It’s official: the NBA will lose some regular season games to the lockout.
How it’s gotten to this point is multi-prong, which can be summarized in two categories: the owners and the players.
Owners
The owners want several concessions from the players. First, they want rollbacks in salaries upwards of $300 million. The owners also want un-guaranteed contracts and a bigger piece of the revenue pie (they want the players to receive less than 50%). In short, the owners want the players to help them save themselves from themselves.
Players
In addition for not wanting to give the owners any of those things, the players want the owners to get their own house in order.
Here’s my unsolicited advice to the players and the owners: grow the hell up and get a deal done.
The NBA is coming off of one of its more exciting seasons in recent memory. The last thing it needs is to kill any momentum by canceling games the next season.
The NBA is risking alienating fans and achieving NHL-like levels of irrelevance. It took the NHL five seasons to get back any type of relevancy, though no one really cares.
Plus, in this crappy economy we Americans do not want to hear about millionaires and billionaires fight over how to split revenues – which is $4 billion.
NBA Commissioner David Stern and NBPA head Billy Hunter better come to their senses before its games will be fighting the NHL for airtime on Versus.
Categories: NBA, sports story
Hmmmmm I’ll disagree with you wholeheartedly on this one Scott. True fans don’t leave or quit watching they just take a siesta. As I get older I find I have a weird perspective on sports. I see sports more as a business like Microsoft or Apple or Walmart. Strikes and lockouts may never happen in those businesses but that’s because of 2 things: 1. Public perception is that major US sports(baseball,football,basketball) are just fine if they run everybody out of town and act like a monopoly. 2. Laws only come into play when someone gets their financial feelings stepped on. Okay to my point. Since I don’t even look at standings for basketball until the football season or watch any games, which I would guess is about 90% of the country, I don’t think there is a negative perception right now, if anything, I think we’re seeing fans are actually doing more searches and reading more about basketball than if the season were going to start. I’m beginning to realize I’m all over the place here. Let’s get to the truth. Billionaire owners buy NBA teams to resell them. Players are short-term investments and owners want that money going into more long-term investments..be it a new arena..a new team charter plane.. OR to reinvest in another venture cause that’s what billionaire owners do!!!
I wish you were right Sam. I remember how bad it was for the NBA in 1999 during the last lockout. It took the NBA several years to recover. Given how worse our nation’s economy is, I think the NBA will have a harder time getting fans back.
Look for the small-market teams to suffer to the point of possible contraction…