had he started in the NBA. And so some of these guys going over there and risking $100 million dollar contracts to make a couple of million the next several years, I’m not certain for a lot of players that that’s a very wise choice.” Sportsradiointerviews.com |
| On what he thinks are the most broken aspects of the current NBA system: “I think the problem in the system, in my opinion, is basketball in the post-cap era…the cap came into the league in ’82 for 6 teams and for the rest of the league in ’83. And what the cap has done in both basketball and football is it’s made it in order to win…pop quiz, how many teams won a title in the NBA since 1980 in the last 31 years? Eight. Each of those teams have a formula. If you look at the Lakers, San Antonio, Miami almost won it last year — they have three stars that make almost all the money. When the Celtics won in 2008, Ray Allen, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett made 75 percent of the money. The fourth highest paid guy, Kendrick Perkins, how much did he earn? $3.6 [million]. Now, when your fourth guy is earning $3.6 and you say ‘Kendrick, I want you to be a role player, play great defense, rebound…’ He doesn’t turn to you and say ‘are you stupid? I’m making $9 million, I’m a star.’ Okay, so the formula for almost every team that’s won since 1980 in the cap era is to have three stars and a bunch of role players. What’s happened by putting a maximum salary on the LeBron’s and the Kobe’s and the Iverson’s over the last ten years, we’ve taken the money that we’ve saved from the stars and we pay guys that are probably worth $3 million, $9 million. That’s the problem in the system. They’re hard to coach, some of them aren’t heavily motivated, and you brought it up earlier, in 1998 when I was in my prime, Patrick Ewing was the president of the union. Stars ran the union. Today, the rank and file is running the union, and there’s a lot more rank and file players — they are passing the rules that disadvantage the stars that the people come to see and buy their merchandise or watch their commercials. And they’re overpaying the middle guys, so you have guys that are really out of shape…I’m not going to name names….there are certain guys that I watch when I come to the games here that I wouldn’t pay a nickel to watch because they’re in worse shape at age 22 than I am at 60.” Sportsradiointerviews.com |
| Listen here to Part 2 of Falk with Mike Wise & Holden Kushner on 106.7 The Fan in Washington D.C. Sportsradiointerviews.com |
There’s growing restlessness within the NBA’s most powerful agents, an uneasiness  with the strategies of Billy Hunter and the Players Association. What’s the strategy? How do we stave off economic Armageddon? This was the reason the agents came to New York for a meeting on Friday, and why they left an unmistakable impression on Hunter: Sooner than later, we want to decertify, file an antitrust suit and throw some fear into the owners. Yahoo! Sports |
| Hunter wants to wait out the rulings on the union’s filings with the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, but there’s little hope that’s gained traction. Hunter doesn’t seem willing to go the decertification route until after the union and NBA meet again in August, and probably not prior to September. Yahoo! Sports |
| Most of the agents see a union with no strategy, and NBA owners simply waiting until the players’ checks stop arriving in November so they can hammer the most one-sided collective bargaining agreement in history down the players’ throats. Yahoo! Sports |
| The owners are counting on panic to take over the union once the players start missing checks. That’s when the owners want to cut a deal, when the players are most vulnerable and fearful of losing a full season’s salary. The players risk getting the same lousy deal next year after already losing a year’s salary. Yahoo! Sports |
| Essentially, it’s come down to this: Hunter is still selling diplomacy, but the agents want to commence fighting. No one expects the league to seriously negotiate issues until they fear the courts could rule against them. The owners want what they want – hard cap, rollback on salaries and guaranteed profits – and they aren’t interested in compromises. The longer the union waits to decertify and file an antitrust suit, the less chance there is of getting a reasonable agreement and saving the season. Yahoo! Sports |
| September, 2011 |
Finally, Duffy lamented that the meeting was ending and the union’s strategy to combat  ownership in the collective bargaining talks was still hazy to him. What are we doing here? This was when NBPA tempers flared, witnesses said, and union vice president Maurice Evans(notes) let loose on the agent – and indirectly – the dozens more in the room. Tension had been building between agents and union officials, and Evans offered a window into the union’s frustration with the challenges and second-guessing from agents. Yahoo! Sports |
| “Evans went on and on about how the agents always want to tell [the union] what to do but don’t have any suggestions on how to make things better. Then Duffy would start to explain in a calm manner what he meant, and Evans kept interrupting him, cursing…” “Just a mess,” another agent in the room said. Yahoo! Sports |
| Most of the major NBA agents have told Yahoo! Sports they wanted to decertify the union and file an antitrust suit against the league. Hunter resisted those advances, wanting to see his unfair labor practice charges against the NBA through the National Labor Relations Board, and fight commissioner David Stern at the negotiating table. “We all know how this ends,” one agent said. “It ends like all the others have – with us giving back everything. Billy had a chance to get out ahead with decertification early on, like [DeMaurice] Smith did with the NFL. Now, if it happens, he won’t be able to take the lead on it.” Yahoo! Sports |
| "It matters now more than ever because there are no bad guys in this situation," said Charles Grantham, former executive director of the players' union and one of the architects of the NBA's existing revenue-sharing agreement with the players. "The owners are not being greedy, and the players are not wrong for wanting to hold on to what they have. There are just problems that need to be resolved. At some point, the future of the league has to take precedence of appearing to win a negotiation. Nobody wins by pointing fingers at this stage. You win by being committed to getting a deal done." ESPN.com |
