Players appear ready to take NBA owners to court
Now that NBA players are preparing to take the labor fight with the league’s owners to the courtroom, some legal experts expect them to face a daunting challenge if they file an antitrust lawsuit.
The players rejected the latest offer from owners Monday and started a process of disbanding the union, a move that would allow them to sue the league, much like the NFL players this summer.
But rulings in the NFL players’ case against owners could make it tougher for their basketball brethren, antitrust lawyer David Scupp said. NFL players dissolved their union and filed an antitrust lawsuit this summer. A federal judge in Minnesota lifted the lockout in June, but that ruling was overturned on appeal.
Because the NBA case likely would take place in a different court, the ruling of the 8th Circuit in St. Louis to vacate U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson’s injunction of the NFL lockout will not be binding. But it will be influential, Scupp said.
“Given the rulings that came down in the NFL case, right now the owners are not in a bad spot,” Scupp said. “It could very well be that the players have an uphill battle toward getting that lockout enjoined.”
Jay Krupin, chairman of the national labor and employment practice at Epstein Becker Green, said NBA players should expect a similar outcome to what happened to the NFL players.
“It may be a different shape of a ball, but it’s very similar circumstance,” Krupin said. “It’s been threatened in baseball, it’s been threatened in football and now it’s being threatened in basketball. The reason is it that the players have nothing else to threaten with.”
There are many legal twists and turns this case will take before a judge makes any kind of outcome-affecting ruling, perhaps none more intriguing than the NBA players hiring David Boies and Jeffrey Kessler to represent them in any potential litigation. Boies represented the NFL owners and squared off against Kessler, who represented NFL players, in court.
“The fact that the two biggest legal adversaries in the NFL players’ dispute over the NFL lockout both agree that the NBA lockout is now illegal and subject to triple damages speaks for itself,” Kessler said in an email to the Associated Press.
Krupin wasn’t so sure.
“He’s one of the premier attorneys in America,” he said of Boies, “but that doesn’t mean the case is any better.”
The league already has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit seeking to prove the lockout is legal.