Greed in its rawest form. That’s the National Football League’s lockout. Both sides were like two billionaire drug cartels splitting up a massive cocaine shipment who got pissed off and just started shooting each other. “You took too much! I saw that!!!” They will settle next week and slink into the sunset with their kilos. We’ll forgive them immediately because we love football and just want our Sundays back. The end.

Stubbornness in its rawest form. That’s the National Basketball Association’s lockout. The owners want to “fix” the system without actually fixing it. The players want everything to remain the same even if that “same” makes no sense. Both sides spent the past few weeks poking holes in each other’s arguments, leaking unflattering tidbits to trusted writers and excreting code-word spin control BS like “we’re unified” and “we’re in this for the long haul.” I never heard anyone say the words, “Hold on a second what’s really wrong here?”

You know what it reminds me of, actually? That scene in Dave after Bill Mitchell impersonator Dave Kovic (played by Kevin Kline) secretly takes over Mitchell’s presidency, when Dave gets his nerdy accountant buddy (played by Charles Grodin) to balance the budget so they can save the First Lady’s homeless program. They meet with the Cabinet, and Dave starts laying out Grodin’s ideas. What if we slashed this by $47 million? What if we cut this program, that’s another $50 million? Every decision is totally logical. Dave ends up finding the extra money in about six minutes, followed by the Cabinet applauding in disbelief.

Totally improbable scene and yet, you feel like it’s totally probable as you’re watching it. Why? Because Dave threw out everyone’s agendas and said, “This is extremely important to me, we’re not leaving this room until we figure it out.” Then he did it.

With the NBA’s lockout, we’re hopelessly mired in the “he said/she said” phase of things only we’re stuck with David instead of Dave. If Dave’s owners lost $340 million last year, he wouldn’t say, “We need to get that money back from the players!” No, he’d say things like, “Wow, David did a terrible job, I can’t believe he left me this mess” and “How could a league that just enjoyed one of its best and most interesting seasons ever be losing money?” Then Dave would gather everyone in a room and figure it out. Maybe not in six minutes but he’d figure it out.

Let’s tackle the key issues and figure out how Dave (not David) would handle them.

Issue No. 1: The owners lost $340 million last season.

Or so they claim. In retrospect, making a huge deal about opening their books was the league’s smartest move of 2011, narrowly edging Stern’s forcing LeBron to throw the Finals so that Miami’s next season would be more compelling. I know it threw me off the scent. They opened their books? That’s enough for me! The Players Association examined all 30 teams and flagged some creative accounting, with Billy Hunter even telling ESPN.com’s Henry Abbott, “If you don’t count interest and depreciation, you already lop off $250 [million] of the 370 million dollars.”

I have no idea what this means, and frankly, I’m not sure Hunter does, either. But once the sports blogs started stirring things up, that led to (ESPN.com’s cap consigliore) Larry Coon’s concluding the NBA’s number was flimsy at best; Nate Silver’s writing a New York Times blog titled “Calling Foul on the NBA’s Claim of Financial Distress”; the NBA’s putting out a press release disputing Silver’s piece; and my spending 10 minutes trying to figure out what “amortization” meant (and failing). This was not how I wanted to spend my summer.

What Dave would tell the owners: “Can we please stop claiming that we lost $340 million? That number can be picked apart too easily. Instead, let’s bang home the point that our league stopped being profitable — which is 100 percent true — and we’re committed to making it profitable again. Let’s take a little responsibility, as well — after all, we just had one of the best seasons in league history and lost money. We should all be ashamed. And also, please remember — nobody is going to feel sorry for you guys because you’re all fucking rich. Well, except for you, George, Joe and Gavin. But from now on, scrap the ‘woe is us, we’re losing money, boo hoo’ routine. We’re just shining a neon spotlight on our own incompetence. Enough. Shut up.”

Issue No. 2: The players are currently getting too big of a revenue share.

