Dame Lillard is firmly under contract for the next three seasons. He's got a player option in 2026 that will pay him somewhere in the neighborhood of $63 million. He'll be 36 by then. You imagine he'll pick that up. After several years of gesturing, vaguely and with little subtlety, toward an exit—won't someone rid me of this tiresome grind?—he has essentially put in a trade request. The access journalist chatter is thick, and everybody with a credential is serving as a mouthpiece for an interested party, but the message is pretty clear: dude wants to go to Miami. And if he's sent somewhere else, he might not play. 

That second part is less definite; it's ambiguous enough to scan as an empty threat. It's a sentiment Dame's self-image won't really allow him to express, even through press lackeys, and it's hard to see him following through on it. He won't go Full James Harden, even if he's doing the same sort of thing: pulling a lever that's available only to about a dozen NBA players at any given time. Dame's theoretical leverage is zilch, but he'll probably get something like what he wants. It's reasonably likely he'll be in Miami by February. And failing that, there's an overwhelming chance he'll have been shipped somewhere. At press time, the Raptors are "front-runners." Which is as plausible a destination as several others.

This relatively new norm, where NBA stars sign massive extensions with teams they think they might leave in the next year or two, is lousy. I couldn't be less concerned with how it frustrates owners and executives, but it sucks for fans of individual teams, that their favorite players' ostensible long-term commitments are paper-thin. And it has created a league that's drunk on novelty—disorienting, aggravating, and flat-out boring to follow. Because a handful of stars could skip town at any given moment, speculation on those exits composes half of all press coverage. Jaylen Brown just signed a mega-deal that should keep him in Boston for the next half-decade. In reality, it has probably purchased the Celtics a year of peace. If they stumble in the postseason again in 2024, Brown'll be halfway to Houston all summer.

It's important to note that the league's best players aren't truly in the wrong, when they try to break free of their obligations through sheer force of starpower. The NBA draft assigns them an employer, the rookie contract scale underpays them, and restricted free agency requires them to either re-up with the franchise that picked them or put at risk many, many millions of dollars by playing on the qualifying offer. By the time they have achieved any real autonomy, they're understandably annoyed. At best, they've received far less compensation than their play deserves. At worst, they've wasted a significant portion of their brief careers on a franchise that can't get its act together. So they feel justified in pushing their employers around, once they've got the juice to do so. This is not really fair or correct, but the system stinks. You get a big club and you wield it.

It doesn't seem that this rotten dynamic between labor and management is going to get fixed anytime soon. The players union recently rubber-stamped a collective bargaining agreement in which they've gained almost nothing. The swiftness with which the agreement was reached suggests that they have no substantial issues with the way things work. And that's apparently true all the way down the membership, because this is an NBPA led mostly by what you might call regular players. In 2017, Chris Paul and LeBron James commandeered the union essentially for the purpose of paying themselves, creating the vet supermax while doing little to improve compensation or conditions for their coworkers. The current NBPA president is C.J. McCollum. Other union execs include Bismack Biyombo, Malcolm Brogdon, Harrison Barnes, and Garrett Temple. None of these guys want to go to the mat in an attempt to, say, abolish restricted free agency—which limits star players' mobility, but really hurts talented mid-tier guys who enter "free agency" to discover they have no market due to RFA's offer sheet-matching rules. Or perhaps they do, but they know they've got only tentative backing from their members, who can't be bothered to even pretend they might strike.

It's easy to guess at what informs the NBPA's supine pose. The vast majority of its membership are millionaires in their 20s. They just want to hoop and no labor struggle they engage in is a life-or-death thing. Sure, whatever. Make sure we get a decent cut of revenue. And can you get them to stop testing us for weed? That's their prerogative, but the fact is a weak union makes for a lousy product. NBA owners are businesspeople, brutal bottom-liners. They're not going to look after the game any more than they absolutely have to, and they'll take whatever labor gives them, plus a few extra feet. If the rotten player-team dynamic is going to be meaningfully reformed, the NBPA has to figure out what the new dynamic looks like. They have little interest in doing so.

Which is immensely frustrating, because it's not like the inspiration and resources aren't readily available to NBA players. After slumbering in a locker for the past few decades, the labor movement has clawed back some of its dignity in recent years. Big unions have improved especially, becoming more democratic and more apt to take confrontational stances against management. In July, the Teamsters negotiated a new UPS contract that secured hefty wage increases, particularly for the company's lowest-paid workers, in large part because of a credible strike threat. Hollywood's writers are on the verge of ending a 148-day strike designed to win them greater job security, more viewership information from streaming services, better royalty pay, and protections against artificial intelligence. Though their deal is now sorted, many of them have continued to join their still-striking SAG-AFTRA colleagues on the picket lines. They understand that what they do is a team sport, and that labor struggles are vast, and unending. The UAW, who under newly elected leader Shawn Fain have a strong sense of how important they are in modeling behavior for the rest of the labor movement, are hammering the big car manufacturers, giving class war speeches published under White House letterhead, making clear that record profits necessitate record wage increases.

In short, it's a good time to pick a fight with your employer. You've got role models and comrades. The NBA players union is demonstrably disengaged from all this. Which, again, is understandable: they're mostly millionaires in their 20s. Many things they negotiate for within a CBA, they don't strictly need. These are disputes over fairness, not being able to make rent. But you wish they would recognize a workplace that, both in spite and because of how much money is flying around, is drenched in mutual contempt. Executives and owners exert near-total control over younger players, and mature stars exert near-total control over teams. Power is wildly over-concentrated; everybody seems unhappy all the time; transaction-tracking overshadows every basketball game that doesn't take place in May or June. The NBA is a structural mess saved only by the thrilling talent of its labor force. They could be doing so much more to repair it. For now, they remain content just to play ball.