The NBA’s Contradictory Era of Player Empowerment
New developments are being made to help players gain power — yet these changes are having the opposite effect
Author’s Note: The term “team owner” will be used due to its past relevance, though the term “team governor” is the new official term in the NBA
THOUGH THE TERM “the Gordian Knot” dates back hundreds of years, its example and precedent in history remains important and consequential in today’s modern world.
As the legendary tale goes, Alexander the Great sent his troops into the Gordium, the Phrygian capital, in what is now known as the country of Turkey. When arriving into the capital, he and his troops saw a wagon with a yoke. The yoke was tied with a series of impossibly intertwined knots. With no start, no finish, and nowhere to begin untangling, the knot was a code that nobody, even the most powerful men of the time, could decipher.
As a translation of an ancient historian revealed, the yoke had “several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened.”
The yoke and wagon belonged to Gordius, the son of the King of Midas, hence the name “the Gordian Knot.” Whoever could untangle the knot, an oracle declared, would become the ruler of all of Asia.
Impeccably infatuated with gaining power, Alexander began wrestling and grabbing and twisting at the ropes. No matter. There was no solution in sight, no promise that lay in the future.
The term “the Gordian Knot” has been used, for many years now, to represent an impossible or unsolvable situation.
And today, there is a conflict, an existential crisis that is still inflicting the NBA and its members. With its roots in racial prejudice, and despite significant progress being made, the conflict and tension between players and owners still has no end in sight.
Like the Gordian knot, this paradoxical, conflicting dissension has no end in sight.
DATING BACK TO the history of prejudice and vitriolic hostility towards African-Americans, the relationship between players and owners has historically been tense.
Historically, team owners have been white, privileged males, causing the sporting industry to reflect the dark, not-so-distant past of America. Racism, hate, and control are ideas that related to the slavery era of the 1800s and the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s — and they all apply to the entertainment-based industry of professional sports.
And with players feeling the pressure of the dominating, entitled, overbearing personas of their owners, they begin to feel like modern slaves, with their only solace being their generous salaries.
Though the NBA is arguably the most progressive sports league in the world today, it, like racism, is systematically inclined to fostering the same mindset that created the rise of plantation owners. And like those former plantation owners of the Confederate South, team owners have a comparable mindset, filled with control and manipulation.
With the NBA Draft, trades, and contracts all being integral to the league, the mentality of people being reduced to assets is still prevalent. The league is mostly African-American, by an overwhelming majority, painting the unsavory picture of African-Americans being controlled, yet again, by their white “superiors.”
There have been changes made to help players to gain more individual and collective power. Yet, narrowing the power of the team owners — who are in the top 1% of society based on wealth and power — has only led to a power struggle.
Changes have been made to take away the power of the owner, including changing the term “owner” into “team governor.” However, an unsurprising development is the owners’ fight to gain their power back.
And though athletes may only see the benefits of reducing the power of owners, they miss the ever-developing frustration that comes with trying to belittle an exclusive club of billionaires.
AMONG THE DEVELOPMENTS that played out throughout the NBA season, one of the most conflicting was the creation of the term “load management.” Though the act of resting star players wasn’t new, it was surprising to see an official malady for rest on the NBA’s injury report.
For years, the Spurs had been finding ways to rest their three stars in Tim Duncan, Manu Ginóbili, and Tony Parker as they aged — though they had to do so by falsely disclosing injuries/sicknesses at times.
Very quietly, Kawhi Leonard and the medical staff of the Toronto Raptors had created a revolution, a new way of thinking about the correlation between intensity and workload.
Yet, though Leonard and his team felt their philosophy of load management was vindicated by an NBA championship, others felt differently.
On the one hand, load management was a crucial development for athletes in the NBA, who no longer had to pretend they needed to play in every regular-season game when doing so is non-beneficial. Load management epitomized the idea of athletes prioritizing themselves and their well-being over all else, which was a very progressive development.
But there was a catch.
By continually managing a regular-season load, Leonard and other NBA players are harming the league’s product and its brand.
For example, the L.A. Clippers were supposed to be one of the three featured teams of the league this season, but with Leonard missing almost one of every three games and Paul George missing time early in the season to recover from surgery, the Clippers haven’t lived up to their hype. And as a product, a marketable team that the league wants to advertise, the Clippers have failed, in large part due to Leonard’s absence from many regular-season games.
