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By Tim Wood

Originally published in The Columbia Daily Herald Oct. 25, 1998

At about this time last year, I was talking basketball with my two sons, discussing the players on our favorite NBA team and looking forward to the season.

Often, I would come home and one of the boys would ask me what I had heard about our team. They would want to know who is playing well, when's the next game, and similar things.

The other night, I came home and was asked "How did the arbitrator rule?"

The reference was to an arbitrator's decision that NBA players with guaranteed contracts would not be paid during the lockout.

So now, instead of discussing the pick and roll, the triangle offense, Michael Jordan's jump shot or whether this will be Shawn Bradley's big year, we're discussing labor law.

At some point, my boys would learn about labor law and lots of other subjects in school. But now they're learning about through following the NBA.

The NBA players and owners are fighting over their respective shares of the enormous amount of money that's now flowing into the league. As recently as 1980, the NBA finals were shown on a tape-delayed basis. This past year, the finals dominated the ratings.

The owners instituted the lockout a few months ago because their last labor agreement gave them the right to renegotiate the labor contract if the players' share of league revenues exceeded a certain percentage.

The owners want a "hard cap," or a strict limit on the amount of money a team can pay its roster of players. The NBA has a salary cap, but it's a joke. The cap was about $27 million last season. Michael Jordan made $33 million all by himself.

The salary cap has a loophole called the "Larry Bird" rule. I don't know the history of the rule or why it was named after Larry Bird, but it allows a team to exceed the salary cap to re-sign its own players.

This has contributed to some extremely high salaries and the owners' so-called salary problem.

Both sides look silly. Last week, players gathered in Las Vegas to show their "solidarity." Players making millions of dollars a year were talking about "union solidarity" and helping out their lower-paid brethren, who struggle by on a mere $272,000 a year minimum wage.

The owners cry foul about all of the money they're paying to players. But no one made the owners pay those high salaries. By asking for a "hard cap" (with no Larry Bird exception), the owners seem to be saying, "Protect us from ourselves."

If the owners did get a hard cap, they would do what their counterparts in the National Football League have done: find every possible loophole in order to gain a competitive advantage on the other teams.

It would be easy to say that the fans are the losers. But maybe we aren't. After all, there will be other basketball to watch. The high schools and colleges can't go on strike. The Nashville Noise, a women's professional team, will play this fall. My boys might learn more about basketball by watching the Noise, or the Lady Vols, than they would by seeing a typical NBA slam-fest.

Although part of the NBA season has been canceled, there's plenty of time for the owners and players to get together. The season is too long as it is. The regular season is just a prelude to the playoffs. More teams make the playoffs than miss them, so the regular season doesn't carry a whole lot of wait.

The bad teams can be eliminated in 40 games as easily as they can in 82. Let them settle in time to get paychecks at Christmas and start playing after New Year's Day. By the time the finals roll around, we will have forgotten this nonsense and will be waiting to see what miracle Michael Jordan pulls off this year.

And at our house, the labor law studies will be put on hold.