Joshua Mendelsohn is the senior labor counsel for the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and an adjunct professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He is the author of The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA.

03.21.2023

• Joshua Mendelsohn

NBA Players Wanted Their Rights as Workers. Owners Were Standing in the Way.

NBA players are well-paid today, but it wasn’t always so. As a new labor history of the league shows, pro basketball players had to unionize and threaten strikes to get out from under the thumb of owners and win a bigger piece of the financial pie.