David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…That lawsuit really makes you think like they were right. There was a competitive market for their talent, and it really makes you think today how the NBA has a monopoly on professional basketball in the United States and that's legal. It raises some interesting questions there as to what is the NBA? Is it a company in itself? I'll spoil it a little bit and say it's not really clear whether it is in itself, a single entity, a joint venture, or just a contract between a bunch of privately-owned organizations that has a constitution and a bunch of bylaws, but they have been a different thing in different legal contexts in different courts around the country over the years to fit into whatever they need to be for that particular scenario. Of course, what are you talking about? They're in the association. It’s obvious. Not obvious. When they finally settle in 1976 and the merger goes through, what drives the players to settle is they get a major concession. The NBA agrees to abolish the reserve clause in contracts. The reserve clause said that any player whose contract was expiring—this was true across all professional sports in the US at the time—the team that the player was playing for kept that player's rights for an extra year after their contract expired. It basically prevented the free agency from happening. You'd get to the end of your contract and you couldn't go negotiate with other teams because your team held your rights for a year. If you wanted to go play for somebody else, you either had to demand a trade or sit out for a year. There was actually during the interim when the merger was being disputed. There's player Rick Barry, who jumped leagues. He was one of the first players to jump from the NBA to the ABA, and he thought that he would be able to dispute this reserve clause and be able to start playing right away. It ended up being held up and he had to spend the first season as he played for Oakland as Oakland's TV announcer before he could actually start playing in the games. When the NBA agrees as part of the settlement to get rid of this—this is huge—now free agency is opened up and this really begins the modern era in baseball. The reserve clause would end up being abolished by a lawsuit from Curt Flood. I think that would happen later. I think that was 1980 maybe I want to say. I could be wrong on that, but once again, the NBA is leading the way here. It's effectively like a non-compete. You were a professional basketball player for me. You can't compete with me by being on another professional basketball team. We're separate organizations. This is like that thing where the NBA when they want the teams to be separate organizations they are, and when they want it to be one single entity that can sign a collective bargaining agreement they also do that.…

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