Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As we've explored a wide range of aspects of power this season on Deep Background, we have not yet had the opportunity to talk about one of the areas of power that I'm most interested at a personal level, and that is the deployment of power in professional sports. Today, we get the chance to take that question on directly. We're joined by Michelle Roberts, who is the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, that is, the NBA players Union. She's the first woman to hold that job, and indeed the first woman to head a major professional sports union in North America. Michelle came to this job through a rather usual pathway. She began her career as a lawyer as a public defender in the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she was mentored by the great Charles Ogletree, who himself went on to become a famous and influential professor of criminal law at Harvard Law School. As a litigator, Michelle was known as fearsome and powerful, and she moved ultimately from the public Defender's office to working as a litigator at major Washington DC law firms, in which role she was widely noted as one of the most experienced and successful and frightening litigators anywhere in the United States. From there, Michelle went straight to the NBA Players Association, and her tenure has been marked by some remarkable historical transformations in the role and identity of players, not to mention by the particularities of COVID, including the bubble experience and more recent the efforts of the league to come to terms with vaccination. In short, Michelle is ideally placed to bring us behind the scenes and explain to us a little bit about how power operates in professional sports in general and in the NBA in particular. We're thrilled that she was able to join us. Michelle, thank you so much for being here. On deep background, our theme this year is power, and what we try to do on the show is bring listeners who are pretty good at following the news and knowing what's going on on the surface of things behind the scenes to try to understand how power actually gets deployed in the times in places where it does get deployed, and in some sense your job is like the archetype of that, because everyone knows what the NBA Players Association is on one level or another, and they know that as executive director, you're both speaking on behalf of the players and also trying to get them all on the same page. And they all understand that you're both collaborative with the league and also occasionally oppositional to it, where your interests and their interests diverge. And I think that's basically all that anybody understands about how their relationship actually works. So I wonder if you would just start for readers who know that much but probably not much more, by describing how you think about the power of the players and their association and how it operates in relation to the power of the owners in the league. It's a bit of a dance because historically, not just in basketball but across all sports, players were never expected to be in any position to exercise power. The relationship between professional athletes and team owners has always been one of aren't you lucky that I'm willing to fund this team and pay you to play? And there was this perception that the players were owned thing, but the opportunity, and beyond that, the ownership had the right to generate as much revenue as it could and dole out whatever money it thought was appropriate to the players. That there was no sort of sense that we're in this together. You can't do this without me from the player's perspective, and that has changed dramatically. Obviously, in my view, the advent of the union made a real difference. It was not until they organized and demanded the very beginning a pension planet's just just a pension plan, not the compensation that we're talking about now. There was only when they threatened not to perform, not to play, that they began to exercise for the first time. Power. Fast forward sixteen seventy five years and you've got players who are obviously have done well in terms of increasing their compensation, but the work hasn't ended. There's much more to be done. Frankly, even now there are occasionally when I gently have to remind the league and the owners that you don't tell us what to do. We negotiate how we're going to behave knock on wood. Things have been pretty good in the past seven eight years. We've enjoyed labor piece, but it's a constant push and pull because I think your historical DNA if you're an owner, is well, why don't I have to get permission from them I'm the owner. Well, players don't see it that way any longer. So we manage. But sometimes it's a little bit more stressful than other times. We're in a good place. Now, I'm going to ask you about that word owner and it's complexity. In a moment before I do you use the word that really fascinated me, you said you gently remind them, And I guess what I wanted to ask you is obviously, when relations are good, you can be gentle. But it seems like the relationship between in this industry, at least between management and labor is basically on something not very gentle at all. Namely, you have one really really big leverage point, which is that without your players, there would be no NBA. But the only way you can really exercise that leverage ultimately would be to walk, and that would cause everybody an enormous amount of money. Meanwhile, from the owner's perspective or from the league's perspective, they really really don't want that to happen, and they want to make exactly zero concessions except for the ones that would lead to that happening. So I guess what I'm wondering is, how do you do gentle in a world where both sides understand that the biggest, the only threat really is the enormous threat. How do you lower the temperature in that way? You know it's it's by reminding, if necessary, that we're talking the potential from mutual destruction. Right, this is a multi billion dollar industry, and as wealthy as the owners are, and frankly as wealthy as the players are, no one wants to walk away from this huge part of gold. No one does. We are grown ups, they're adults. We can scream and yell and threaten and eventually not get anywhere. Or we can and again we'll gently agree we don't want to go there. It's a no one's interests not to mention our fans. For us to stop playing, they will do damage to our business. But I'm happy to report is that most people are pretty smart and sufficiently self interesting that they won't go there. And so you know, in our last CBA negotiation, we had some difficult negotiating sessions, but as long as we kept in mind that it was in the best interest of everyone in that room that we keep this business operating. We were able to tone things down when they got a little bit too volatile and figure out that we had to figure something out. If people say it all the time, it's someone cliche that the best negotiations are one where everybody goes away thinking that they wanted a little bit more, but at the same time goes away believing I can live with That's why you have to be When I was preparing to talk to you, I went back and read the interviews that you gave early after you took over as executive director in twenty fourteen, and then I read some conversations and listened to some conversations that you had more recently, and I noticed, at least I think I noticed what I imagine might have been a subtle strategy. And since your successor has recently been announced, maybe you're willing to share a few tricks of the trade. Was it conscious on