David Roth's Weak In Review: Free Agency, Free Will, And Semi-Free Markets

The short answer is that I'd rather not go into why I was talking to a good friend about J.J. Hickson in a bar on a Thursday night. I would, if given the choice, not admit to talking about J.J. Hickson during my off-duty hours at all, if only because the don't-tell-anyone-how-I-live glimpse it offers into my personal life contrasts unflatteringly with the general glamor of writing about sports on the internet. But I will admit it, even if I will not go into the details, please and thanks.

We were talking about J.J. Hickson, who is a 26-year-old veteran of seven tenuously average NBA seasons, for reasons that are private and personal, but also because the frenetic first days of NBA free agency—in which just-graduated role players become rich in life-changing ways, recognized stars become rich in implausible/climate-controlled-sunglasses-hangar ways, and the Sacramento Kings fuck everything up in some avant-garde way—tend to put one in a reflective mood. We agreed that J.J. Hickson, who was a delightful dunk-and-scream college player and almost immediately an NBA journeyman, deserved better. Or at least we wished something happier for him than spending his late twenties grabbing not-so-contested third quarter rebounds on 24-win teams. It was not until I got home that I thought to check a figure I'd maybe too confidently—again: bar, happy hour, Hickson, my life—thrown out. As it happens, I was about right. J.J. Hickson has made a little over $21 million dollars in his NBA career; he earned $5.3 million of those last season, playing 19 roughly average minutes per game as a supporting player in the Denver Nuggets season-long community theater version of Event Horizon.

All of which is to say that J.J. Hickson, despite not having the type of career he and the bar-goers who support him might have wanted, is doing fine. He is a working person in a small, highly competitive, and extremely lucrative economy, and has been paid accordingly. Hickson is middle class, at least in this Olympian hothouse economy, and he is also hugely rich. This particular economy has thrown off something like $1.4 billion in new salary commitments since July 1; the days since have been defined by the ambient noise of instant appraisals, the hot-take sirens wailing round the clock, and the rumble of Wojbombs landing in round-the-clock sorties. It's been a good deal more fun than it sounds; this year, there is also the sense about it of something more than the usual creative destruction.

All this activity certainly looks like, sounds like, and pays like capitalism at work; given that it's more accurately people trying to sell their labor for whatever money is left over after the elites finish dividing it up chummily amongst themselves, I suppose it actually is. But as is always the case in professional sports, there is nothing exactly free about this particular version of the free market. In a truly free market, LeBron James is paid not a negotiated maximum salary, but in F-35 fighter jets and private islands. This market unfolds—while players earn free agency and exercise it—on a continuum that favors owners, and under the laws of the collective bargaining agreement negotiated at knifepoint in 2011, after NBA owners initiated a lockout that shortened the NBA season by two months. No one fights harder in defense of a warped and un-free market than the loud-and-proud free market types who have managed to make it work in their favor. This is not only true in the NBA, as you have undoubtedly noticed if you ever notice anything.

In 2011, for reasons that can be reduced to a belief that they could get away with it, owners sought to cut the share of NBA revenues allocated to player salaries from 57 percent to 47 percent. The owners were not wrong in this—NBA players, who are both the league's labor force and its product, wound up with 51 percent of league revenues—and they were not necessarily wrong in their calculation that, in a struggle between billionaires and millionaires, a plurality of sports fans would reflexively support the richer, whiter, less robustly tattooed side.

The resulting deal still leaves enough money for J.J. Hickson to be rich for the rest of his life. When the league's new TV deal kicks in next summer, those 51 percent of revenues will jump enough to raise the salary cap by something like $25 million. You can rent a lot of new or certified pre-owned Hicksons for that kind of money. We can assume that the prevailing price of a Hickson will also rise considerably since we've seen how irrational NBA's owners can be. This is good news for the NBA's Hickson-grade lower-middle tier; one of the signature befuddlements of this free agent period has been watching teams try to figure out what a reasonable middle-class salary looks like in a deliriously profitable league that is about to become even richer. With each groping-in-the-dark deal that hits, this unscientific consensus becomes clearer, and fans go from screaming "$12 million per year" in the tone of someone being attacked by alligators to nodding sagely and saying "$12 million per year" in the knowing tone that people use when attempting to describe an Economist article they read some of. Market forces do their things, and the NBA's little wave pool does its frothy imitation of the ocean, and business goes on as usual. All of it in the span of 36 crazy hours.

Except not quite, really.

While teams and players are making deals with an eye on the salary cap bump that's coming before the 2016-17 season, they're also doing so with the knowledge that the union can opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement at the end of that year. Michele Roberts, the new head of the NBPA, is in presentation and rhetoric, the most aggressive and singularly no-bullshit labor figure that sports has seen in a generation and more; she has signaled that the union will indeed opt out of the CBA and fight hard for a different sort of deal, one that could begin with questions like, "Why The Hell Is There Even A Salary Cap Anyway?" Which is very interesting to fans of prolonged labor disputes, naturally, but which has been more interesting to watch as it begins to take shape in the semi-free market of free agency.

It would require more aggressive parsing than I can manage at the moment to tell you how, say, Greg Monroe signing with the Bucks bodes for the future of labor relations in the NBA, although I will say that it looks kind of good for the Bucks. But there is an amorphous but palpable sense, in this free agent period, of a shift in power and perspective on the part of the players. This is a mood that has been gathering over the years since LeBron catalyzed the formation of Miami's big three, and it grows easier with each passing year to see the lockout as the NBA's power elite responding to players flexing their free will and exercising their self-determination in an unseemly way. It is now, if not quite explicit and not quite everywhere, unmissable.

It's not so much that players are energized and organizations are hapless; that's a silly binary, anyway. But as players opt out of deals and refuse to leave money on the table, as they refuse hometown discounts and put prospective employees through the paces, there is the sense that players are dedicated to pressing individual advantages as a path to creating a collective one; the moldy editorial moralizing about Greedy Players seems not just stale and wrongheadedly sentimental but antique. That is not the game being played, here, and it never was. The players are approaching free agency with the clear-eyed self-interest that the owners have always brought to the process, and if this is not exactly inspiring—individuated self-interest in action is something like the opposite of inspiring, at least from a spectator's perspective—it is at least something like progress.

There has always been something queasy about the commodification that defines the NBA Draft and the machinations of the offseason; it's only fan-sided abstraction that keeps us from being more thoroughly skeeved by human beings getting traded from one city to the next, and the flubby business jargon that comprises the contemporary NBA conversation, all leveraged assets and interlocking efficiencies, is drearily familiar from the equally unequal world in which we non-NBA players sell our labor. Given the choice between business and basketball, basketball will always be more fun to watch. But in the business of basketball as in the game itself, it is a lot more fun to watch when both teams have a chance to win.