The biggest beneficiaries of the newly reached collective bargaining agreement are actually the ones who stand to profit the least from it. For NBA fans and arena workers who enjoy watching basketball or need the income from working games, the knowledge that not a single second of next season will be lost to labor strife is welcome relief.
For everyone else in the basketball business, it's just life continuing on. The new CBA feels like a tie between owners and players. That counts as a quasi-victory for the players, but it's a reminder of just how big a victory the 2011 lockout was for the owners. They got what they wanted and felt they needed at that time, even if it took away about two months of the season.
The amicable nature and accelerated pace of negotiations this time around made it seem as if the owners took a look at the dessert menu after a satisfying meal and said, "Nahhh, we're good."
Their big achievement in 2011 was lowering the players' share of basketball-related revenue from 57 percent to around 50 percent. It was a victory that grew in magnitude when the new national TV deals came in at $24 billion over nine years. The 6 percent difference was worth an extra $1.4 billion to the owners from the ESPN and TNT contracts alone.
Five years ago, the owners were willing to lose two months' worth of games and push the start of the season back to Christmas Day in order to get what they wanted. The players were willing to make the same sacrifices in an attempt to hold off the changes, until both sides averted the Armageddon of a lost season by reaching a deal. They missed games because ultimately they could afford to do so. They weren't even punished by the fans, as regular-season television ratings actually increased during the shortened season.
Even though history told both sides they could have gotten away with another work stoppage, they had no desire this time. There might have been points worth arguing but nothing that escalated into a fight. A league that has always been image-conscious (e.g., the dress code) also realized it would be a bad look to squabble over money at a time when franchise values and player contracts had soared.
The rush to make a deal also meant that some of the unpopular practices of the league won't be addressed at the highest possible level, via the collective bargaining agreement. One such example played out just as the new agreement was being announced, with stars such as LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, DeMarcus Cousins and LaMarcus Aldridge sitting out as preventive measures, rather than because of serious injuries.
(I happened to be working the Spurs game Wednesday night, and in a pregame meeting with coach Gregg Popovich, he waved off his role as the forefather of that movement. Pop said he didn't draw some scientific conclusion; he simply started the practice in order to extend the career of Tim Duncan after Duncan's knee injury forced Popovich to shut him down for the 2000 playoffs).
There will be incremental measures to avoid the "resting epidemic," such as shortening the preseason and spreading out the NBA calendar to decrease the schedule density. But we won't see the dramatic step of shortening the regular season.
It's interesting to keep in mind that while the 82-game season might be difficult to change without high-level negotiations, the ability to lighten the players' workload by changing the playoffs is not. The 2003 decision to extend the first round from best-of-five to best-of-seven not only happened mid-CBA -- it happened midseason. But good luck trying to take playoff games away from the networks shelling out all of those billions.
What is left to be seen are the unintended consequences of the new agreement. For example, in the expiring CBA, the rules made it financially beneficial for a player to hit free agency rather than sign a contract extension, even if he had no desire to leave his current team, a loophole that's been addressed in the new deal.
That CBA also failed to anticipate the impact that a huge jump in television revenue would have on the salary cap, which led to the one-time spike this summer that facilitated the contract explosion and allowed the Warriors to sign Kevin Durant. Surely there will be some kinks in the new deal that even the brightest negotiators and best-paid lawyers didn't anticipate.
And as always, any built-in attempts to prevent the formation of superteams can be undone by players' willingness to take less money.
For now, though, there are no major complaints from either side. Any professional sports work stoppage is a failure by the richest members of a lucrative industry to realize how good they have it.
That isn't the case in the NBA right now. The message they sent by reaching this agreement is that they're appreciative. We all can appreciate that.