WITH NO END to the NBA lockout in sight, an increasing number of the league’s biggest stars are beginning to look to foreign leagues as a means of maintaining competitive fitness.
The latest to contemplate a move abroad is the LA Lakers’ Kobe Bryant. According to a report by Yahoo! Sports, the four-time All-Star MVP is considering a number of lucrative offers from the Chinese basketball league.
Though the Chinese Basketball Association is attempting to clamp down on contracts containing NBA opt-out clauses, Bryant is suspected to have been promised somewhere in the region of $1.5m per month.
It’s tempting to see the possibility of relatively lucrative employment abroad as a boon to the immediate labour interests of the NBA’s players, but as Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski explains, it could actually weaken their resolve to continue with the lockout:
“There aren’t enough good jobs available to truly give the players a great deal of leverage in talks with the NBA. The owners believe they can get the players to crack in November and December when the checks stop coming, and that’s why they won’t make many, if any, concessions in the one-sided collective bargaining agreement that the league has offered players…“There isn’t much the players can do to create leverage in this lockout, and after that meeting later this week in China, there could be even less.”
Even if Kobe doesn’t manage to make it to China, the Cheshire Jets would probably be willing to take him on.