| There’s a big labor meeting in Las Vegas on Thursday, and Hunter is competing for the hearts and minds of his rank-and-file players. He’s already lost the top agents, who are laying the groundwork for a coup, sources told Yahoo! Sports. The decision to make a move on Hunter could come as soon as this week, agents privately said. Yahoo! Sports |
| Several high-profile agents, including Jeff Schwartz, Arn Tellem, Mark Bartelstein, Bill Duffy and Dan Fegan, have been on the phones with each other this week. Sources briefed on the conversations say they’re getting closer to pursuing a signed petition, with 30 percent of the NBA’s players needed to bring a formal vote on dissolving the union. Yahoo! Sports |
| After that, they would need a majority of the NBA players to vote. To that end, the core agents had been recruiting rival agents to join them in the overthrow, trying to get the majority vote needed to decertify. “They’re all militant against the union now,” an agent who works in one of those agencies told Yahoo!. Yahoo! Sports |
| One agent says he’s had several conversations in the last 48 hours with the powerbrokers, and feels inclined to eventually join the cause. “There are still players who are on board with [Hunter], but many are not anymore,” the agent told Yahoo! Sports. “This will not be a pretty meeting.” Yahoo! Sports |
| Five of the most powerful agents in the NBA spoke via conference call Monday about how they can help the players union in its stalemate with the league's owners. Their answer: blow the union up. ESPN.com |
| Arn Tellem, Bill Duffy, Mark Bartelstein, Jeff Schwartz and Dan Fegan -- who collectively represent nearly one-third of the league's players -- spoke Monday about the process of decertifying the union, according to sources with knowledge of the situation. ESPN.com |
| The agents' view is that the owners currently have most, if not all, of the leverage in these talks and that something needs to be done to turn the tide. They believe decertification will do the trick, creating uncertainty and wresting control away from the owners. ESPN.com |
| Hunter believes he has his own weapon to change the tenor of the talks in the lawsuit the union filed with the National Labor Relations Board. The suit claims that the NBA is not negotiating in good faith. Hunter said he hopes there will be a ruling within the next few weeks. ESPN.com |
| If the union wins its suit, the NLRB could declare the lockout illegal and end it, though the number of cases in which the NLRB has done that in the past decade is miniscule. Nevertheless, Hunter is not likely to consider decertification until getting the results of the suit. ESPN.com |
| “One thing you have to remember about negotiations, any negotiation whether it is in the NBA or the NFL or the debt ceiling, everyone is going to wait until what they consider the pressure being on because they want to wait as long as they can to see if they can get the best deal,” said Grantham, who teaches a negotiations course at Seton Hall. “Consequently, you can start negotiating a year-and-a-half out, but it is going to wind up coming down to the last few minutes or few days. I am optimistic this will get done.” Sporting News |
| Privately, the most influential player agents in the business swear they won’t let Billy Hunter cut a crippling collective bargaining deal. They won’t let his parting gift to the union membership be deeper concessions, givebacks to the owners. They can’t storm the negotiating room in New York this week, but they believe they can ultimately stop the ratifying of a deal. They can deliver the percentage of players needed to decertify the union. They believe they still can unleash holy hell on this sure, steady capitulation to the NBA. Yahoo! Sports |
| “The players don’t want to make these kinds of concessions, yet the union keeps giving them,” one agent in a prominent firm told Yahoo! Sports. “The union hasn’t been listening to its players.” Everyone knows this is Hunter’s final stand as executive director of the Players Association, and he ultimately won’t have to live with the consequences of the agreement. He’ll take his millions of dollars, and go, and that leaves some agents and players suspicious of his willingness to fight NBA commissioner David Stern and the hard-line owners to a determined, defiant end. Yahoo! Sports |
| For the agents, this is a last stand of sorts. They won’t go quietly. No one has to like the agents, nor care that they get bigger commissions. Give the agents this: Unlike the owners and the union, they’re probably the most honest about the pursuit here, about their motivations. They need a system where they can negotiate deals for maximum dollars, where great players still have great value. There’s no hidden agenda here. The more the players get, the more the agents get. For the players, that makes them the ultimate advocacy group. Privately, the agents have always questioned the depth of the legal team that Hunters surrounds himself with, the creativity with which he approaches collective bargaining solutions with the owners. Yahoo! Sports |
| The NBA lockout has caused many players to make difficult decisions. While it’s well documented when a player signs overseas, there has been little discussion when a player chooses to fire his agent. Since the lockout commenced, many NBA players have left their agents and hired new representation. Hoopsworld |
| “There are a lot of players who aren’t doing well financially,” one agent said. “Agents know who hasn’t handled their money well. They’re swarming around these guys that are in financial trouble and offering money that will last the duration of the lockout. They provide money to the player and are paid back going forward. Some agents don’t even ask to be paid back; they’ll just do the player’s next deal. The players that aren’t doing well financially aren’t thinking about loyalty – they’re thinking ‘I’m broke and I need the money.’ Players are starving right now and that has made things easier for the agents looking to steal clients.” Hoopsworld |
