Michele Roberts has a big, important job.
She's a talented, relentless trial lawyer who has taken up the cause of representing NBA players in their partnership/adversarial relationship with the league and teams that employ them.
She rose to power as executive director of the National Basketball Players Association in the aftermath of an ethics scandal that ousted her predecessor, Billy Hunter, whose track record also included a two-decade losing streak in every round of collective bargaining against David Stern, Adam Silver and the billionaire owners who sign the players' checks.
She has assembled a capable, talented team of lawyers, economists and marketing experts -- her "gladiators," she calls them -- and recently announced during All-Star weekend in New York that the most prominent basketball player on the planet, LeBron James, has been elected to a senior leadership role with the union.
Nobody is paying outlandish ticket prices to watch middle-aged white men count money. The television networks didn't commit $24 billion over nine years to broadcast the NBA across the globe to showcase the 30 owners. If you want to see Mark Cuban, watch "Shark Tank."
People pay to see the players. But the reality for Roberts is that the workers, no matter how much money they are making or how famous they are, never have the upper hand in labor negotiations. The people with the private jets, cruise ships and vaults filled with cash have all the leverage. Undaunted, Roberts has established a pattern of fighting the good fight and playing to her base with outlandish rhetoric -- like calling the owners "expendable" and the salary cap "un-American."
Rah-rah-rah, sis-boom-bah. See you at the Waldorf in 2017, Silver must be thinking.
There are a lot of problems in front of Roberts, but one in particular came to light this week that is somewhat troubling considering her role as the bargaining agent and advocate for the players: She apparently has no idea who pays their salaries.
You do.
There's an old saying in the newspaper industry: Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. In the digital age, the ink has slowly dried up, replaced by bandwidth, but the logic still applies. Yet in remarks published in a lengthy ESPN-W profile of Roberts, she picked such a fight with the click-stained wretches who populate NBA practice facilities and locker rooms for the purpose of delivering information to you -- the NBA's paying customer -- from the athletes you care about.
Having sauntered through a few locker rooms glad-handing her constituents, Roberts concluded that allowing media on the premises before and after games amounts to "an incredible invasion of privacy."
"It's a tremendous commitment that we've made to the media," Roberts said. "Are there ways that we can tone it down? Of course."
A bit of a history lesson: Prior to 1982, the NBA Finals weren't even on live TV; they were on tape delay. The league's final TV contract of the tape-delay era totaled $1.5 million over three years.
That's now the minimum salary for an NBA rookie, collectively bargained by the NBA and the union that Roberts now leads. Their salaries -- and hers -- are only going up from here.
Unlike Roberts, I won't bore you with the laundry list of workplace issues that exist for NBA players and reporters in cramped basketball locker rooms. You don't care how the sausage is made, you just want your information -- and you are consuming it at a rate that has helped the NBA grow from a fringe curiosity in the 1970s and early 1980s to a $5 billion global business.
Fans' consumption of NBA tickets, merchandise, broadcasts and yes, information -- on whatever screen you happen to have in front of you at the moment -- has contributed to the league negotiating a broadcast and digital rights contract that literally is so massive, the owners and players can't even agree on how to inject all that money into the sport's economic engine.
There was a time not so far removed from my experience covering the NBA when the league literally had to beg reporters to cover All-Star weekend. Two weeks ago in New York, 1,800 media were credentialed for the event -- to the point where getting more than a five-second sound byte from a player was next to impossible.
Are too many reporters credentialed for NBA games, resulting in crowded, untenable working conditions for both the reporters and the players? Perhaps. But issuing media credentials is the job of the teams, not the NBPA. Does pre- and postgame media access time often become, as Roberts stated, "eight or nine reporters just standing there, just staring at [the players]?" Sometimes. Often, the reporters are just staring at each other because the players don't venture into the locker room during that time -- despite the league deciding before last season to reduce pre-game media availability from 45 minutes to 30 minutes, in an effort to make it more efficient and accommodating for all involved.
Postgame is often no better, with stars like Carmelo Anthony doggedly pursuing the world record for longest shower.
The Pro Basketball Writers Association issued a statement Thursday calling Roberts' characterization of locker room access periods "inaccurate."
“The vast majority of players and the vast majority of our members have positive interactions on a daily basis," the PBWA said.
As they should. This is what it says on page 492 of the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement, a document that it's Roberts' job to be familiar with: "Upon request, the Player shall consent to and make himself available for interviews by representatives of the media conducted at reasonable times."
Every time a player gets a deal worth millions (or tens of millions) of dollars, he signs a Uniform Player Contract containing this language -- and many other stipulations allowing the NBA to use his name and image to promote the business. In law school, I think they call that "modus operandi," or, "this is how stuff works."
Like owners and salary caps, sports journalists are easy targets. There's a perception among prominent players -- like, for instance, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook -- that we serve no purpose other than to get in their way. Such a lack of understanding about the role of sports media is nothing new. In my days as an NFL writer, I approached Laveranues Coles of the Jets one day after practice, upon which he instructed me to "go get a job."
"This is my job," I said.
"That ain't no job, writin' paragraphs," he replied.
That perception has now been validated, right at the top of the NBA players' leadership structure. If it becomes ingrained in the NBPA membership, it will mean less information for you -- the people who pay the bills.
There's another problem: Roberts said in the ESPN-W profile that the first thing she does every morning is Google the names of her star players to see what the news is about them.
Unless she wants to amend her contract and visit NBA locker rooms every day and work the phones to produce the content that comes up in those Google searches, I suggest she stay in her lane.
Until then, I'll see Roberts, James, Chris Paul and the rest of the gladiators outside some Manhattan hotel in July 2017, as they use the media -- I mean, have their privacy invaded -- during the next lockout.
Don't worry. I know all the good takeout spots.
