Picking on working stiffs

Over the course of the past ten days since Carmelo Anthony ditched Denver to join Amar’e Stoudemire as a New York Knick, sports punditry has promoted the tale that Melo’s power-move was the tipping point of some kind of shift in power from NBA ownership and management to players. As the Midwest quietly erupts in political turmoil over workers’ rights issues, this labor vs. management NBA narrative appeals to the zeitgeist, providing a feast of potential sermonizing spread before a nation of salivating sports commentators.

The hostility directed at the handful of players in the NBA powerful (read: talented) enough to actually decide in which city they want to live and work, and for whom they wish to work, has seemed at times like a Fox News conspiracy. For one thing, NBA superstars have been forcing or demanding (defensibly) self-serving trades for nearly 50 years, so reports of the league’s post-LeBron fan-unfriendliness represent an especially lazy type of preachy condescension. Sure, it sucks when your franchise player leaves a team that’s been constructed around him. For fans, it’s a huge slap in the face, and the fact that small-market teams (whose fans are often among the most passionate and devoted in the NBA) are usually the victims of superstar attrition—while glitzy destinations like New York, L.A., and Miami are the benefactors—only makes these situations more difficult to swallow.

Most columnists have sided with the owners in a thinly disguised attempt to appear sympathetic to fans (I suppose it’s an irrelevant detail that team management regulates advantageous press access). Make no mistake: it’s painful to see the foundation of your favorite franchise walk out the door. I’m a Sonics fan—I watched the most promising young roster in the league up and leave, and it rips your heart out. But we can’t expect people to act against their own wishes, no matter how much emotional energy we’ve spent rooting for them in our team’s uniform. Besides, for every Carmelo Anthony, there’s dozens of Chauncey Billupses: players (some of whom, like Billups, are also very talented) who have little control—or none at all—over where they play. As you’ve probably heard, Mr. Big Shot wanted no part of the Big Apple, preferring so emotively to stay in his hometown of Denver that the team actually apologized publicly for forcing him to change his address against his will.

But it’s a business, as jaded NBA folks are wont to repeat, and loyalty always loses out to the bottom line—although you wouldn’t know it from reading the past week’s doom-and-gloom headlines about the impending death of the league, and superstars’ callous disregard for the fans that spend their money on tickets, jerseys, and sneakers for the sake of showing their undying love and support for the best players on their teams. Obviously, nobody held a pistol to Chauncey Billups’ temple and forced him to start accepting paychecks from the New York Knicks—he could have retired luxuriously in Denver with the millions of dollars he’s been paid to play basketball. It’s not like he’s a firefighter in Wisconsin or anything. And there was nothing particularly graceful about Melo’s half-season in Denver—he awkwardly pretended he was invested in the Nuggets season though he’d openly courted a trade to New York since before the season began. But it was a calculated move on his part, and it paid off.

Players like Carmelo Anthony are worth the money they’re paid—as absurd as that may be in a world where public school teachers make less in a year than Anthony makes each time he ties his sneakers. He’s not the only one profiting off his talent (nor his relocation to a bigger media market), and he has earned every bit of his right to exercise leverage in deciding where he wants to sell his considerable brand. In a league where a number of nearly irrelevant players (Rashard Lewis, Gilbert Arenas, there are too many examples to list) earn MVP money, the privilege of a select few stars to make business decisions on their own behalf is one of the sole vestiges of a functioning economic meritocracy. If sports journalists are really as reactionary—nay, Republican—as they’ve sounded in the latest round of anti-labor opinionating, you’d think they’d appreciate the capitalistic virtue in that.

Meanwhile, NBA players will join a legion of de-pensioned union members and public employees—people whose jobs are indispensable to a functional society—on the picket lines at the end of this season. It’s a shame that most basketball fans probably understand the imminent collective bargaining stalemate in the NBA better than the current labor disputes that could permanently alter tens of thousands of American families’ financial well-being, but a certain fluency in NBA economics is now obligatory for any well-informed fan of the league. This summer, the buzzwords of labor struggle will become more important basketball terminology than shooting percentages or win shares, as multimillionaire athletes join the ranks of the proletarians. Welcome to the revolution.