your part to open by saying, I have a lot of cards in my hand, and I'm going to call things out when they need to be called out. Before I've engaged in any negotiation, I'm going to use words like monopoly, because it is a monopoly. I'm going to say it's preposterous that they would blocks total salaries. I'm going to say, good luck if the owners play the games, which I thought was a very good line. They used it, let's have the owners play out the games. And then I watched over the course of the next six seven years as you came to be praised alongside the the league for having this incredibly positive relationship, especially compared to other professional sports leagues, and it's like your rhetoric just mellowed out a little bit because presumably you were winning. So am I Am I getting any of that right? You know? I can't claim that there was a grand strategy or design. I will say this, I knew that nobody knew what in the heck I was going to do when I got when I got right, I had no prior history in sports, let alone in basketball, right, So I, frankly, rather than view that as being a bit of a negative or disadvantage, view that as a positive because no one had a book on me. And what I didn't want people to think was that I was shy. Not I wish I'd been accused of that. Once maybe in my life, but that having been me either, so it's all right, And I didn't want to be dishonest, and so I thought the questions that were being posed to me were fair. You know, what do you think about the salary cap? I still think it's preposterous. I think it's absolutely outrageous that only in professional sports and basketball and football do you have a talented person not being able to get as much money as he or she can be paid. Right, it's insane that it's not illegal. It's hard to believe that it's not illegal. Not illegal because it's been collectively bargained. That's the point. You can get all this stuff as long as it's been collectively bargained, and that's the point. So I was just telling the truth. I was answering questions. Honestly, I think it was making the owners then the league nervous, and frankly they should have been. And I didn't do it to scare anyone. I just wanted everyone to understand that this is my view of how this business is structured. But I'm not an idiot. I understand collective bargaining, and all the things I purported to be preposterous were collectively bargained. Am I being dismissive of the efforts that went into those negotiations? No, because I wasn't there, and that was a time when leverage was not were leverages today for players. But I still think that having a cap system is Frankly, if I had my way, there would be no cat, there would be no salary. So but you know, like I said, I'm not God, and I don't think I'm going to be God tomorrow, so I understand that these things have to be negotiated. You had an unusual background, as you were just alluding to. You came to this job, which is a job about negotiation, from a background in litigation, where you had started as a federal public defender in Washington, DC and worked with a great Charles Ogletree and my wonderful, wonderful colleague, and you know, one of the more inspiring people I've ever had a chance to work alongside. And then you became a private side litigator, and you know, everyone feared you, because that's how you succeed as a good litigator. Right If you're not feared, you're not a successful litigator. And it worked, were you in some sense able to play on that. You know, people thought, oh my goodness, you know, if she goes to war, we really do not want to be on the other side of that. And then sure enough you didn't have to go to war. Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons that I like being a lawyer was not because I liked having a law degree. I like litigation, and I even make a distinction between litigation and trial work. And one of the things I used to drive me really crazy, just especially in my old life, just before I got this job, is that I had these cases I was litigating was so big, and frankly you won by settling, right, And but I'd get hired on these big cases and I'd say, look, you all have a settlement negotiation team. That's not me. I want to fight, all right, So you let me know if you don't. If you settled it, I don't want to be distracted, and I don't want my team to be distracted. We've got to be ready for war. But when they settled, I'd be a little disappointed. Becaust I had a great opening statement I was about to deliver, but I knew it wasn't the best interest of the client. That the client and decided to settle and CBA negotiations here. You know, I'm not, like I said, I am completely appreciative of the fact that that's why they call it collective bargaining, because you're bargaining. At the same time, there are some people who have had this role, or who have had this role in other sports that just risk averse that are known to the league and teams and not wanting to fight. I don't want to fight. I don't mind a good fight that I will. There were times when we had to say, now, this is something we'll go to war on because this is just fundamentally unfair what you're trying to do. It's all about knowing what your leverage is, knowing what your players will not stand for, and then making the argument on their behalf. That's what lawyers do. I want to zoom back out to the deeper dynamics of power between the players and the owners, and I just want to double click on that word owner. Technically, the owner owns a franchise and then is the employer of players. The word, though, has a kind of cultural capital, and you were suggesting earlier that that word somehow actually does say something about at least a mindset of management. Do you think it's actively different in professional sports as a consequence than it is in other professions that, let's say, are connected to entertainment, you know, the film business, where you have high paid talent and then you have studios and so forth. To the league's credit, they have tried to substitute the word governor for the word owner, and it's made some of my players pleased because they are offended by the word owner on some levels. I am too. I think I'm just the world that I'm used to hearing it, so I remember I use governor as well. But the addition of the fact that most of the players in the NBA are African American and most of the governors are white, it's especially disturbing. A case in point, Donald Sterling, who used to own the and again own the LA Clippers Stories and Merge that he would literally go into the locker rooms of the LA Clipper players, and Chris Paul tells this one of the films he did about this. Sterling would go in and he'd be rubbing the players, and Chris reports that he felt like he was being petted, right, and then the governors of the teams that we have now are frankly much younger, much more entrepreneurial, and have I think a better met mindset than some of the governors some of the owners of these teams back in the day. So there's a little less concern about the title, though we appreciate the change. On occasion, though the league will communicate repeat to us comments made by some of the team governors that suggest that the mentality is not quite gone. I'd prefer to and the league reports too as well us as partners, and that that's a much more palatable word than owner, and I don't want to play games. You own the team, you own the franchise, whatever, but you be very careful when you begin to use that concept and can refer to the employees. We'll be right back. One of the most significant historical changes over your time in your job has been the rise of NBA