The NBA lockout drags on. And on, and on, and on. It’s killing my lifeforce. I have no idea why spell check doesn’t like the word “lifeforce” but it doesn’t. Billy Hunter and David Stern don’t speak much. They had a meeting last week and basically said “let’s keep the fighting inside the boardroom,” promising each other that they wouldn’t throw mud at each other through the press anymore. I think that both parties realized that all that does, and the only intent is to get public opinon on their side. What it really does is demean the entire league and the players and all the parties involved. Keeping it inside eliminates that, I guess.
The first few weeks of the lockout were marked by the players, and people sympathetic to the players, questioning their numbers, their motives, and of course the entire exsistence of life itself. Maybe that last part is a stretch but you get the point. Then the league and commissioner were in full on defense mode saying “No, no, those numbers are right. The players never questioned them before and their accountants look at our books and this is the deal.” Then the players got their escrow money and that was a whole other can of worms and people began to question the whole system.
The reporters, bloggers, even me, we all started to say “Ok, here’s what I think this all means and this is how they should fix it because we just want basketball.” People much smarter than I, me….people that would know if “I” or “me” was proper in this sentence offered a lot of conjecture and several viable options and solutions but there were no discussions between the involved parties. It’s sort of like the Israelis and the Palestinians fighting and American Presidents saying what they should do when they can barely affect an outcome and likely don’t truly understand the issues at hand. But that’s the nature of the beast.
Right now, there are meetings tomorrow (Wednesday) and everyone that writes about all things NBA are optimistic. Chris Broussard is the one reporting the meeting set for tomorrow, I’m sure it’s been confirmed but he’s the one saying “sources” so he gets credit with me. The optimism, I feel is best embodied by this post that Chris Sheridan posted on his new site today. He was very excited about his hits, but his site is hideous. The content is pretty good if you can stand 8 of him staring at you as you read it. He says basically, it’s quite possible that the league and players can agree, because they aren’t as far apart as everyone thinks, by October 1st and the season could start on time.
Some people out there, can’t put my head on a name or two at the moment but several people think that the issues are deep and that players and owners are so far apart that it will be November before anything will be agreed upon and possibly January before we see players on NBA courts. Even less optimistic, or more pessimistic (see what I did there?) folks say that the owners are so entrenched and the small market teams are so upside down, they’d be happy to lose a whole season if they can get what they want. If it’s true that 22 teams are losing money and 10 or more are losing significant amounts of money, I could see the logic in saying “Screw it. In order to fix it, I’ll take a year off, not have the losses for a year and be happy with that.”
It sounds ridiculous, it really does. There was so much going for the league back in June and all season before that but the owners have sold a lot of people that the system is broken. I’d agree, you can’t really argue when guys like Rashard Lewis and Gilbert Arenas are making as much as they are and they were swapped between two teams in the same division, making the trade equal out in a lot of ways. It’s a weird system that no one fully understands, maybe not even Larry Coon and his FAQ’s.
Lots of NFL folks were preaching that doom and gloom back when their lockout was on but it was fixed just in time for a free agent frenzy and full training camps and pre-seasons that probably has actually drawn more interest than if it had been a regular off-season. I don’t know if the NBA has time for all that. Even under Sheridan’s proposed, theoretical timeline, he sees the pre-season cut to two games rather than the 8 that teams have scheduled. Besides, the free agent class isn’t that juicy.
I’m optimistic, simply because that’s what I want to believe. I have nothing to base it on. I like the “actual” news that these “insiders” are “saying.” I also like quotation marks and if I could, some parenthetical asides but I couldn’t squeeze one in before I wrap this up (or could I?).
Andrew Barraclough is Senior Editor for RobertoGato.com, a Charlotte Bobcats Blog on the Fansided Network. Follow him on Twitter @therobertogato and Like the site on Facebook.