NBA isn’t nearly at volume for those models to apply, and I think the current issue (if there is one from the player perspective, aside from the brutal schedule and wildly varying officiating quality they don’t have a ton of complaints) isn’t with the structure of contracts or the overall wealth distribution amongst them (we’re seeing $140 million contracts given to year 2, year 3 players already…and not high draft guys) it’s the distillation of league capital amongst markets.

There will never, ever, be a population that can support an Oklahoma City franchise the same way a population can support a New York franchise…and it’s bad. My team is worth $7.5 Billion - putting them in second behind the Dallas Cowboys in team valuation amongst all North American sports - and a team like the Pelicans are worth about $1.6 Billion; that essentially means the Pelicans are physically incapable of earning as much as the Warriors in a business capacity, which means ownership groups will never have the ability to spend on salary. The salary cap in the NBA is soft, it effectively does not exist when someone like Joe Lacob takes a several hundred million dollar hit in luxury taxes every year with a smile and a trophy in his hands. So right now it’s not the inability of players to get well paying contacts, it’s the lack of earning potential in individual markets and a massive disparity between the ones at the top and the rest of the league in terms of spending potential whilst still turning a profit. The owners have painted themselves into a corner.

Historically there isn’t a lot of precedent, but the closest is probably the Tour de France/Armstrong stuff or the collegiate level stuff in Basketball and Football - those titles were all vacated (Armstrong may have also been stripped, not sure, but those Tour titles were vacated meaning nobody technically “won” in the record books).

I don’t know that there is a parallel though, at least in large organized sports, it’s pretty wild for a sitting champ to literally just bail out on the organization and I don’t even know what my feelings are.

You also have, in the NBA, one of the most player-friendly arrangements in all of sport…the NBPA pulls the strings in the league, there’s a real tangible power imbalance favoring players and I’m hugely in favor of that model - I think if this ever happened in the NBA you wouldn’t even catch a whiff of a title being stripped.