The last labor deal guaranteed players 57 percent of basketball-related revenue (better known as “BRI”). If the league makes X.X billion dollars in a season, the owners HAVE to spend exactly 57 percent of that X.X billion on salaries. The owners believe that number is too high. And actually, they’re right. By including a luxury tax in the previous two labor deals, they assumed it would frighten teams from overpaying players. Nope. If anything, it’s turned into something of a Jedi mind trick. You can’t win unless you’re overpaying players. Open your wallets. Open them. Our past four champions were luxury tax teams. Not a coincidence. As deputy commissioner Adam Silver told the New York Times, “We had predicted the tax would be more of a drag on salaries than it’s turned out to be. It became business as usual to pay the tax, and therefore it created a league of haves and have-nots, where you have the Lakers at $110 million and Sacramento at $45 million.”

What Dave would tell the owners: “Fifty-seven percent was too high, and the tax created more problems than it solved. I get that. But with all due respect to Real Adam, I’d argue the Lakers should spend 225 percent as much on salary as the Kings. After all, they play in Los Angeles, not Sacramento. They make more local TV money in one year than Sacramento makes in 12. They can charge three times as much for tickets. And their owner has enough money to pay his players without hawking his prized possessions like he’s on an special episode of Pawn Stars. We ARE a league of Haves and Have-Nots. Look at every great season we’ve ever had — when we’re top-heavy and bottom-heavy, that’s when we have the best teams and the best playoff games.

“Here’s a newsflash: We’re not the NFL. They have revenue sharing because it doesn’t matter who plays in the Super Bowl, or where Peyton Manning spends his career. All that matters is parity and television money. Our success hinges on star power and big-market teams; we could never survive one year without a team in Los Angeles, much less two decades and counting like the NFL just did. Our attendance numbers these past few years have told us — pretty convincingly — that small-market fans aren’t forking over money for professional basketball anymore unless their local team is good or great. And even then, they might not show up.

“We have to reinvent our league. We have to figure out which 25 to 30 cities can handle a professional basketball franchise instead of wasting our time protecting the ones that can’t. We have to accept that big-market teams have a better chance of succeeding than small-market teams, for a variety of reasons, but mainly because wealthier owners want to own big-market teams and talented players want to play for big-market teams. That’s the reality. That’s the big picture. But yes, the small picture says we need to knock down that BRI a little. A 50/50 split seems totally fair.”

Issue No. 3: Guaranteed contracts are too long

Even the Players Association seems to agree on this one. Long-term deals allow players to coast for years on end (how’s it going, Rashard Lewis?), mail in entire seasons (what’s happening, Charlie Villanueva?), or eat themselves out of the league (would you like another slice, Eddy Curry?). Any of those paths make the players look terrible as a whole. From the league’s perspective, you can’t have five- or six-year deals AND a salary cap, not when the wrong contract can singlehandedly submarine a team. Players also play their greedy butts off during contract years so by having more contract years and fewer Long-Term Deals Gone Wrong, the league’s quality of play would improve. At least that’s the hope.

What Dave would tell the owners: “Fans can’t identify with overpaid players — especially if those guys aren’t trying as hard as they once did. They resent them, which means they resent our league. Why would we ever want that? Think of Clippers fans suffering through 2½ years of Baron Davis, and then losing their no. 1 overall pick because that was the only way their team could dump Davis. How can we expect them to enjoy our product after that? No NBA contract should last longer than four years except for rookie contracts. Period.”

Issue No. 4 (in 3 parts): NBA superstars should make more money than they do; it should be easier for NBA teams to keep those superstars; and too many nonsuperstars make too much money.

Tackling the superstar issue first: Ten baseball players will earn $20 million or more in 2011 (with Alex Rodriguez leading the way at $32 million); only four NBA players could potentially make $20 million or more in 2011-12. Twenty-nine baseball players earn $15 million or more; only 22 NBA players can say the same. That would make sense if baseball players were more marketable, but actually, it’s the opposite: The NBA has three times as many marketable stars (LeBron, Kobe, Howard, Durant, Wade, Amar’e, Carmelo, Duncan, Pierce, Griffin, Nash, Dirk, Garnett, Yao, Paul, Rose and at least one star I’m probably forgetting) as baseball (A-Rod, Jeter, Pujols, Howard and maybe Lincecum). Hell, you could argue Chris Bosh, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker and Pau Gasol are more famous worldwide than any baseball players except Jeter, A-Rod and Ichiro.