players, especially African American players, as major voices on crucial national questions of importance, most significantly on race, an association with Black Lives Matter, but not only on racially related issues. Of course, we have that legacy in the United States going back to nineteen sixties in the form of Muhammad Ali, but you know, he was in a different kind of a sport with its own very complicated dynamics, and there wasn't a league that he was actively a part of. And of course there have been individually individual NBA players Premu Bards another great example, who had strong identities and took strong stands, not an accident. In both of those cases, the Nation of Islam were part of the way that they made statements. But there's really been a main streaming of the expectation that NBA players are de facto leaders of public consciousness, both for white and for black people. And I'm wondering as you watch that happen, how much of it do you think was driven by the aspirations of the players, how much of it by the expectations of the public, how much by the fact that it's also a period of time historically where NBA players came to be extremely well paid, so that now black NBA players were among the best paid prominent African Americans in the country, and which confers a certain obligation of leadership. Arguably, Yeah, I think a little bit of all that may be there, but I think the principal component is the players themselves, right, I mean, there are any fans who are pushing them into the streets and into protests. In back. Quite the contrary, we get a lot of fans who used you've heard a million times, just shut up and dribble. So it's not as if I think that our fans are pushing us there. And now the community that's a different piece. None of these men that I'm working with go out on the streets or write those checks, or do those those community forums build schools because they feel, well, I got to do it for my public. I absolutely believe this with every ouncew of my being. But they do it because they feel it so strongly. I'm in the middle of reading Mellow's book right now, and it's just the way. It's a great read. If yeah, I have it too, it's on myself. I'm excited to read it. It's a great read. It goes very quickly. And Mellow is one of the one of the players who before became popular, was in Baltimore in the streets marching with the community. That he was a player, but he was in the streets marching the community because he passionately felt that what was happening in that community was wrong. Well, that's the same thing our players are doing now. I think they passionately feel these things the day friends, though, and I'm still marveling at this is their appreciation that, oh, I feel this way. Maybe I can do something about it because I've got a platform, and it's a platform that Muhammad Ali didn't have. It's a platform that Kareem didn't have, that Bill Russell didn't have. Despite the passion of all those men. It's frankly, Noah, it's social media. We just got a new rookie class come in and as I try to get to know who they are, and I check out their Twitter and all this Graham and they've got hundreds of thousands of people that purport to want to hear what they have to say. On a good day, I might have five people that call me and ask me what's up, Michelle. I can even imagine being able to have that audience and know that if I say black lives matter, whether you leave it or not, two millions of my followers are going to hear me say it, and some of them are gonna say, yeah, that's right. Something I say, what is he talking about it? And And maybe learn something about these issues in the community. Involving the police misconduct. Bottom line is, these players completely appreciate the power of their platform. And when we went to the bubble, a condition of going to the bubble was that we'd be permitted to talk about these issues. There would have been no season had the league made the stupid bone hit of the mistake of saying, no, you just play, We don't want to use any of your iMedia time or any of the quarts to the uniform. None of that that had happened that have been those seasons. So they appreciate that they've got platforms. Michelle, I want to just ask one more question about the kind of responsibility power question, you know, the kind of with great power comes great responsibility, And that had to do with how the Players Association negotiated, not the bubble part, which is itself totally fascinating and I think part of your incredible legacy, but also the post bubble, the vaccination period, where you guys sort of came out from the beginning and said mandatory vaccinations are a non starter. But going to voluntarily vaccinate up to a very very high percentage, I forget it somewhere between. How did you hit on that particular combination of factor, because it must have been very delicate internal thinking about, you know, what was the right thing to do for your players, for their health and safety, for those smaller number of players who might have not wanted to get vaccinated, and ultimately for the industry as a whole. You know, I frequently say, especially in the last few days or weeks, that it was a lot easier when there was no vaccine in many ways, because I could just concentrate on understanding what what we needed to do to keep the players as safe as possible, to keep COVID out of the house, so to speak. You know, the vaccine was going to be something that frankly none of us thought was going to be available as quickly as it became a bill. Sure, or it would work as well as it works, right. So the bubble, as horrific ideas that sounded, was actually, in any ways an easy decision to make because it was a way to have the players play but protect them. I mean, there was no way we were going to be traveling all over the country and being on planes and buses all that, and we had zero Once once we got to the bubble and people tested, I was there. I was there with the guys. We didn't have any cases, and so it was a completely artificial environment, but I knew that they would be safe and it turned out well. We could be finished the season, nobody got infected, let alone sick. That was a success. Then the vaccine started to happen, and unfortunately, and again, you can't separate the politics that were going on in the country from the vaccine and this notion of whether we'll take it or not, and the messages that were coming from the White House were so mixed that on the one hand, AD's not a big deal, and the other hand, I got this just super special vaccine. Is he really saying that? Because it's true all the scientists political There was so many questions that were not merely being asked in the country at large, but among our players, Michelle, is this typical for a vaccine to be ready this quickly? I've flunk seventh great biologies. I'm the last person to ask because we ended up getting our own experts. Everybody was sort of learning as it went. And to be candidate with you know, you would ask me months into the vaccine's production, I'd have said, I will be lucky if we get fifty percent of our players to take it. And you know, and I'll admit to this as well, I was suspicious. I mean I used to. In my whole life, I've represented pharmaceutical companies that were being sued in class action matters because of allegations that their drugs were not safe. How did I defend those lawsuits by pointing out the years and years of study and writings about the efficacy and the safety of these drugs that we're going for. That was our defense. It was very effective. People said, you know, one, I know, I think that they didn't. They didn't just throw