So LeBron James is opting out of his contract with the Miami Heat, and of course on Twitter the result was the regularly-expected storm of condemnation. Partially this is leftover blowback from “The Decision,” which everybody hated because LeBron arrogantly decided to reveal an enormous piece of sporting news on national television (and in the process forced ESPN to donate millions to charity, something most people forget). But partially it’s the result of two mindsets towards professional athletes, neither of which is terribly healthy.
The first mindset is distinctly authoritarian in tone, which is to say: “LeBron owes the fans.” The question of how much LeBron or any player owes their fans is, of course, never quantified, because the operating principle behind this mindset is that LeBron or any other professional athlete should just be goddamned grateful that they get to play a game and be paid money to do so. The second mindset is dismissive (and far more prevalent on the left side of the political spectrum, where jokes about “sportsball” are annoyingly common from people who should frankly have more common sense than to disparage something many people enjoy simply because it’s not their thing) and stems from the idea that professional athletes don’t deserve the money they earn because professional sports themselves are bad.
What is common to both mindsets is that athletes are, in some way, different from other workers. In fairness, this is true in some ways: in North America most athletes are still unionized, which makes them relative outliers on the labour spectrum, and have levels of job protection that most people cannot get any more. But that doesn’t change the nature of the fact that professional athletes are still labourers, and in many ways more purely exemplify the value of labour in the labour-capital relationship more than any other business you can conceive. After all, if you don’t have players, then you don’t have a sport. And yet, in professional sports, most leagues only have half of the revenue at most going to the players without whom there would be no league (and it is often less).
Which is why LeBron choosing to opt out of his contract early to become a free agent is important. He put that clause in his contract – as did Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh – because they all agreed that they wanted to try and win as many championships as possible, to create a team for the ages, and if it didn’t work out then they could go their separate ways or try to retool as necessary after a few years. And the results have been reasonably good: four straight NBA Finals appearances, two championships. That is pretty impressive. But, following the 2014 NBA Finals – where the Heat were whipped like a mule by the San Antonio Spurs, who were fundamentally a better and smarter team and where the Heat’s previous reliance on athletic, smart attack failed them when LeBron turned out to be the only star athlete left on the Heat – it’s clear that the Heat no longer have what it takes to win championships reliably.
(An aside: this is typically the point where some fans will complain about the obvious collusion on the part of LeBron, Bosh and Wade to play together, which doesn’t make any sense when you think about it: why should we condemn players for deciding to create a superteam when, if it was achieved through trades/free agency by a team, we would be celebrating smart management? This all goes back to that authoritarian mindset.)
This is exactly the scenario that LeBron, Wade and Bosh envisioned when they all signed with the Heat for a bit less than they otherwise could have commanded in free agency: the model does not work now. Time to find a new one – whether that means each of them going their own separate ways, or each of them terminating their contracts and re-signing with the Heat for less money so the Heat can afford to sign additional quality players.
It may not work; LeBron has opted out, presumably to force the Heat’s hand, but the biggest reason he’s opting out is because Wade might decide he wants to keep his $20 million per year, because nobody in their right mind signs Dwyane Wade to a deal for anything more than half that at this point, and even $10 million a year might be comparatively generous for a player who cannot under any realistic circumstances play starter minutes as a star player any longer. But that, too, goes back to what’s fair for workers: nobody forced the Miami Heat to sign Dwyane Wade to a $20 million contract. Why should Wade give up $42 million over the next two years to make other people happy? That’s a lot of money. Wade can do what he thinks is best for him and LeBron can do what he thinks is best for him (and for LeBron, that’s winning titles).
Of course, none of this really matters, because at the end of the day this is purely about envy. The people complaining about LeBron opting out are, at root, complaining that he makes a very large amount of money (regardless of the fact that he is legitimately the best in the world at what he does and that there is an insane market demand for what he does, a demand that is so great that frankly the NBA salary rules are restricting LeBron from earning what he could conceivably get from teams did those rules not exist), and generally also complaining that they do not. That’s all it is. That’s all it really ever was. And it’s a bit of a problem, because when people are opposed to workers engaging with their own basic labour rights – with workers using the terms of the contracts they negotiated to their own advantage – it’s the beginning of a slippery slope.
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Actually what turned my disinterest in sports to intense dislike springs more from the preferential treatment that sports stars and companies get from being on the “moneyed” level of our tiered justice system, along with the unjustified tax breaks and sweetheart land deals they inevitably secure at the local level. But hey, thanks for playing the smarmy “you’re just jealous” card!
