The NBA’s CBA Could Learn a Lot From the NFL’s, and Vice Versa

There’s far too much talk about collective bargaining agreements these days. The CBA is like trash pickup—it’s some magical thing that happens when you’re not looking, and you never have to think about it until one day it fails you and you’ve got a huge pile of garbage out on the curb. That’s what we’ve got now.

Incredibly, both the NBA and NFL (the country’s two most watchable leagues) are both threatening lockouts in 2011 after their respective CBAs expire. They both have the same situation on their hands—the owners want to make more money, and the players don’t want to give up the otherworldly amounts of money they’re making. Tough life.

Since they’ve both got the same tasks to accomplish, I don’t see why they don’t all get together and compare notes. Let’s get the NBA and NFL owners and unions together, and assemble one super CBA that works for any sport. Or, at the very least, they could learn from each other so they don’t make the same dumb mistakes.

Specifically, the NFL has got to figure out that using a rookie salary scale is a no-brainer. And the NBA needs to ditch the clumsy salary-matching rule for trades.

The Rookie Scale — Chalk One Up to Common Sense

Somehow the NBA got this right, and the NFL has seen it get worse and worse every year as a gigantic, wildly-gaping flaw in their CBA. In the NBA, rookie salaries are set well before draft day; your salary is determined by when you’re taken in the draft, and many rookies don’t even bother hiring an agent since there’s nothing to haggle over. Nobody holds out for more money, because there is no more money. You get what you get, or you don’t play in the NBA. And, might I add, I’ve never heard anybody complain about it.

In the NFL, though? Wow. Remember JaMarcus Russell’s draft? It was 2007, and the Raiders took him with the first pick. Their multi-million dollar contract offers weren’t enough for him, though, and he held out all through training camp—and several weeks into the 2007 season. Finally the two sides agreed, and Russell joined the team with an eye-popping $68 million contract over six years, with $31.5 million of it guaranteed.

For a bad player. JaMarcus Russell is not a good NFL quarterback. The black and silver sure thought/hoped he would be, but the point is that they shelled out that cash before he’d played a single game of NFL ball. It makes Adrian Peterson’s $40.5 million over six years look like a steal, and unlike Russell, Peterson is actually a player you’d want to have on your team. Last year’s #1 pick by the Detroit Lions, Matthew Stafford, even managed to top Russell—he’s getting $72 million over six years.

In stark, pants-wetting contrast, Blake Griffin was the NBA’s #1 pick last year. His contract? About $13.4 over three years.

Take a look at the salaries of the top ten picks from last year, and compare the NBA salaries to the NFL salaries. It’ll make your jaw drop. NBA rookie salaries also have a fourth year option and the possibility of a fifth year qualifying offer , but the maximum raise is only marginal for each year: 26-27% for the fourth, and 30-35% for the fifth (for example, Griffin’s possible contract over five years is about $27.2 million). And in the NBA, where contracts are guaranteed, a long contract can be just as handcuffing as a large one.

So, obviously the NBA’s got it right. You don’t have to pay small-country-GDP-sized salaries to newbies in the league.

The great part is that this is a concession that the NFLPA will make. Does it matter to any existing NFL players, or their union, if new rookies get paid less? They’d probably prefer it, so then their paycheck isn’t getting dwarfed by some young whippersnapper who may or may not actually even pan out as an NFL player.

So here’s a cue that the NFL can take from the NBA. Put rookies on a salary scale, and the owners can keep the money they save—which, for a #1 pick, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million over the length of the contract. Which is more money than I’ll see in the entire course of my mortal tenure.

Now let’s flip sides. As nice as the rookie scale is in the NBA, they’ve made a super boneheaded move in requiring salary matching in trades.

News Flash: Salary Matching in Trades Makes Zero Sense

If you’re not up to speed, let me fill you in. The NBA requires the combined salaries of traded players to come close to matching—the salaries of the players they receive can’t be more than 125% plus $100,000 of what they trade out. (Note: This isn’t true for teams that are under the salary cap. But that’s not even worth talking about. Last season, only the Memphis Grizzlies were under the cap.)

What this means is that NBA players get traded based on the monetary value of their salary, and not their actual usefulness as a player. Market value is thrown out the window. What if a guy signed a massive contract, and then broke both legs and one arm and was never the same again? Doesn’t matter. You can’t trade him for peanuts; he trades at his salary value.

The NFL doesn’t require this, and it makes much more sense. You can trade a player for market value, regardless of how much he gets paid. Remember when the Raiders traded Randy Moss to the Patriots in 2007? Here’s a world-class receiver, whose value had dropped because he had some serious baggage. Oakland was more than happy to trade him away for a fourth-round pick. That’s it. They used that pick to grab a cornerback, who now has two tackles in his entire career.

Now jump back to the NBA for the contrast. When the Boston Celtics traded for Kevin Garnett, a top player who’d become unhappy with his situation, you’d better believe it wasn’t for just a draft pick. You ready for this?

The C’s traded Ryan Gomes, Gerald Green, Al Jefferson, Theo Ratliff, Sebastian Telfair, a 2009 first round draft pick (top three protected), and a conditional first round pick that had previously been Minnesota’s to begin with. The Timberwolves also got some cash. In return? The Celtics got Kevin Garnett.

Not that it ended up as a lopsided trade; the Celtics got a title out of it. But it doesn’t always work so well (obligatory nod to the Knicks for the Eddy Curry trade), and the salary-matching rules can make it prohibitively complicated to put together a good trade.

That’s why we see all these three-team deals, and situations like Zydrunas Ilgauskas in the Antawn Jamison trade; Big Z had to be included to make the salary portion of the trade work. It should have been a simple trade of a first-round pick for Jamison (and that’s what it will be after Ilgauskas is re-signed by the Cavs in 30 days), but draft picks don’t even count for a single cent toward matching. In this particular instance, scrubbing the salary-matching rules from the CBA is not only better for the players (Z can just stay with the Cavs, instead of taking a 30-day vacation) but also for the teams/owners (the Cavs get to keep Z, and don’t miss his gargantuan presence in the paint. Don’t forget, they lost three straight when he left).

It’s a goofy rule. It’s there to prevent teams from going further above the cap, but in doing so it takes some good old-fashioned capitalism out of it. If an owner wants to take on extra salary in order to boost their talent, great. If another owner wants to shed salaries to save money, like nearly every owner has been doing this year? Well, scrapping this rule would make that a whole lot easier.

The rule might also be in place to promote parity, in that down-on-their-luck teams are likely to get at least something in return for their most-salaried assets in trades. But parity hasn’t exactly been the NBA’s hallmark (go Clippers!), and the NFL has seen two of their all-time worst franchises, the Arizona Cardinals and New Orleans Saints, in the Super Bowl in consecutive years.

Score one for the NFL—here’s something the NBA can learn from.

But Yeah, It’s Not Going To Be That Easy

It all makes too much sense, though. It’s hard to see a CBA get simpler because of more negotiations. If the thing is understandable without a fistful of graduate degrees it will be a marked improvement over what we have now, in either sport.

But complex or not, hard cap or not, goofy trade rules or whatever, holy moly, let’s get this thing solved. Nobody wins in a lockout; they hold out for more money, and end up getting nothing when there’s no games. But let me be clear: I’m not nearly as worried about them as I am about myself. I don’t even want to think about enduring a summer full of nothing but baseball, only to start up a fall with no NBA. Or no NFL. Or neither, in which case I’d end up crying myself to sleep every night. I might start sucking my thumb.

So if either league needs a little help moving the discussion forward… well, I have some ideas.