something out there. They study this at first in animals got to give them, then in humans, and then none of that had happened with this vaccine, and so I was hard pressed to even personally believe that this was safe. At my age, I determined I don't have any choice because of people that were dying were in my cohort. And so to me, the decision was, oh, I know what COVID's gonna do to me, I'll take my chances, exactly. But I thoroughly understood and I still understand, that people have to get there, and people are making to find my players, But they're right those are saying it. Do the research, satisfy yourself that this is something that is in the best interests of yourself. And now what I would I have had a mandatory vaccination, Michelle, You damn right I would. I would have. And I told the players, I strongly believe that we should, every one of you should have a vaccination. But I also understand that I got here how I got here, and you get you need to get there as well. And I believe that they would, And so we voted at the time we voted, we voted a couple of times on this. By the way the players voted on this. The first time it was a non starter. There will be no mandatory vaccinations. And I can remember players who I know are vaccinated right now who said, I don't care if the Good Lord himself tells me to roll up my sleeves, I'm never taking that. So I knew it was going to be a process. And both times we voted that the players understood that there was a risk that was being taken, but not only individually, but for themselves and their families and their players families. Now we're at ninety six percent. I think we're going to get even better than that. What I have a mandatory vaccine, I would, but it's not my call. And the only thing I felt responsible for doing was making sure that they had as much information as they needed. In fact, I'm still working on some things which I think might be helpful for those guys that was still I'm not sure. I'm still worried. My wife says, no, these are unprecedented times and all of us have had to figure out how we want to manage this. It's kind of thought saying what you're saying, because I mean it sort of fits one of the themes that we've been talking about. The way that you guys in the Players Association were successful was not by laying down a law, but by a process of convincing people slowly and for them doing the research and convincing themselves. In other words, it turned out to be not that aspect of the way we think as lawyers, that's, you know, there's a right and a wrong, there's justice and there's injustice, and they're going to fight it out, but rather about collaborative conversation in a more open ended environment. And that actually leads me to my last question, which is as you transition to whatever you're planning to do next. Do you think that the old Michelle, you know, the warrior who loves to be in the courtroom, will predominate or will the Michelle who's enjoyed building tremendously successful collaborative relationships even across different sets of interests be the one who predominates. Do you think not to imply they're not the same person, but they seem like two aspects of the same fascinating life. I shell that's going to be our hope in control within the first year of my retirement, because that's what I'm doing. I'm not I'm not taking another job. I hope that she actually dust sought that list and she's been keeping for the last forty years and being able to check some things off. There are some things that I want to do that I'd like to do before I meet my maker. Having said that they're to share one or two of those. I gotta tell you, I've been blessed with incredible travel professionally. I mean, I've been on some of the greatest cities on planet, in the country and around the world, and I've never with the exception of Barcelona, and I just stole four days and said, I don't care, I'm going to Barcelona. I've never had a chance to enjoy those cities beyond you know, maybe taking the walk and the first place. I want to go to Senegal. I fell in love with that country. I want to go to Senea. I want to go back to Brazil. I mean I want to go. I love South Africa, I've been there a couple of times. I want to do Nigeria. I love love, love, love, love room. So I want to do some traveling just to just to get fat, but then I also want to pursue some things to keep my brain a little bit. I want to return to my biggest passion, but just criminal justice. I have recently joined a board of a nonprofit that I think is doing great work in this space, and I'm really excited about the work. I think I'll be able to be here and then you'll see me in a couple of next games. Well, those all sound like they're pretty amazing things. Something for you, something for the rest of the world, something for fun. Yeah. I really want to thank you for sharing your insights and your experiences, and also just for your fascinating work, which I think has contributed to justice in a lot of really interesting ways, from different angles and in different perspectives. So thank you, Michelle, No, thank you, No, I appreciate it. We'll be right back. Listening to Michelle, I was please struck by her directness in explaining how she deploys power in her position and how the players in the NBA have overtime been able to gain greater power visavi, the league and the governors as team owners are now increasingly known. In essence, as Michelle made crystal clear, the power of the players derives from their ability to walk off the job, the most fundamental power of any group of employees represented by a union. Given that circumstance, she has been able to craft the interests of the players into a far more collegial relationship with management than exists in other professional sports leagues or than existed at previous times in the history of the NBA. From strength, she generated collaboration and collegiality, always remembering that being willing to go to the mats and fight as needed is conferral of power. At the same time, Michelle also made it very clear that she learned to be collegial and she's benefited from that collegiality by bringing people to recognize im mutuality of interest. All of this has given her an inside perspective to watch the transformation of the power of NBA players through their leadership on major issues of national social importance, particularly Black Lives Matter, and also by their ability to wield social media presence as an important new tool that was not available to earlier generations of professional athletes. Ultimately, I would say that Michelle's tenure is a kind of object lesson in how it looks when things actually work between labor and management. And it's also an object lesson in how power subtly and gradually can be transformed at the hands of sophisticated actors who think things through, strategize and get results. You can't avoid the possibility of conflict, but sometimes, if you're as good as Michelle is, you can deploy the threat of conflict to achieve its exact opposite, namely collegiality and collaboration. There's a lesson there, I think for all of us, no matter what we do for a living, and even if like me, we're never going to play in the NBA until the next time I speak to you breathe deep, think deep thoughts, play some ball, and have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noa Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our engineer is Benaliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gera at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia, Jean Coott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah r Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As