Tom Peck: NBA players union head is conveniently selective in taking offence

The fact that Kobe Bryant (left) will have to share the NBA’s profits with team owners has been branded ‘un-American’ by the players’ union leader (AP)

In an age where to be offended is simply to be alive, the new American basketball players’ union boss should be admired for having gone one better. So aggrieved is Michele Roberts at the “artificially deflated” salaries paid to the likes of Kobe Bryant (£15m) and LeBron James (£13m) that, she says, her “DNA is offended”.

Yes, deep in the nucleic acids of one of America’s top trial lawyers, righteous anger is tumbling down her every double helix, the cytoplasm bubbling over like a live volcano in microscopic protest at the rank unfairness of it all.

It’s “un-American” she has claimed, of this carefully brokered deal that splits basketball’s huge profits 50/50 between the players and the owners.

Roberts was elected to her post in July, replacing a former NFL wide receiver ousted amid charges of nepotism. She grew up in the housing projects in the South Bronx and rose to become described by her peers as “the finest pure trial lawyer in Washington”.

A Maverick, immediately she has set about putting the Bobcats among the Pistons, and winning praise in the process.

“Why don’t we have the owners play half the games?” Roberts told ESPN this week. “There would be no money if not for the players.”

In this she has a point, although if the owners did play half the games, it’s worth noting that one of them is Michael Jordan and another a 6ft 8in Russian, so it might not be as underwhelming a spectacle as she claims. In wanting the best deal for her charges, Roberts is true to the DNA of every other union leader, even if accusations of un-Americanism were not the first to leave the lips of the likes of Arthur Scargill and the late Bob Crow.

Her words agitate towards a walkout, of the type American sport sees all too regularly, and is inconceivable to imagine over here. This 50-50 split will be up for renegotiation in two years’ time, and her line is one that suggests such negotiation will take place with the multimillionaire players refusing to take the court, and their noble fans having a lot of free weekends on their hands that they frankly don’t want.

As the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, has pointed out, the quasi-socialist system that runs the sports leagues at the heart of America has had the advantage of making their players the best-paid sportsmen in the world, and is one which is looked on with jealousy by most of Europe’s football fans.

The college system is fully integrated in the professional leagues, and the best players are signed each year by the worst teams. It is a system that keeps hope alive for the equivalent of a West Bromwich or a Crystal Palace, who can dream of good times around the corner that aren’t dependent simply on the arrival of some bored sheikh’s son with a point to prove to the emir down the road with a two-foot longer yacht.

Should a walkout happen, it will also take effect at the exact moment that the new £17bn TV deal begins, a deal that will double the more lowly NBA players’ earnings from, say, £3m to £5m. Roberts may not find them on her side.

There is every chance however, that Roberts is familiar with the way the Premier League likes to do business, of what is presumably a more American system, but one entirely detached from conventional economic forces.

Her chief day job remains as an attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, who just so happen to be the favourite litigators of Mr Roman Abramovich. These were the guys who prepared the Chelsea owner’s defence in a £3.5bn case he eventually won in London’s High Court two years ago against his old mentor, a man called Boris Berezovsky, who lost. He later killed himself.

In a curious legal set-up, it was Abramovich’s lawyers’ job to prove the root of the two men’s riches was an entirely corrupt bargain, and as such Abramovich couldn’t possibly, legally owe the other guy anything. The story is reasonably well known: they had conspired to buy a huge chunk of Russia’s mineral wealth for £70m, in return for supporting President Yeltsin in the 1996 Presidential election through the TV channel Berezovsky owned. It paid off, Yeltsin won, the assets were bought, and then sold back to the Russian state nine years later for £9bn.

“It was a corrupt bargain, was it not?” Berezovsky was asked in court. He denied the allegations, of course, but it was Abramovich trying to prove it was, and it was he who won. It is these profits that now spew forth from the pockets not merely of John Terry and Didier Drogba but also the humble folk of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, to the tune of an estimated £60m. Yet this course of events appears not to have troubled Roberts’ ever-sensitive genetic material.

God bless America.