Photo from Daniel2005 via Flickr
Two men are arrested for being suspects in an unnamed crime. Police is low on evidence, but what they do have is a sophisticated interrogator. The interrogator speaks to each of the two suspects separately, and tells each of them this:
“We know the crime was committed by some combination of the two of you. You can decide if you want to admit you did it, or rat out on your friend. If both of you admit – you each get one year. If you admit and your friend rats you out – he goes free, and you get 5 years. And if you both rat each other out – you both get 3 years”.
In convenient chart form, it looks like this.
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Prisoner 1/Prisoner 2
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Admit
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Rat
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Admit
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1-1
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5-0
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Rat
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0-5
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3-3
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Let us arbitrarily choose one of our two prisoners and take a look at his demented, yet perfectly logical mind. “If my buddy admits”, goes the inner dialogue, “then I can get 1 year for admitting, and 0 for ratting out. And if my buddy rats out, I can get 5 years for admitting, and 3 for ratting out. So no matter what my buddy does, the smarter decision for me personally is to rat out”.
This exact same logic conclusion is also reached in the mind of Mr. Buddy. Thus, even though the smallest amount of aggregate jail time is achieved by both prisoners admitting to their crime, both rat out, and they sit a combined 6 years.
This is an aspect of game theory called
The Prisoner’s Dilemma. And though the “game” in game theory is mathematics, and not basketball, this is exactly what’s preventing the NBA lockout from ending.
The NBA and its players are currently looking at a gap that consists of just 3% of BRI. The players want a 53-47 split, while the owners have upped their offer only to 50-50. Those 3% are all that’s standing between us and actual, honest-to-goodness basketball.
What does this actually mean? Well, that’s what Larry Coon is for.
The players are holding out for an additional $120 million in 2011-12, but holding out costs them $82.4 million per week. They would lose everything they stand to gain this season in less than two weeks. On Monday the league is expected to announce the cancellation of the first two weeks of the season, which will cost the players $164.8 million.
Over a six year agreement, the players would burn through the $796 million in a little under 10 weeks. If they continue to hold out for 53 percent, and the owners hold firm at 50 percent, the players will reach the break-even point around December 16th. If the sides settle for 53 percent past that date, then the players would have been better off by taking the owners’ offer of 50 percent before games were cancelled.
via The player salaries lost to a lockout – TrueHoop Blog – ESPN.
In this case, the NBA is one prisoner, and the players are another. “Ratting out” for that extra 3% looks good on paper – after all, this lockout was always about financial splits, and each side badly wants to win that battle. But if both sides rat out, the losses will be worse for everybody. Huge losses will combine with lost momentum to create a much worse situation than the 6 aggregate years served by our hypothetical criminals from before. No, for prisoners Hunter and Stern, our table looks more like this.
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Stern/Hunter
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Relent
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Hold
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Relent
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51.5-48.5
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53-47
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Hold
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50-50
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ULTIMATE-DOOM
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Of course, things are much more complicated, in thousands of different ways. From TV deals to career lengths, from competitive balance to revenue sharing, hard caps, amnesty clauses, setting precedents for future CBAs – it is impossible to capture the full complexity of the lockout in a 9-cell table that thinks it’s funny just because it used two different colors.
But the point remains. Standing strong for one’s principles makes for great stories of heroism and mediocre Hollywood scripts, but those weren’t going to be written about the owners and the players anyway. At the moment, this is just a giant fuss about something that may be very valuable – far be it from me to bat an eye at 3% of a 4 billion dollar total – but shouldn’t be valuable enough to throw away everything.
Split the difference, gentlemen. Don’t try to be sophisticated, don’t try to analyze what the other side is doing to gain a psychological advantage, don’t go calling on bluffs. There is too much at stake. After all, in the lockout version of this dilemma, it’s not you that are the prisoners, it’s the community of fans you’ve worked so hard to establish. And I’m sure every single one of those fans would gladly admit to a variety of crimes if it got them basketball again.
