TIME to whip out your NBA2K11—and if you’re luckier—your NBA2K12 and get it going.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) lockout is not going anywhere. In fact, it’s decided to stay.
All the regular-season games from November 1 to 14 have been wiped out—Poof! Pfft! Gone! The Great Divide between team owners and the NBA players’ association is as far apart as ever. And we poor NBA fans just have to be content with reruns, those fantasy games on the NBA2K discs. And memories. How pathetic is that!
NBA Commissioner David Stern canceled the first two weeks of the season on Monday after owners and players were unable to reach a new labor deal and end the lockout. With the regular season already shortened, the next question is: how short will short be—mini, maxi or midi? The cancellations are expected to come in two-week increments. The longer the chasm continues to exist, the more painful it will be—especially for the players, who will not be getting their paychecks anytime soon.
Add to that the support culture of the games—team staff, arena personnel, parking lot attendants, restaurant and bar owners, etc., the so-called bottom of the pyramid who will not be getting any business from the NBA games till who knows when, and it’s a truly bleak economic picture for all concerned. These game-day employees—both inside and outside of the league—don’t get paid if there aren’t any games.
How to make sense of the lockout? Are we looking at victims and villains here? Many are still undecided—or uninformed—about who the good guys and the bad guys are. But alas, the matter isn’t as black and white as all that.
Stern—being the most visible and most iconic symbol of the NBA—has been getting his hits from some quarters. “But ..Stern is not the only one at fault,” says Washington Post columnist Tracee Hamilton. “The players’ union fought off a hard salary cap and is now tussling with a luxury tax penalty that it claims amounts to about the same thing. Because heaven forbid there would be a limit on how much teams pay—and overpay—for some of this NBA ‘talent.’ Frankly, for some teams, a hard cap would be a general manager’s best friend.”
“By losing the first two weeks of the season, the owners say they’ll lose hundreds of millions, and the players will lose more than $350 million for every month they don’t play. Both sides hope those losses will teach the other side a lesson.” Hamilton continues.
“Are they all crazy? In our current economic climate, the idea that either side can throw around figures such as those is ludicrous. Many fans of these overpaid millionaires and billionaires are struggling to get by, or in danger of losing their jobs—or they’ve lost their jobs, and maybe even their homes.”
So the line between the so-called Good Guys and Bad Guys is really blurred?
Apparently. Both sides have legitimate concerns, legitimate fears and gripes. There is also a very strong sense of distrust between the two sides, so that is complicating the whole matter even more.
Owners say they lost $300 million last season, and lost hundreds of millions every year since the previous collective-bargaining agreement that was ratified in 2005. The league says 22 of its 30 teams lost money, including losses of $20 million or more for 11 of them.
Players are suggesting that teams that make money should share more with the other teams. The league says it is ready to pursue a more robust revenue-sharing plan, but first the new CBA with the players must be reached, because right now all it would be able to share is losses.
Owners want a system that would guarantee their teams the chance to make a profit, and a system where all teams would have a chance to compete equally for a championship.
Owners want a hard cap. Players are completely against it, calling it “a blood issue.” Players believe a hard cap would eliminate fully guaranteed contracts for all but a handful of top players and set up a system like the National Football League, where teams cut even high-performing players for cap reasons and aren’t required to pay their full contracts.
And so it goes...
Eventually, optimists say the deal will get done. Owners have too much already invested into their teams and infrastructures, and the players won’t be getting as good a deal as they can in the NBA in the short and medium terms. Yes, not even if they play overseas. But when?
Brian Arda, a disenfranchised NBA basketball fan, looks at the matter philosophically:
“Both parties created this dilemma themselves. Since the early days teams have really relied on superstars—players with really tremendous skills on the court who lift the spirits of the other members of the team and make the entire organization look good. That was what everything was about then—the TEAM, the love for the game. Now, team owners have allowed their superstars to be on top, not just of their game, but in some aspects, of the entire ‘team’, as well. The issue on salary cap where some players [“the superstars”] just get to be paid [or could just dictate to be paid] so far above the usual expected salary reflects how much the entire façade of the league has changed. It’s not about the league anymore... it’s now about personal and economic gains. On both sides.”
And that’s sad.
