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| This sucks. (image from kentuckysportsradio.com) |
Okay, we were all rejoicing when Kobe Bryant and Co. came to town and enthralled us with dunks and highlight reels left and right. These were our idols playing at the Smart Araneta Coliseum! These were the best hoopsters on the planet strutting their stuff on our own soil! Yey for the NBA Lockout!
And then this happens.
It's official. We won't have an 82-game season. At best, the NBA will resume late in 2011 or early 2012, reminiscent of the *asterisk* 1999 season.
But who are we kidding?
The NBA Owners claim most of the teams are losing more money than they're making.
The NBA Players claim that lowering their Basketball-Related Income (BRI) and compromising on a "harder" salary cap will be too much of a concession and that it will severely undervalue their worth.
It seems both sides won't budge. At all.
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| The way things have been going, neither the players nor the owners are going to give in anytime soon. The losers? Us. (image from inquisitr.com) |
But, and this is the thing that trumps everything else, all the owners can afford to not have an NBA Season. And here's me betting that's just the thing that will happen.
We WILL NOT have an NBA season until October 2012.
No Fantasy NBA.
No Kobe Bryant vs. LeBron James in an official NBA game.
No Heat, or insert your most-hated team here, bashing for a while.
No Monta Ellis highlights.
No scoffing at Rashard Lewis.
No flying for Superman.
No running for the Flash.
No Ricky Rubio.
No All-Star Weekend.
No Laker Girls on TV.
And a million other things we'll all miss.
It'll be about a year of NBA Classics and Greatest Games reruns on BTV.
We'll have to make do with NBA 2K12 (of course, no real-time games/results here as well).
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| (image from kotaku.com) |
Our girlfriends and/or wives will relish having more quality time.
YouTube will get millions of searches for D-Rose pick-up games, or CP3 sightings in this or that celebrity league.
Dammit NBA. Why can't you get your act together like the WNBA?
I no longer really care whose fault it is.
Just give us our NBA. Now.
1 Comment
I know this may be kind of selfish of me, but as a Spurs fan, I find myself generally thrilled about the lockout because I think the it has the potential to benefit my Spurs down the road. In actuality, a shortened season (assuming the whole season isn't cancelled, of course) gives my "old-as-dirt" team more juice for the playoffs, effectively ascertaining no upstart Memphis Grizzly team, or any team in the same mold for that matter, takes advantage of wear and tear; at least, not to the same extent as otherwise possible with a full season.
BalasI'm also supporting the owners here, and not just because Peter Holt, the owner of the Spurs, is the Chairman of the Labor Relations Committee (didn't Google that fact, relying solely on memory here). The thing is, he happens to be relatively poor compared to other owners, and I overwhelmingly agree with the owners' sentiment that the league's current model is broken, that small market teams who have little profit and fan support are overwhelmingly less competitive when competing for a championship (The Lakers' payroll at $110 million, for instance, is more than double than that of, say, the Sacramento Kings' at $45 million).
So I'm going to play the role of contrarian here. Proudly. Go owners. Go lockout. Go hard cap (or at least highly punitive luxury tax system). Go parity. Go competitive balance. No more big market Lakers buying their way to titles. Reward brilliant management (like that of the Spurs') for shrewd player maneuvering rather than capacity to spend. Go Peter Holt. Go Spurs.