Baseball stars make more money only because there’s no salary cap in baseball. I get it. But given the NBA is such a star-driven league, why wouldn’t it reward its best players a little more smartly? Why not redistribute NBA salaries so they resemble more of a Hollywood star system? For instance, look at Mission Impossible — Ghost Protocol: Cruise is the “superstar,” Jeremy Renner is the secondary star, and Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Josh Holloway were the supporting stars. If the NBA was funding that movie, Cruise would make $25 million, Renner would make $15 million (even though he would have done it for one-third that), Holloway would inexplicably make $9 million, then the other three would probably be overpaid something like $20 million combined. And that makes sense how?

Try to follow me here

a. Twenty-two players are scheduled to make more than $15 million for the 2011-12 season: Kobe Bryant ($25.5m), Tim Duncan ($21.4m), Rashard Lewis ($21.4m), Kevin Garnett ($21.2m), Gilbert Arenas ($19.1m), Dirk Nowitzki ($19.1m), Pau Gasol ($18.7m), Dwight Howard ($18.1m), Carmelo Anthony ($18.4m), Amar’e Stoudemire ($18.2m), Joe Johnson ($18m), Elton Brand ($17.1m), Chris Paul ($16.4m), Deron Williams ($16.3m), LeBron James ($16.0m), Chris Bosh ($16.0m), Dwyane Wade (15.7m), Paul Pierce ($15.3m), Zach Randolph ($15.2m), Antawn Jamison ($15.1m), Brandon Roy ($15m), Rudy Gay ($15m). Only Lewis, Arenas, Brand, Jamison and Roy don’t belong on that list and if our “four-year max” rule was in place, Lewis’ deal would be done; Arenas, Brand and Jamison would be in their final year, and Roy would have two years left. Either way, we’re batting 78 percent on big-ass deals. Not bad.

b. Forty-six NBA players are scheduled to make between $8 million and $14.9 million for the 2011-12 season (not counting free agents or restricted free agents). We’ll separate them into four groups and throw them into a massive footnote to save space: “Comically overpaid,” “Overpaid,” “Fairly Paid” and “Underpaid.” You’ll see in the footnote — 27 of the 46 players were “overpaid” or “comically overpaid,” which means we went from batting 78 percent to 38 percent and that’s not counting another $75 million worth of dumb deals from the $6.5 million to $7.9 million group, or whichever team stupidly overpays Marc Gasol, Jamal Crawford, J.R. Smith, Kris Humphries, Caron Butler and (gulp) Greg Oden.

See, that’s what is really killing the NBA: overpaying the Jeremy Renners and TOTALLY overpaying the Josh Holloways. But how do you fix it?

What Dave would tell the owners: “Fellas, this couldn’t be an easier fix. We keep the rookie contracts intact and get a four-year cap on contracts. We abolish the midlevel exception; in return, we back off our 50/50 request on the BRI and give them a 52/48 split. That guarantees them between $1.8 billion and $1.9 billion in salaries, depending on how we’re doing. We want to reward our best players more than we do. We want to make it easier for teams to keep franchise players so LeBron/Cleveland or Carmelo/Denver doesn’t happen every year. And we want to keep our hard cap relatively low so teams don’t overpay role players (a.k.a. Travis Outlaw for $35 million), frustrating our fans and make them think we’re idiots.

“So here’s my radical suggestion in seven parts. Call it the Dave Plan. If you don’t like it, stick with your old system and keep bitching about your $340 million in losses

“1. We settle on a $52 million hard cap but promise players we’ll spend 52 percent of the BRI on salaries, which should average out to $56 million to $58 million per season, depending on how we’re doing. All extra wiggle room from $52 million to that $56 million to $58 million that we DON’T spend goes into an escrow fund. If we’re over, we get the extra money. If we’re under, the players get it. But we’re going to spend that money. Watch.

