By Jeff Moss
October 25, 2011
DetroitSportsRag@gmail.com 

Remember near the end of “Return of the Jedi” when Luke Skywalker’s anger got the best of him and he engaged in a vicious lightsaber battle with Darth Vader on the new Death Star?

Do you recall the unfettered look of joy on Emperor Palpatine’s deformed grill while the father and son battled it out to the death in front of his throne?

Well, that is EXACTLY the same look I had on my face last Thursday night when the marathon bargaining session between the NBA and the NBPA ended in disaster.

I was ecstatic the moment Adrian Wojnarowski ran to Twitter and updated us on the nastiness that occurred during the 16-hour “negotiation.”

Hopefully, Paul Allen and Kevin Garnett will continue to allow the hate to flow through them for the foreseeable future.

As I have written on previous occasions, I want the owners to break the players back and make them humble™ (Iron Shiek.) I don’t want to see professional basketball return until David Stern has imposed on the players a Hard Salary Cap brought to you by Cialis.

Look, my position on this labor situation has absolutely nothing to do with my feelings on Collective Bargaining between labor and management.

I don’t like the owners any more than the players. I really don’t care if the BRI breakdown is 50/50 or 52/48 or some type of floating mechanism.

I don’t give a shit if as part of the final CBA, David Stern’s title of Commissioner is replaced with that of “Masta” as a concession to Bryant Gumbel.

I couldn’t care less if the players negotiate the ability to wear True Religion jeans [PRODUCT PLACEMENT] falling from their asses accompanied by Sean John graphic tees instead of the current restrictive dress code when they are sitting on the bench in street clothes.

I don’t give a shit about any of these sideshows that we are enduring while this lockout continues marching on towards the inevitable crushing of the union or the cancellation of the 2011-2 season.

Nope, I just SELFISHLY want the NBA to impose the same bullshit rules that Gary Bettman instituted after the 2004-5 NHL season was lost when the league acted like they were Todd Bertuzzi to the NHLPA’s Scott Moore.

I am a Detroit sports fan first and foremost and all I give a fuck about is how this shit is going to affect the Pistons.

Before the NHL adopted this current no loophole salary restrictive system the Red Wings were the only one of the Big 4 teams in Detroit that had an actual advantage when it came to payroll.

Not only was Mike Ilitch willing to outspend the rest of the league in his pursuit of a Stanley Cup, hockey players actually wanted to spend their winters in Detroit because of the team’s history and commitment to excellence.

But Bettman and the small market NHL owners were hell-bent on breaking the union and instituting a hard cap. Dovish owners like Ilitch, who would have lived with a luxury tax, were vastly outnumbered by the Jeremy Jacobs of the league.

So not only did hockey fans miss out on an entire season for NOTHING, Detroiters lost the only professional team that could behave like the New York Yankees.

In the six years since the hard cap was instituted, the Wings have won one Cup and lost another in a Game 7. I am guessing if a luxury tax would have been implemented instead of a hard cap, Detroit would have won AT LEAST another Cup and maybe two.

(Not to mention, as always, the team would have been a favourite™ (Canada) to win the Cup during the season that was sacrificed for NO GOD-DAMN REASON.)

So yeah, I am a little FUCKING BITTER that we lost our upper hand in the one sport where we had a competitive advantage due to economics and ownership.

And now I am looking for David Stern to carry the water for Pistons fans and extract a pound of flesh in response to the 2005 dirty work of his former nebbish deputy.

Unlike the Red Wings, the Pistons don’t have one single competitive advantage in the NBA.

They play in a relatively smaller market.

They play in a city where it snows in the winter.

They play in a city that isn’t a mecca of the entertainment business.

And now they have an owner who purchased the team ostensibly to flip it in a couple of years and make a profit and who doesn’t even know the names of the players on his roster.

Does any logical Pistons fan believe that this team can compete in today’s NBA or the one that Billy Hunter, Mark Cuban, Jerry Buss, Mickey Arison and Larry Dolan envision?

Every other Detroit franchise has the ability to compete on a year-by-year basis due to the infrastructure of the league. (Especially now that William Clay Ford, Sr. is nearly on his last breath and his kid is running the show.)

The Wings and Lions participate in sports where there is a salary cap. The Tigers luckily reside in the American League Central where they can remain competitive with the rest of the teams in respect to payroll.

But the Pistons? They don’t have a damn thing going for them.

Think about this for a second. Since 1980, the Pistons have had two genuine superstars in their organization in Isiah Thomas and Grant Hill.

Basically, we are entitled to one great player every 15 years.

In comparison, every other Detroit sports team has two superstars on their CURRENT roster!!!!

The Tigers have Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera.

The Red Wings have Nick Lidstrom and Pavel Datsyuk.

The Lions have Calvin Johnson and Ndamukong Suh.

And the Pistons couldn’t even KEEP Hill. I mean, if the Pistons could not retain a guy who went to Duke and graduated, is supposedly everything that is right about today’s athlete AND had a great relationship with the team’s top executive (Joe Dumars) at the time, how the fuck are they going to be able to keep the next Carmelo Anthony?

(And why did Gimpy Albatross leave Detroit? Partially because his wife who is from WINDSOR wanted to go to a city with nice weather and a better music industry. Unfortunately for her, God seems to be a Pistons fan so he granted us one of the best rebounders/defenders in the history of the game, fucked up her husband’s ankle and inflicted her with multiple sclerosis.)

Something has to be done to stop this current migration of players to warm weather locales or New York or fans in cities like Detroit are just going to throw in the towel.

Just take a look at the Carmelo situation. The idiot played in a city that loved him, on a competitive team that was willing to max out his contract. But when you are married to a chick named LA LA, the Denver suburbs ain’t going to thrill you.

Hell, Cleveland couldn’t keep LeBron James even though he was from the damn area. And you wonder why Dan Gilbert is insisting on a system that will make it more likely for him to keep Kyrie Irving from bolting to Jay-Z’s Brooklyn team in a few years?

And I am not suggesting that if and when the NBA institutes a punitive salary cap, all of the sudden elite free-agents are going to be dying to play in Auburn Hills.

The truth is that no free-agent superstar is EVER coming to Detroit. But at least if teams like Miami and the Knicks could only afford two superstars and a bunch of role players, you could convince yourself that a couple of good trades coupled with some lottery pick luck could vault a team like the Pistons into contention.

And if you think the Pistons are going to be able to build a team with the current NBA model like they did in the early part of this century, you’re fucking crazy.

That was an absolute fluke that has ZERO chance of replication. That 2004 Pistons team is still the only NBA champion in the last four decades that won without the aid of a bonafide superstar.

And truthfully, if Shaq and Kobe didn’t go all Avon Barksdale-Stringer Bell Season 3 Episode 11 on each other during that postseason, we probably wouldn’t even have that banner.

Just give me a hard cap with no exceptions, exemptions or redemptions™ (Jesse Jackson) and I will be a happy man.

Not to mention, the better deal the owners get, the quicker Tom Gores can sell the organization to someone who actually cares about the team.

I am a Pistons fan, not an NBA fan. So if this season needs to be sacrificed for the best CBA possible, well, I think I can give up watching the team struggle to win 30 games.

And to be quite honest, I am not even sure that a hard cap would help Detroit’s NBA franchise that much. A lot of the issues that I mentioned in this article would still exist even with a supposed equal playing field.

But it sure couldn’t hurt a team currently owned by a private equity firm.

Sorry players, it’s not personal. It’s just business.