NBA Players Wanted Their Rights as Workers. Owners Were Standing in the Way.
NBA players are well-paid today, but it wasn’t always so. As a new labor history of the league shows, pro basketball players had to unionize and threaten strikes to get out from under the thumb of owners and win a bigger piece of the financial pie.
Oscar Robertson (with ball) playing for the Cincinnati Royals in 1964. (Sport Magazine Archives via Wikimedia Commons)
In 1983, just weeks after Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) threatened a work stoppage of its own. That move ultimately proved successful, as the National Basketball Association (NBA) became the first US sports league to adopt a revenue-sharing plan, guaranteeing players a 53 percent slice of the financial pie. In exchange, the owners got their coveted salary cap, which placed a ceiling on player pay.
These high-stakes negotiations began in the early 1980s, but in his recent book The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA, labor lawyer Joshua Mendelsohn documents how the labor battles of the preceding decades helped set the stage for the multibillion-dollar league of today.
The result is a riveting work of labor history, full of memorable characters who are also Basketball Hall of Famers: Fleisher, Stern, Bob Cousy, and Oscar Robertson, among them.
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