we've explored a wide range of aspects of power this season on Deep Background, we have not yet had the opportunity to talk about one of the areas of power that I'm most interested at a personal level, and that is the deployment of power in professional sports. Today, we get the chance to take that question on directly. We're joined by Michelle Roberts, who is the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, that is, the NBA players Union. She's the first woman to hold that job, and indeed the first woman to head a major professional sports union in North America. Michelle came to this job through a rather usual pathway. She began her career as a lawyer as a public defender in the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she was mentored by the great Charles Ogletree, who himself went on to become a famous and influential professor of criminal law at Harvard Law School. As a litigator, Michelle was known as fearsome and powerful, and she moved ultimately from the public Defender's office to working as a litigator at major Washington DC law firms, in which role she was widely noted as one of the most experienced and successful and frightening litigators anywhere in the United States. From there, Michelle went straight to the NBA Players Association, and her tenure has been marked by some remarkable historical transformations in the role and identity of players, not to mention by the particularities of COVID, including the bubble experience and more recent the efforts of the league to come to terms with vaccination. In short, Michelle is ideally placed to bring us behind the scenes and explain to us a little bit about how power operates in professional sports in general and in the NBA in particular. We're thrilled that she was able to join us. Michelle, thank you so much for being here. On deep background, our theme this year is power, and what we try to do on the show is bring listeners who are pretty good at following the news and knowing what's going on on the surface of things behind the scenes to try to understand how power actually gets deployed in the times in places where it does get deployed, and in some sense your job is like the archetype of that, because everyone knows what the NBA Players Association is on one level or another, and they know that as executive director, you're both speaking on behalf of the players and also trying to get them all on the same page. And they all understand that you're both collaborative with the league and also occasionally oppositional to it, where your interests and their interests diverge. And I think that's basically all that anybody understands about how their relationship actually works. So I wonder if you would just start for readers who know that much but probably not much more, by describing how you think about the power of the players and their association and how it operates in relation to the power of the owners in the league. It's a bit of a dance because historically, not just in basketball but across all sports, players were never expected to be in any position to exercise power. The relationship between professional athletes and team owners has always been one of aren't you lucky that I'm willing to fund this team and pay you to play? And there was this perception that the players were owned thing, but the opportunity, and beyond that, the ownership had the right to generate as much revenue as it could and dole out whatever money it thought was appropriate to the players. That there was no sort of sense that we're in this together. You can't do this without me from the player's perspective, and that has changed dramatically. Obviously, in my view, the advent of the union made a real difference. It was not until they organized and demanded the very beginning a pension planet's just just a pension plan, not the compensation that we're talking about now. There was only when they threatened not to perform, not to play, that they began to exercise for the first time. Power. Fast forward sixteen seventy five years and you've got players who are obviously have done well in terms of increasing their compensation, but the work hasn't ended. There's much more to be done. Frankly, even now there are occasionally when I gently have to remind the league and the owners that you don't tell us what to do. We negotiate how we're going to behave knock on wood. Things have been pretty good in the past seven eight years. We've enjoyed labor piece, but it's a constant push and pull because I think your historical DNA if you're an owner, is well, why don't I have to get permission from them I'm the owner. Well, players don't see it that way any longer. So we manage. But sometimes it's a little bit more stressful than other times. We're in a good place. Now, I'm going to ask you about that word owner and it's complexity. In a moment before I do you use the word that really fascinated me, you said you gently remind them, And I guess what I wanted to ask you is obviously, when relations are good, you can be gentle. But it seems like the relationship between in this industry, at least between management and labor is basically on something not very gentle at all. Namely, you have one really really big leverage point, which is that without your players, there would be no NBA. But the only way you can really exercise that leverage ultimately would be to walk, and that would cause everybody an enormous amount of money. Meanwhile, from the owner's perspective or from the league's perspective, they really really don't want that to happen, and they want to make exactly zero concessions except for the ones that would lead to that happening. So I guess what I'm wondering is, how do you do gentle in a world where both sides understand that the biggest, the only threat really is the enormous threat. How do you lower the temperature in that way? You know it's it's by reminding, if necessary, that we're talking the potential from mutual destruction. Right, this is a multi billion dollar industry, and as wealthy as the owners are, and frankly as wealthy as the players are, no one wants to walk away from this huge part of gold. No one does. We are grown ups, they're adults. We can scream and yell and threaten and eventually not get anywhere. Or we can and again we'll gently agree we don't want to go there. It's a no one's interests not to mention our fans. For us to stop playing, they will do damage to our business. But I'm happy to report is that most people are pretty smart and sufficiently self interesting that they won't go there. And so you know, in our last CBA negotiation, we had some difficult negotiating sessions, but as long as we kept in mind that it was in the best interest of everyone in that room that we keep this business operating. We were able to tone things down when they got a little bit too volatile and figure out that we had to figure something out. If people say it all the time, it's someone cliche that the best negotiations are one where everybody goes away thinking that they wanted a little bit more, but at the same time goes away believing I can live with That's why you have to be When I was preparing to talk to you, I went back and read the interviews that you gave early after you took over as executive director in twenty fourteen, and then I read some conversations and listened to some conversations that you had more recently, and I noticed, at least I think I noticed what I imagine might have been a subtle strategy. And since your successor has recently been announced, maybe you're willing to share a few tricks of the trade. Was it conscious on your part to open by saying, I