The idea of load management contradicts the players’ ability to maximize profit — something that they have been relentless in their pursuit of. With the current and recent leadership of the NBPA (National Basketball Player’s Association), money has become a driving force for the players, who want as much as possible, as soon as possible.
It is telling that, in recent years, LeBron James has played in almost all regular-season games he has been available for, including playing all 82 games in 2017–2018. The true motivation behind this sudden willingness to play is simple: James is trying to maximize profit for respective athletes, while trying to lessen the power of team owners.
But the goal of gaining personal wealth contradicts the supposed “ultimate goal” of winning an NBA championship, so something has to give. Either the players will forgo money to chase individual and team honor or they will choose profit over winning, a widely frowned upon idea in all of sports.
How the paradoxical issue of load management will be solved remains to be seen.
LOST IN THE headlines of “player empowerment,” where NBA athletes are now free to sign with any team, whenever they want, is the recent development of NBA contracts. The players effectively are sending a message to team owners.
If you want to keep us, they are saying, then you will have to pay us more than ever before.
With Chris Paul, the president of the aforementioned NBPA, pushing for larger contracts for all players — even those who are aging, the players are getting paid handsomely. It is Paul’s leadership that led to the massive cap-spike in 2016 and the precipitous rise in player’s salaries over the past 4 years. And as Paul, new vice-president Andre Iguodala, and many other veterans have received generous contracts over the past three seasons, the monetary reforms of the players appear to have worked.
But, in reality, these changes may have had the opposite effect for players.
Mentioned earlier, a defining trait of this new era of player empowerment is the rise in player movement — whether it be through demanding trades or signing in unrestricted free agency.
Yet, with so many large contracts being handed out, players are now stuck on teams, with their salaries often not matching their performance on the court. Look no further than Paul in Oklahoma City, who is virtually untradeable due to his salary. These enormous salaries have led to the rise in the public trade demand, an action that is explicitly disallowed based on the Collective Bargaining Agreement, an agreement signed by both players and team owners.
So while players believe they are winning their power struggle with owners by signing massive, four-year maximum contracts year after year, they are contradicting the primary value of player empowerment.
When Daryl Morey was effectively blackballed by other members of the league for supporting Hong Kong in their dispute with China, there was a clear threat in the relationship with players and owners. If Morey, a respected if not frustratingly talented NBA executive could be completely repudiated, what would happen if a player performed the same actions.
Many players, rightfully so, felt the Daryl Morey incident was a threat to freedom of speech.
Yet, for as noble as defending the personal right to freedom of speech is, it is in the best financial interest of the league and team owners to not speak out on Chinese politics. So what do players value, their money or their rights?
They have tried to have both, wanting to gain more money than ever with more player rights than ever, but this issue is too complex, too complicated for that possibility to become reality.
With no clear solution in sight, the players will be forced to ask themselves, what do they truly value. Their answer could define the development of the NBA over the next decade.
THOUGH NBA COMMISSIONER Adam Silver has been incredibly supportive of helping players gain powers, he also needs to appeal to team owners — a conflicting job that reflects the paradoxical nature of the league.
The relationship between players and owners has evolved, with the two parties both needing each other to survive, yet trying to belittle one another.
Owners need their players, for otherwise they would be losing hundreds of millions of dollars on a poor investment. Meanwhile, players, for as much as they empower themselves on and off the court, still rely on their team owners to provide the requisite needs of being a professional athlete.
Going back to the history of the Gordian Knot, the knot was solved, though in a unique way. According to a translated story from the time, Alexander the Great, looking at an impossibly entangled group of knots, claimed, “it makes no difference how they are loosed.”
He then took out his sword, cutting it the knot half, and solving the puzzle that was the Gordian Knot.
As the legend goes, Gordium (the Phrygian capital), experienced mass strikes of lightning and thunder — which Alexander took as approval from the Gods. Alexander would infamously go on to become one of the world’s most famous conquerors, taking large parts of Asia in his lifetime.
Who, out of the players and the owners, will be like Alexander the Great and impose their will in a unique way to solve the paradoxical conflict in the NBA?
The answer remains to be seen.
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