The 2010-11 NBA season is set for intrigue. There's a new and controversial superpower in Miami, stars are heading east to take up leftover cap space bringing more balance to the conferences, New York is finally on the path to recovery, new rookies are about to take the court, and the Lakers/Celtics rivalry is in a new prime. Most of the league's best teams have maintained the core their rosters, while the faces of the have-nots are changing more rapidly than we've seen in years. The chance for renewed public interest in the NBA has reached its peak. And yet the ultimate buzz-kill in sports, an imminent lockout, could help most of that interest to come crashing down. The game has only now started to recover from the last lockout where the league, coping with the end of the Bulls era, further devastated its popularity by cutting out the first half of the following season, postponing an all-star weekend (it's biggest draw), and seeing a small market, fundamentals-style (read less-exciting) basketball team win its first championship. At least at that time the league was coming off a high. Despite a recent resurgence, the NBA hasn't recovered to the level it once had in the 80's and 90's. Every game has its ups and downs. Even media entertainment has a strike every once in a while, shutting down your favorite TV show early for the season (or canceling it altogether) and filling in the convening gap with complete garbage. The fact is there's an ugly side to entertainment, and that's money, and this will never change. It will suck out all the naively misconceived purity of the event to children, and leave all the grown-ups with less to bond with. This is assuming that the owners and the players can patch things up in time to even have a season. The tabletop is left with a couple of problems. First of all, the owners are asking the players to take a huge pay-cut to save the owners from themselves. The number on the table is a $45 million hard-cap, which states that no team can ever exceed the amount even to re-sign their own players. Right now the average team is shelling out $65-70 million. The other problem is, the owners have been owning the last few collective bargaining agreements. Cutting a year or two off of contract sizes, setting a pay scale, limiting the age of draft picks, they've even had to implement a luxury tax to encourage themselves to cut the calories. To no avail. The owners have said it's not enough, and the league is behind them, quoting massive losses now and in the future. The player's union of course is in outright opposition, disputing some of the numbers put forth by the league and trying to take a stand. Of course, there will be compromises. What does the burgeoning Euro League stand to gain? Hello Josh Childress, welcome back... and we'll be seeing you next year. Nothing that this lockout will do will hurt any other professional sports league out there. I'm sure most of the veterans will just sit tight and wait for the storm to blow over. But our high school players that don't want to wait a year in college are already thinking about making a paycheck prior to joining the NBA. International players will probably jump at the chance to fill the time playing in their home countries. Maybe they will feel a bit of a draw. Younger NBA players might even consider doing it as well, to keep their form up. That's not even the worst part. The worst part is, while the NBA is looking for ways to cut costs, the rest of the world has no interest in doing that, and have the money to throw at players should the league reduce the size of contracts it can afford to give. How many more mid-level players would follow Childress over to Europe? How many international players might not come over at all? If Europe felt a level of excitement for the game the way Oklahoma City did when the Hornets briefly played there a couple of seasons, what's to stop them from taking players the way an OKC entrepreneur took one of the more classic NBA franchises in the SuperSonics to fill that craving? NBA commissioner David Stern was talking about wanting Europe to open up to world-class basketball. That might happen without him. That's not to say it would be the end of the NBA. Far from it, but it could take away a lot of its monopoly of good players. The problem is, the fate of a basketball game is more affected by the whims of a single player than it is in other sports. It's still a team game, but the loss of a player can be felt more. What is Cleveland without LeBron? So these players are in more demand than they are in any other sport, not just for selling tickets to games, but for winning period. So we have to pay them obscene amounts of money, sell them on coming to play in our cities, make exclusive TV episodes that only they will see to show them that we're serious. And in this, the owners can't stop themselves from beating each other out even to the point of hemorrhaging money. But for those of us who are passionate about the game, who want it to thrive so the fan-base gets bigger and the league becomes more successful, so that our friends can talk about it and our cities can get together every few nights and share a rush of emotion, we have to watch it loose some air. All of these stories that have been coming out the last couple of months, all of the intrigue and controversy will pale in comparison to that surrounding another long lockout. Another postponed all-star weekend. Sorry Los Angeles, but at least you have those titles. Oh, sorry Clippers fans (you are the most admirable and faithful of them all). The price of competition at the highest level is exorbitant. Spend, or watch the other guy fork out the cash. What's the price of parity worth when your players are going to squeeze through your fingers? The more limits you set, the more likely a player is going to take his services to someone that will pay for it. Not a lot of them at first. Just a few, then one by one, and before you know it half of your potential players are outside of your bounds. Draft picks wasted on players who change their minds and decide to play in that other league. Like the ABA all over again, changing the rules of the game for their audiences (think of leagues that operate like soccer leagues), making you drastically change your own until it becomes unrecognizable. Maybe basketball truly is a world game.
