Mike Check: NBA stars pressured to take less money, but why should they?

It turns out the NBA players’ union and player agents aren’t down with this whole theme of players taking less money “for the good of the team.”

Obviously agents and union officials have a vested interest in players getting the most money they can.  That doesn’t mean their concerns aren’t valid, even if it’s an argument they can never win with the public.

The owners cried poor and cleaned the players' clocks in the last labor negotiations, which didn't end until after the owners had locked out the players for 161 days in 2011. The owners got the share of revenues devoted to by player salaries reduced from 57 percent to 50, plus provisions that require superstar players to leave a lot of money on the table if they switch teams. Increasingly, bad owners don't have to be any better to make money.

But NBA owners and executives know fans don’t care about any of that. They know they can leverage fanaticism and the general jealousy a lot of customers feel towards players making millions of dollars. They understand there is an anti-labor sentiment permeating the country, with working stiffs attacking one another as "job creators" clean up with the help of their political patrons.

This social trend is magnified through the lens of sports. Star players who do take less money are lionized for their desire to win a championship. Those star players who take the maximum are deemed selfish for choosing money over winning. The owners get to have it both ways: benefit from a system that forces the best players to sacrifice a lot of money to change teams and also an atmosphere that pressures those players to give up money, anyway, if they re-sign.

It’s in this context that owners can pressure players to accept less money. It’s funny how it never works the other way, though. No one ever seems to say the owners are making plenty of cash and so why should players help them by taking pay cuts? There is less pressure on front offices to develop young (and cheaper) players and find value in contracts for role players than there is pressure on star players to take less money “for the good of the team.”

The owners are doing quite well financially, according to Grantland's Zach Lowe. He recently obtained a confidential NBA memo that shows the league projects that only nine of 30 teams will end up in the red in "basketball-related net profit" this year including the Nets, Hornets, Pistons, and Wizards. Lowe adds: "It's important to note that the figures here stem from basketball activities only . . ."

Another part of that picture is escalating franchise values. We just saw the Milwaukee Bucks—the Milwaukee Bucks!—sold for about $550 million. The pending sale of the Clippers is for $2 billion. I'm thinking it's very profitable to own an NBA team, unless the successful businessmen buying franchises suddenly became idiots.

(Remember Bud Selig telling trying to sell his "greater-fool theory" to Congress back in 2000? "The appreciation of these franchises is over," Selig declared with a straight face.)

Nowadays, people who complain about stagnating wages for the middle class and crappy wages for workers lower on the socioeconomic scale are told they get paid what they are worth. Don’t like it? Improve your skills and increase your marketability, you moocher.

Yet here we have NBA players, a small labor pool of people with rare, specialized skills that are very marketable. They are the labor and the product. They work for owners who generally are making a lot of money while increasing the value of their businesses.

And still the sentiment among a significant number of people is that these valuable workers should take less. Those with a free-market fetish get turned off by a market in which labor gets a big cut, even when it's justified.