have a lot of cards in my hand, and I'm going to call things out when they need to be called out. Before I've engaged in any negotiation, I'm going to use words like monopoly, because it is a monopoly. I'm going to say it's preposterous that they would blocks total salaries. I'm going to say, good luck if the owners play the games, which I thought was a very good line. They used it, let's have the owners play out the games. And then I watched over the course of the next six seven years as you came to be praised alongside the the league for having this incredibly positive relationship, especially compared to other professional sports leagues, and it's like your rhetoric just mellowed out a little bit because presumably you were winning. So am I Am I getting any of that right? You know? I can't claim that there was a grand strategy or design. I will say this, I knew that nobody knew what in the heck I was going to do when I got when I got right, I had no prior history in sports, let alone in basketball, right, So I, frankly, rather than view that as being a bit of a negative or disadvantage, view that as a positive because no one had a book on me. And what I didn't want people to think was that I was shy. Not I wish I'd been accused of that. Once maybe in my life, but that having been me either, so it's all right, And I didn't want to be dishonest, and so I thought the questions that were being posed to me were fair. You know, what do you think about the salary cap? I still think it's preposterous. I think it's absolutely outrageous that only in professional sports and basketball and football do you have a talented person not being able to get as much money as he or she can be paid. Right, it's insane that it's not illegal. It's hard to believe that it's not illegal. Not illegal because it's been collectively bargained. That's the point. You can get all this stuff as long as it's been collectively bargained, and that's the point. So I was just telling the truth. I was answering questions. Honestly, I think it was making the owners then the league nervous, and frankly they should have been. And I didn't do it to scare anyone. I just wanted everyone to understand that this is my view of how this business is structured. But I'm not an idiot. I understand collective bargaining, and all the things I purported to be preposterous were collectively bargained. Am I being dismissive of the efforts that went into those negotiations? No, because I wasn't there, and that was a time when leverage was not were leverages today for players. But I still think that having a cap system is Frankly, if I had my way, there would be no cat, there would be no salary. So but you know, like I said, I'm not God, and I don't think I'm going to be God tomorrow, so I understand that these things have to be negotiated. You had an unusual background, as you were just alluding to. You came to this job, which is a job about negotiation, from a background in litigation, where you had started as a federal public defender in Washington, DC and worked with a great Charles Ogletree and my wonderful, wonderful colleague, and you know, one of the more inspiring people I've ever had a chance to work alongside. And then you became a private side litigator, and you know, everyone feared you, because that's how you succeed as a good litigator. Right If you're not feared, you're not a successful litigator. And it worked, were you in some sense able to play on that. You know, people thought, oh my goodness, you know, if she goes to war, we really do not want to be on the other side of that. And then sure enough you didn't have to go to war. Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons that I like being a lawyer was not because I liked having a law degree. I like litigation, and I even make a distinction between litigation and trial work. And one of the things I used to drive me really crazy, just especially in my old life, just before I got this job, is that I had these cases I was litigating was so big, and frankly you won by settling, right, And but I'd get hired on these big cases and I'd say, look, you all have a settlement negotiation team. That's not me. I want to fight, all right, So you let me know if you don't. If you settled it, I don't want to be distracted, and I don't want my team to be distracted. We've got to be ready for war. But when they settled, I'd be a little disappointed. Becaust I had a great opening statement I was about to deliver, but I knew it wasn't the best interest of the client. That the client and decided to settle and CBA negotiations here. You know, I'm not, like I said, I am completely appreciative of the fact that that's why they call it collective bargaining, because you're bargaining. At the same time, there are some people who have had this role, or who have had this role in other sports that just risk averse that are known to the league and teams and not wanting to fight. I don't want to fight. I don't mind a good fight that I will. There were times when we had to say, now, this is something we'll go to war on because this is just fundamentally unfair what you're trying to do. It's all about knowing what your leverage is, knowing what your players will not stand for, and then making the argument on their behalf. That's what lawyers do. I want to zoom back out to the deeper dynamics of power between the players and the owners, and I just want to double click on that word owner. Technically, the owner owns a franchise and then is the employer of players. The word, though, has a kind of cultural capital, and you were suggesting earlier that that word somehow actually does say something about at least a mindset of management. Do you think it's actively different in professional sports as a consequence than it is in other professions that, let's say, are connected to entertainment, you know, the film business, where you have high paid talent and then you have studios and so forth. To the league's credit, they have tried to substitute the word governor for the word owner, and it's made some of my players pleased because they are offended by the word owner on some levels. I am too. I think I'm just the world that I'm used to hearing it, so I remember I use governor as well. But the addition of the fact that most of the players in the NBA are African American and most of the governors are white, it's especially disturbing. A case in point, Donald Sterling, who used to own the and again own the LA Clippers Stories and Merge that he would literally go into the locker rooms of the LA Clipper players, and Chris Paul tells this one of the films he did about this. Sterling would go in and he'd be rubbing the players, and Chris reports that he felt like he was being petted, right, and then the governors of the teams that we have now are frankly much younger, much more entrepreneurial, and have I think a better met mindset than some of the governors some of the owners of these teams back in the day. So there's a little less concern about the title, though we appreciate the change. On occasion, though the league will communicate repeat to us comments made by some of the team governors that suggest that the mentality is not quite gone. I'd prefer to and the league reports too as well us as partners, and that that's a much more palatable word than owner, and I don't want to play games. You own the team, you own the franchise, whatever, but you be very careful when you begin to use that concept and can refer to the employees. We'll be right back. One of the most significant historical changes over your time in your job has been the rise of NBA players, especially African American