You’re conflating sports labour and sports management. No player has anything particularly to do with public money paying for arenas.
why should we condemn players for deciding to create a superteam when, if it was achieved through trades/free agency by a team, we would be celebrating smart management?
The reason that I dislike player collusion is that the pro sports’ rules frameworks are predicated on — at least nominally — balancing competitiveness between teams, and the underlying assumption that players act in their own best interest, which is generally believed to be money. If LeBron’s only factor in leaving Cleveland is money, Cleveland can choose pony that cash up. If LeBron’s team criteria includes a team of near-contenders, a fantastic climate and a big media market for further packaging of his brand, Cleveland doesn’t and probably never will have those, and suddenly the Cavs (and the lower tier of smaller-market teams) are non-competitive also-rans for the next several years. Even if parity is already an illusion in the modern NBA, that dismisses it entirely.
I don’t think envy is quite the issue. Wherever he lands, whatever salary LBJ will pull down is astronomical to the point of being almost incomprehensible by his critics. His perceived arrogance, however, which came bubbling up when he was playing with that RC Humvee in high school and solidified with The Decision (and ESPN’s insistence that personalities and not sports drive news) is fed by stories like this — even though the idea of him looking out for himself is an assumption upon which the entire competitive system is founded. It’s not a perception he’s done anything to dispel, but like the fans’ expectations, that’s not his responsibility.
Orrrrrrrrr, we’re Cavs fans.
@MGK
While precise levels of gratitude are indeed difficult to quantify, it does not seem to much to me to ask that people rise to a certain level of comportment when presenting themselves to those whose largess makes them getting hugely rich possible. Fans often feel, with varying level of justification that sometimes cross the line into self-involvement, that their financial support of athletes entails not just them preforming on the field, but that they display other positive qualities as well.
Also too: this same standard applies to owners, who don’t just get rich, but often gather obscene levels of wealth from the fans, far eclipsing that made by players. A player should comport themselves with dignity; an owner should strive for nothing less than humility, verging on obsequious grovelling.
Let’s be fair. There are a lot of people who make disparaging sports about sportsball not because they have any particular beef with a specific athlete making bank, but for the toxic cultures surrounding both professional sports and professional sports fans.
I don’t have a problem with “Generic Football Player X” but I do have a problem with a culture that has made it incredibly likely that Generic Football Player X is going to be marinating in a particularly insane, self-destructive form of masculinity.
@Sigma7
Some of them are. Many are not. Baseball doesn’t really take competitive balance into account at all, for example, or there’d be salary caps and mandatory revenue sharing.
I reject your premise:
“And it’s a bit of a problem, because when people are opposed to workers engaging with their own basic labour rights – with workers using the terms of the contracts they negotiated to their own advantage – it’s the beginning of a slippery slope.”
It has nothing to do with that, at least for me. What it has to do with is the accumulation of wealth in private hands, a process which professional sports is very good at abetting. Do they deserve to earn a living wage and exercise their union rights? Of course! But no human being should be able to amass that much wealth, period. So is it jealousy? Of course! Jealous that so few completely unqualified parties get to make the resource management decisions that are going to contribute to the gradual dissolution of human society over the next century.
(Who are qualified parties? Well, if we had a government that was serious about confiscatory taxation policy, that might be a good start – at least until we can dismantle the commodity form itself.)
@Tim O’Neill
You’re barking up completely the wrong tree here, though, in your complaints. Because from that point of view, the real sinners here aren’t the athletes who are making ridiculous sums of money; the real problem is with the owners, who are making really absolutely ludicrous sums of money, and who are already insanely wealthy besides. And all of these transactions are more or less contests between those two parties. In the immediate sense, the only plausible alternative to the players getting this much money is the owners getting it.
It would be nice, certainly, to change the entire model. In my ideal world, all sports teams would be collectively owned enterprises. But in the interim, while we’re living in the world that we are in fact living in, I’m going to continue to support the athletes, however wealthy they are, over the owners, who are far more wealthy and generally awful. The players are just not the biggest problem here.
No, the real sinners are anyone with conspicuous amounts of accumulated wealth, period.
My only disagreement is on collusion. I have a problem with it (if they did collude before they were officially free agents) because it is against the rules, and it would also be against the rules if Pat Riley had been talking to LeBron and Bosh before they were free agents.