“2. Going forward, we define an ‘All-Star’ as someone who’s played four consecutive years with one team and made two All-Star teams OR an All-NBA team during that time. Any ‘All-Star’ automatically gets a $12 million cap figure, but his original team can pay him up to 25 percent more than the cap figure (max: $60 million for four years). A new team can only pay him that cap figure (max: $48 million for four years).

“3. We define a ‘Franchise Player’ as someone who’s played at least four consecutive years with one team and made three All-Star teams OR two first or second All-NBA teams during that time. Any ‘Franchise Player’ automatically gets a $17 million cap figure, but can be paid $500,000 per years of service beyond that number without it counting on the cap . For instance, if Dwight Howard wants to sign with the Lakers next summer, they could offer only his franchise cap number ($68 million over four years). Orlando gets the benefit of that $500k bump — eight Howard/Orlando seasons multiplied by $500,000 — so they can offer him a four-year deal worth $87 million. The longer he stays in Orlando and keeps playing at a ‘Franchise’ level, the more money Howard can earn.

. For instance, if Dwight Howard wants to sign with the Lakers next summer, they could offer only his franchise cap number ($68 million over four years). Orlando gets the benefit of that $500k bump — eight Howard/Orlando seasons multiplied by $500,000 — so they can offer him a four-year deal worth $87 million. The longer he stays in Orlando and keeps playing at a ‘Franchise’ level, the more money Howard can earn. “4. Anyone who graduates from ‘All-Star’ to ‘Franchise Player’ during his four-year deal gets an automatic salary bump to ‘Franchise’ status. For instance, Russell Westbrook’s second-team All-NBA would make him eligible for an “All-Star” extension right now ($15 million per year for four years, but with a $12 million per year cap figure). Let’s say he makes second-team All-NBA again this season. Boom! He jumps to “Franchise” status; his cap figure bumps to $17 million, along with the corresponding $500k bumps for each year in Oklahoma City. In other words, he’s incentivized to keep kicking ass even after he gets paid.

“5. If you can’t maintain ‘All-Star’ or ‘Franchise’ status during your deal, you lose those privileges for the next deal.

“6. Any All-Star who gets traded keeps his salary/cap figure disparity for his new team. Franchise players can veto any trade — if they accept the deal, they lose their accumulated $500k bumps and revert back to the $17 million cap figure.

“7. Nobody else can sign for more than $10 million per year unless he made an All-NBA team OR two All-Star teams within the past three years, giving him a 33 percent bump (and enabling him a deal or extension for $13.3 million per year, with the salary doubling as the cap number). Yes, we’re calling this the Zach Randolph Exception.

“Did you follow that? All we did was redistribute our salary output a little: we pulled money from the middle class (where most salary mistakes are made, anyway) and gave it to the upper class; we made it harder for franchises to kill themselves with long-term deals; we made it easier for franchises to keep signature players; and we rewarded stars for sticking with their original teams. That doesn’t make sense why?”

Issue No. 5: Nobody is putting a gun to the owners’ heads and telling them to overpay players.

This is the no. 1 argument from every agent and Players Association head, none of whom seem to care that they sound like the parent of an obese child saying, “It’s not my fault the boy is fat, I’m not forcing him to eat.” Let’s skip this one because the lack of accountability is disgusting.

What Dave would tell the owners: “We can’t win here. If you made a conscious commitment to collectively rein in spending, that would be collusion. When you’re left to your own devices, more times than not, you’ll screw up. My only idea: Maybe any NBA franchise that allows an ex-player, a coach, a former scout, or basically anyone without genuine business and/or legal training to negotiate with some of the smartest legal/business minds in the entire world should be fined $10 million by the commissioner’s office. Do you realize that agents laugh about this behind closed doors? They can’t believe they were allowed to negotiate deals with the likes of Mike Dunleavy, Joe Dumars, Kevin McHale, David Kahn, Isiah Thomas, Danny Ferry and the Paxson brothers over the years. It makes them giggle and giggle. Maybe we DO deserve to lose $340 million every year.”