players, as major voices on crucial national questions of importance, most significantly on race, an association with Black Lives Matter, but not only on racially related issues. Of course, we have that legacy in the United States going back to nineteen sixties in the form of Muhammad Ali, but you know, he was in a different kind of a sport with its own very complicated dynamics, and there wasn't a league that he was actively a part of. And of course there have been individually individual NBA players Premu Bards another great example, who had strong identities and took strong stands, not an accident. In both of those cases, the Nation of Islam were part of the way that they made statements. But there's really been a main streaming of the expectation that NBA players are de facto leaders of public consciousness, both for white and for black people. And I'm wondering as you watch that happen, how much of it do you think was driven by the aspirations of the players, how much of it by the expectations of the public, how much by the fact that it's also a period of time historically where NBA players came to be extremely well paid, so that now black NBA players were among the best paid prominent African Americans in the country, and which confers a certain obligation of leadership. Arguably, Yeah, I think a little bit of all that may be there, but I think the principal component is the players themselves, right, I mean, there are any fans who are pushing them into the streets and into protests. In back. Quite the contrary, we get a lot of fans who used you've heard a million times, just shut up and dribble. So it's not as if I think that our fans are pushing us there. And now the community that's a different piece. None of these men that I'm working with go out on the streets or write those checks, or do those those community forums build schools because they feel, well, I got to do it for my public. I absolutely believe this with every ouncew of my being. But they do it because they feel it so strongly. I'm in the middle of reading Mellow's book right now, and it's just the way. It's a great read. If yeah, I have it too, it's on myself. I'm excited to read it. It's a great read. It goes very quickly. And Mellow is one of the one of the players who before became popular, was in Baltimore in the streets marching with the community. That he was a player, but he was in the streets marching the community because he passionately felt that what was happening in that community was wrong. Well, that's the same thing our players are doing now. I think they passionately feel these things the day friends, though, and I'm still marveling at this is their appreciation that, oh, I feel this way. Maybe I can do something about it because I've got a platform, and it's a platform that Muhammad Ali didn't have. It's a platform that Kareem didn't have, that Bill Russell didn't have. Despite the passion of all those men. It's frankly, Noah, it's social media. We just got a new rookie class come in and as I try to get to know who they are, and I check out their Twitter and all this Graham and they've got hundreds of thousands of people that purport to want to hear what they have to say. On a good day, I might have five people that call me and ask me what's up, Michelle. I can even imagine being able to have that audience and know that if I say black lives matter, whether you leave it or not, two millions of my followers are going to hear me say it, and some of them are gonna say, yeah, that's right. Something I say, what is he talking about it? And And maybe learn something about these issues in the community. Involving the police misconduct. Bottom line is, these players completely appreciate the power of their platform. And when we went to the bubble, a condition of going to the bubble was that we'd be permitted to talk about these issues. There would have been no season had the league made the stupid bone hit of the mistake of saying, no, you just play, We don't want to use any of your iMedia time or any of the quarts to the uniform. None of that that had happened that have been those seasons. So they appreciate that they've got platforms. Michelle, I want to just ask one more question about the kind of responsibility power question, you know, the kind of with great power comes great responsibility, And that had to do with how the Players Association negotiated, not the bubble part, which is itself totally fascinating and I think part of your incredible legacy, but also the post bubble, the vaccination period, where you guys sort of came out from the beginning and said mandatory vaccinations are a non starter. But going to voluntarily vaccinate up to a very very high percentage, I forget it somewhere between. How did you hit on that particular combination of factor, because it must have been very delicate internal thinking about, you know, what was the right thing to do for your players, for their health and safety, for those smaller number of players who might have not wanted to get vaccinated, and ultimately for the industry as a whole. You know, I frequently say, especially in the last few days or weeks, that it was a lot easier when there was no vaccine in many ways, because I could just concentrate on understanding what what we needed to do to keep the players as safe as possible, to keep COVID out of the house, so to speak. You know, the vaccine was going to be something that frankly none of us thought was going to be available as quickly as it became a bill. Sure, or it would work as well as it works, right. So the bubble, as horrific ideas that sounded, was actually, in any ways an easy decision to make because it was a way to have the players play but protect them. I mean, there was no way we were going to be traveling all over the country and being on planes and buses all that, and we had zero Once once we got to the bubble and people tested, I was there. I was there with the guys. We didn't have any cases, and so it was a completely artificial environment, but I knew that they would be safe and it turned out well. We could be finished the season, nobody got infected, let alone sick. That was a success. Then the vaccine started to happen, and unfortunately, and again, you can't separate the politics that were going on in the country from the vaccine and this notion of whether we'll take it or not, and the messages that were coming from the White House were so mixed that on the one hand, AD's not a big deal, and the other hand, I got this just super special vaccine. Is he really saying that? Because it's true all the scientists political There was so many questions that were not merely being asked in the country at large, but among our players, Michelle, is this typical for a vaccine to be ready this quickly? I've flunk seventh great biologies. I'm the last person to ask because we ended up getting our own experts. Everybody was sort of learning as it went. And to be candidate with you know, you would ask me months into the vaccine's production, I'd have said, I will be lucky if we get fifty percent of our players to take it. And you know, and I'll admit to this as well, I was suspicious. I mean I used to. In my whole life, I've represented pharmaceutical companies that were being sued in class action matters because of allegations that their drugs were not safe. How did I defend those lawsuits by pointing out the years and years of study and writings about the efficacy and the safety of these drugs that we're going for. That was our defense. It was very effective. People said, you know, one, I know, I think that they didn't. They didn't just throw something out there. They study