Otherwise, go where you want, make what you can (Hey, King, wanna move to Detroit?)
I’ve never understood the backlash against players who try to maximize their earnings based on their abilities. I couldn’t be LeBron James. LeBron James probably couldn’t be me. My skill set is valued at far less than LeBron’s skill set. That said, if I had a chance to dictate where I worked and for how much, I’d probably take advantage of the situation. Most of humanity would as well, I’d wager.
My problem with “The Decision” was that LeBron chose to play with some of the only players who could lead teams that would challenge him. Rather than embrace competition, he shied from it. I never want to see someone put a self-inflicted cap on their greatness.
Also, Miami Heat fans.
I’ve never understood the backlash against players who try to maximize their earnings based on their abilities.
It’s actually unclear that Lebron’s actions maximize his earnings, especially since he almost certainly makes more as an advertising spokesperson than as an NBA player. Lebron might be able to improve his lifetime total income by taking a smaller player salary if it improves his viability as an spokesperson for Nike.
Of course, we’re talking about an income level where people start buying silly things just because they can and monetary decisions stop being obviously rational.
I agree with Scott’s point, re: LeBron shying away from competition. Back when LeBron made the decision to go to Miami, one of the talking heads on ESPN (Wilbon? Simmons? I can’t remember) made the observation that you’d have NEVER seen Jordan and Hakeem, for example, or Magic & Bird, teaming up together to chase titles. Their larger point was that, while the championships were important to them, they also placed a premium on beating the best competition available to win those championships.
Man, MGK’s just killing it with these sports pieces lately (I’m including the pro wrestling piece just for simplicity’s sake). I love looking at sports from a labor standpoint.
And although I have no problem at all with Lebron negotiating his career to his best interests, I do wish that the best player in the game was more competitive towards others at his level. The “superteam” idea has merit, but I really enjoyed the era of star players being spread far and wide across franchises. It makes the standings more interesting, and although I have no figures to back this up, my sense is that it’s probably better for the league to have 6-10 teams with a real shot at the Finals than the 3-4 we have now.
I sometimes wonder if living in an era of giant conglomerates made the superteam idea more palatable to people. Maybe that’s a stretch. But there’s still something kinda poetic to me in a well-rounded (and multinational!) team with a killer bench and a great passing game absolutely devouring a flashy team dependent on mostly-aging marquee players.
I understand the Lebron hate coming from Heat fans. Sports fans aren’t exactly rational. Hey, there’s a soccer player I hate because he sued the team I’m a fan of in order no to fulfill a contract, and I get myself rooting against him even when his playing for Brazil.
That said, I agree that the whole “sports players make too much money” atitude is basically about envy. Whether or not Lebron James is making the bast decision, moneywise, is up to him. It’s his career and he makes the amount of money he makes because people are willing to pay .And I don’t mean managers. Managers only have money to pay because fans give them money.
As long as consumers are willing to funnel their money into the sport in some form, whether it is a $50+ jersey or a several hundred dollar seat to a game or anything else, that money has to go somewhere. We can’t choose how the money is spent once it gets into the business but having it go pretty evenly between the labor and management is not a terrible direction considering the alternatives.
As with many things in our business world, the voice of the consumer is expressed by where those dollars go. If we stop spending on the sport or the related products, there will be less money to go to these players or owners. As soon as the money leaves your hand, you’ve had your vote. That includes athlete-endorsed products, licensed gear, a cable package that carries the broadcast, and on and on.
It wasn’t that he decided to reveal which team on national television that people were objecting to – he could have held a press conference to announce where he was going to, and the people who objected to the overblown spectacle of “The Decision” would have happily either watched or ignored that.
It’s that he plays in a team sport, and fans want their stars to value being part of a team, rather than just being all about how great and awesome they alone are. LeBron makes things be all about how wonderful we should feel LeBron is, and how grateful whatever team he deigns to join should be that they get to be LeBron’s team. And that’s as unhealthy an attitude toward sport as the ones you described.