Issue No. 6: The NBA owners need to figure out revenue sharing before they can figure out a labor deal.

The Players Association keeps pointing out the 22 of 30 NBA teams are losing money because the eight teams that make money aren’t sharing it. The owners’ response (pretty weak): It doesn’t matter how we lose $340 million, just that we’re losing $340 million. The players’ response to the response (just as weak): It’s not $340 million, that’s creative accounting! It’s really like $90 million! The owners’ response to the response to the response: No it’s not! My response to the response to the response to the response: Can someone turn on an oven? I want to stick my head inside it.

What Dave would tell the owners: “Let’s spend our energies on making sure the next season doesn’t get compromised or canceled. Once that’s settled, we’ll try to figure out revenue sharing and fail miserably, because the odds of James Dolan, the black sheep Buss brothers and Jerry Reinsdorf forking over hard-earned profits to make sure basketball can keep limping along in Sacramento, Milwaukee, Philly, Detroit, New Orleans, Charlotte and Indiana are between 0.0 and 0.00000001 percent. We’re going to have a 30-owner Battle Royal over that issue; that’s the last thing we need right now. Besides, you can’t create a revenue sharing plan before you know what you’re getting with a new labor deal. Makes no sense.”

Issue No. 7: The NBA owners need to get their house in order before they can figure out a labor deal.

Here’s where the owners, Real Dave and Real Adam have totally blown it. They keep intimating that they’d sacrifice an entire season to “fix” the league, which is code for, “Our newer owners paid top dollar for their teams and haven’t seen a profit yet — scaring every other prospective new owner off, and in turn, scaring the shit out of us because nobody wants to sell a sports team for less than they paid for it — so we’d rather shut things down, break the players and create a more favorable system over considering any other ambitious alternative.”

Really, fellas, you’re breaking out a nuclear bomb before trying a few air strikes and naval hits? Who does that? This isn’t anything like skyrocketing salaries nearly sinking the NHL in 2004, when teams suddenly had to charge white-collar ticket prices for blue-collar fan bases just to break even (and failed). Again, we’re coming off one of the most entertaining NBA seasons ever! We really need to bring out Dr. Oppenheimer to solve this one? The league would never admit this publicly, but its long-range concern isn’t about the now-infamous 340 number as much as unpredictable fan behavior the rest of this decade. Secondary ticket markets, the internet, HD televisions, DirecTV’s season pass, the Broadband Pass, short attention spans, DVRs, video games, iPads, a struggling economy all of these forces have slowly pushed many basketball fans towards the same two conclusions:

“Why should I spend a huge chunk of money upfront on season tickets when I can just cherry-pick seven or eight games online?”

“Why should I pay for mediocre or crappy tickets, drive all the way to a game, pay for parking, pay for food and drink, then spend 150 minutes watching a regular-season NBA game when I could just stay home and watch that same game in HD while doing nine other things?”

People who love basketball will keep coming but what about everyone else? That’s the fear. And that’s where the players have been totally disingenuous: They want to roll over the current setup, and they want to keep bitching about the owners’ rigging that $340 million number, but have you heard Billy Hunter, Derek Fisher or anyone else even acknowledge the (legitimate) uncertainty with fan behavior going forward? Why do you think rich dudes weren’t exactly lining up to purchase the Hornets, Kings, Pistons, Bucks or Sixers?

Of course, that doesn’t mean the owners should drop a nuclear bomb, either. But the league needs to decide — fundamentally, right now, this month — where it’s going these next 10 years before figuring out anything else. Mention contraction to any league official and they shudder. We can’t do that, we can’t lose those jobs. BUT YOU CAN CANCEL A SEASON??? What???? How does that make sense? You don’t think we’re going to lose jobs during a one-year lockout not to mention fan interest and TV ratings? How dense can you be?

The NBA’s unwillingness to experiment with anything beyond its digital and international presence has been its Achilles’ heel. Not to step on Dave’s toes, but why haven’t we heard the following ideas or strategies even discussed?: