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David Stern is looking for a boatload of concessions from the players in the upcoming labor negotiations, the biggest of which involves the size and length of contracts.  His take is that right now the league cannot afford to pay players at the rate they are now, estimating a loss of $400 million this year alone.  Yikes.  I heard Erik Kuselias on ESPN suggest that Stern should try to get rid of the guaranteed contracts and not worry about anything else like the age limit or the percentage of revenues that the players get.  He did make one good point, that people largely don’t care what Lebron and Kobe are making but do get pissed off when guys who don’t deserve $10 million plus are getting that much.  Here are a few examples, with their 2010 salary and the amount owed on the rest of their contract in parentheses:

Erick Dampier: $10,112,500 ($23 million through 2011)

Luol Deng: $10,370,425 ($61 million through 2014)

Kenyon Martin: $15,363,636 ($31 million through 2011)

Troy Murphy: $11,047,619 ($23 million through 2011)

Mike Dunleavy: $9,780,992 ($20.3 million through 2011)

Michael Redd: $17,040,000 ($35.3 million through 2011)

Peja Stojakovic: $14,202,000 ($29.5 million through 2011)

Rashard Lewis: $18,876,000 ($85.2 million through 2013)

Gilbert Arenas: $16 million ($80 million through 2014)

Now I picked these contracts as examples because they were all bad from the moment they were signed.  In contrast, Tracy McGrady getting $20 million a year didn’t seem too awful when he signed for it, but obviously stinks today.  Dampier signed for seven years and $84 million after pulling off the oldest trick in the book, the career year during your contract year (12 points and 12 rebounds per game after barely going for double digits in either category before that).  Martin got $91 million for seven, after career highs of 16 points and 9 rebounds, and Arenas got $111 over six years after two missed seasons and three knee surgeries.

Now Lebon and Kobe’s contracts don’t make these any better or worse; they’re planty bad enough on their own.  So why is it rumored that Stern might be looking to knock down the max from $18 million to half that amount?  Economies of scale, that’s why.  If Lebron’s only getting $9 million, then the Erick Dampier’s of the world will probably have to get by on $4 million or so.  It’s just not sustainable to have a $20 million on your roster along with two other $10 million men and three to four guys making between $6 and $8 million.  Not in this economic climate.

So who’s to blame for this?  The owners, that’s who!  Mark Cuban should have been slapped for signing Dampier to that deal, and Ernie Grunfeld should have gotten canned for even suggesting that Arenas for $111 million was a good investment after three surgeries.  But nothing of the sort went down.  Instead, Wizards fans got to watch Arenas struggle to come back last season and throw everything away this time around with his locker room antics.  And so, the owners are going to demand that the players save them from themselves, yet again.  And the players will cave in and do it.  But please folks, don’t fall for the okey-doke this time around.  Last time, the owners were able to frame the players as greedy, clueless jerks, largely because of foot-in-mouth moments from Kenny Anderson and Patrick Ewing and a complicit media.  Now we’ll probably get some stupid comments again, but the media is different.  There are other sources of information out there, like this website.  So get the whole story now that you can.