When was that? The Eighties were dominated by the Celtics (Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish), the Lakers (Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy) and the Pistons (Isiah Thomas, Dennis Rodman, Bill Laimbeer) – all teams with multiple Hall of Fame players and more All-Stars and All-NBA mentions than you can conveniently count. The Nineties were dominated by the Jordan Bulls (with Pippen), the Olojuwon/Drexler Rockets and then the Jordan Bulls again (with Pipper AND Dennis Rodman). The 2000s: the Shaq/Kobe Lakers, the Kobe/Pau Lakers, the Duncan/Manu/Parker Spurs, appearances by the Wade/Shaq Heat and the Garnett/Pierce/Allen Celtics. Hell, the Sixties were dominated by the Bill Russell Celtics, when Russell had 11 championships in a row.
There’s really only about half a dozen years in the 70s when the league wasn’t dominated by superteams, and that was primarily the result of the ABA siphoning away talent.
Players should and do have a right to do whatever they can do to further their interests, whether that be money, fame, or championships. People have trouble conceiving of calling players “labor” because of how much they make. However, compare what the average, or even superstar, players make to what owners make, and it suddenly looks like a normal labor market. Which is to say, management has all the power and labor is probably getting screwed.
The real source of the problem is that people have some idea that “sports” is a special breed of thing; a place where we should look for role models. Once we stop trying to conflate athletic talent with morality or some idea that players should be role models, we can look at the labor market there with clearer eyes. Of course, I suspect that a big part of the fees commanded by sports teams will start to seem less reasonable to pay for the average fan.
tl;dr – Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
I live in Seattle, and am therefore entitled to make fun of the NBA all I want.
Cities should stop agreeing on tax breaks and shared arena costs and the like until the team owners give the cities partial ownership, IMHO.
One of my favorite things about the NFL is how all the owners colluding to eliminate the possibility that one of them could betray the others by selling or bequeathing a team to a city, thus creating more teams like the Packers.
No, wait. Not favorite. The other thing.
His perceived arrogance, however, which came bubbling up when he was playing with that RC Humvee in high school…
I hope you realize how absurd that sounds.
Anyway, LeBron James publicly disrespected a rich white guy, which made him a public enemy forever.
If it’s not complaints about how “super teams” ruin sports, it’s complaints how one super player has to carry an entire team that isn’t playing to his level. I don’t know from basketball outside of Detroit’s Bad Boys but in my day the kids complained about how Dominik Hasek had to play defense, offense AND stay in goal for the entire game.
I hope you realize how absurd that sounds.
Oh, yeah. It’s a bit less absurd with context (but not a great deal): he was flirting with his amateur status his last year of high school when he’d already forfeited NCAA eligibility and was still securely the next big thing in roundball. His mom gave him an H2 for his birthday — according to Wikipedia she “secured a loan for the vehicle utilizing LeBron’s future earning power as a professional athlete,” and that raised a lot of eyebrows. And before games, he was playing with his RC Hummer on the court, which a few sports wags used to further their already-crafted interpretation of him as entitled. That was the first time I remember distinctly that his critics could point to a specific visible event and say “You see, he’s flaunting his status.”
But the only thing I remember about the Cavs owner is that he issues press releases in Comic Sans, so to hell with him.
Of course the people saying “but he isn’t working for a profit” are ignoring that by being on teams that can repeatedly win championships he’s securing his retirement income which will depend on how big of a figure he’s been during his sporting career – given that if he lives to be 100 his retirment period will likely span 6 decades, he has a huge nest egg he needs to squirrel away asap.
If you don’t like it, have a better post-career safety net for atheletes, or pay them a larger chunk of their team’s profits, until that happens they’re gonna keep hustling to be on winning teams because that’s how the game is designed.
TL;DR: Do not hate the player for having no tact, for who is to say the game will not make them a hobo? So too must the best players collude to play on the same team to win the maximum number of championships.
Although it’s true that sports players are unionized, it’s vital to observe that sports employers also have a union, and in addition to getting a pass on anti-trust law, the sport cartels are permitted, indeed expected, to openly suppress wages. In other words, what Apple, Google etc. recently got sued for doing in private, the NBA (and NFL, and…) is expected to do as a matter of course.
Holy shit that’s a lot of words to say “nuh uh you’re just jealous.”
At least part of the wrath comes from the fact that most of us have never worked with anyone who’s the absolute best in the world at what he does. The rules are pretty different for such talents.
>the left side of the political spectrum, where jokes about “sportsball” are annoyingly common from people who should frankly have more common sense than to disparage something many people enjoy simply because it’s not their thing
people on the left side of the political spectrum should have more common sense than to lazily dismiss the views of other people on the left of the political spectrum as being based on nothing more than “simply because it’s not their thing”