this at first in animals got to give them, then in humans, and then none of that had happened with this vaccine, and so I was hard pressed to even personally believe that this was safe. At my age, I determined I don't have any choice because of people that were dying were in my cohort. And so to me, the decision was, oh, I know what COVID's gonna do to me, I'll take my chances, exactly. But I thoroughly understood and I still understand, that people have to get there, and people are making to find my players, But they're right those are saying it. Do the research, satisfy yourself that this is something that is in the best interests of yourself. And now what I would I have had a mandatory vaccination, Michelle, You damn right I would. I would have. And I told the players, I strongly believe that we should, every one of you should have a vaccination. But I also understand that I got here how I got here, and you get you need to get there as well. And I believe that they would, And so we voted at the time we voted, we voted a couple of times on this. By the way the players voted on this. The first time it was a non starter. There will be no mandatory vaccinations. And I can remember players who I know are vaccinated right now who said, I don't care if the Good Lord himself tells me to roll up my sleeves, I'm never taking that. So I knew it was going to be a process. And both times we voted that the players understood that there was a risk that was being taken, but not only individually, but for themselves and their families and their players families. Now we're at ninety six percent. I think we're going to get even better than that. What I have a mandatory vaccine, I would, but it's not my call. And the only thing I felt responsible for doing was making sure that they had as much information as they needed. In fact, I'm still working on some things which I think might be helpful for those guys that was still I'm not sure. I'm still worried. My wife says, no, these are unprecedented times and all of us have had to figure out how we want to manage this. It's kind of thought saying what you're saying, because I mean it sort of fits one of the themes that we've been talking about. The way that you guys in the Players Association were successful was not by laying down a law, but by a process of convincing people slowly and for them doing the research and convincing themselves. In other words, it turned out to be not that aspect of the way we think as lawyers, that's, you know, there's a right and a wrong, there's justice and there's injustice, and they're going to fight it out, but rather about collaborative conversation in a more open ended environment. And that actually leads me to my last question, which is as you transition to whatever you're planning to do next. Do you think that the old Michelle, you know, the warrior who loves to be in the courtroom, will predominate or will the Michelle who's enjoyed building tremendously successful collaborative relationships even across different sets of interests be the one who predominates. Do you think not to imply they're not the same person, but they seem like two aspects of the same fascinating life. I shell that's going to be our hope in control within the first year of my retirement, because that's what I'm doing. I'm not I'm not taking another job. I hope that she actually dust sought that list and she's been keeping for the last forty years and being able to check some things off. There are some things that I want to do that I'd like to do before I meet my maker. Having said that they're to share one or two of those. I gotta tell you, I've been blessed with incredible travel professionally. I mean, I've been on some of the greatest cities on planet, in the country and around the world, and I've never with the exception of Barcelona, and I just stole four days and said, I don't care, I'm going to Barcelona. I've never had a chance to enjoy those cities beyond you know, maybe taking the walk and the first place. I want to go to Senegal. I fell in love with that country. I want to go to Senea. I want to go back to Brazil. I mean I want to go. I love South Africa, I've been there a couple of times. I want to do Nigeria. I love love, love, love, love room. So I want to do some traveling just to just to get fat, but then I also want to pursue some things to keep my brain a little bit. I want to return to my biggest passion, but just criminal justice. I have recently joined a board of a nonprofit that I think is doing great work in this space, and I'm really excited about the work. I think I'll be able to be here and then you'll see me in a couple of next games. Well, those all sound like they're pretty amazing things. Something for you, something for the rest of the world, something for fun. Yeah. I really want to thank you for sharing your insights and your experiences, and also just for your fascinating work, which I think has contributed to justice in a lot of really interesting ways, from different angles and in different perspectives. So thank you, Michelle, No, thank you, No, I appreciate it. We'll be right back. Listening to Michelle, I was please struck by her directness in explaining how she deploys power in her position and how the players in the NBA have overtime been able to gain greater power visavi, the league and the governors as team owners are now increasingly known. In essence, as Michelle made crystal clear, the power of the players derives from their ability to walk off the job, the most fundamental power of any group of employees represented by a union. Given that circumstance, she has been able to craft the interests of the players into a far more collegial relationship with management than exists in other professional sports leagues or than existed at previous times in the history of the NBA. From strength, she generated collaboration and collegiality, always remembering that being willing to go to the mats and fight as needed is conferral of power. At the same time, Michelle also made it very clear that she learned to be collegial and she's benefited from that collegiality by bringing people to recognize im mutuality of interest. All of this has given her an inside perspective to watch the transformation of the power of NBA players through their leadership on major issues of national social importance, particularly Black Lives Matter, and also by their ability to wield social media presence as an important new tool that was not available to earlier generations of professional athletes. Ultimately, I would say that Michelle's tenure is a kind of object lesson in how it looks when things actually work between labor and management. And it's also an object lesson in how power subtly and gradually can be transformed at the hands of sophisticated actors who think things through, strategize and get results. You can't avoid the possibility of conflict, but sometimes, if you're as good as Michelle is, you can deploy the threat of conflict to achieve its exact opposite, namely collegiality and collaboration. There's a lesson there, I think for all of us, no matter what we do for a living, and even if like me, we're never going to play in the NBA until the next time I speak to you breathe deep, think deep thoughts, play some ball, and have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noa Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our engineer is Benaliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gera at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia, Jean Coott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah r Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background