A year without watching Derrick Rose and the Bulls on television? A year without going to Madison Square Garden to watch Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudamire? A year without NBA basketball? These are the horrid truths NBA fans are facing because of the continued lockout. Yesterday David Stern announced that the NBA will postpone training camp and has also canceled preseason games between October 9th through the 15th, 43 games in total. Now this may just be preseason games but these are times when teams start to gel and coincide together. Find their identity, if you will. It really interrupts a players preparation going into the season. Players can not practice in their teams facility or interact with coaches because of the lockout which hurts their growth, more so to incoming rookies. If the NBPA cannot come to terms with the owners soon this might mean that regular season games may be canceled as well, shortening the season. This has happened before in the 98'-99' when no agreement was reached before the start of the season. That year they played 50 out of the scheduled 82 games.
Labor talks have continued since the previous Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) was not renewed on July 1st. Owners proclaim that they lost $300 million last season and want to instate a hard cap to replace the soft cap. A hard cap is basically a limit on spending that every team has to follow. For example if the hard cap is 58 million then every teams salary has to remain under that number. Currently, the NBA uses a soft cap which means teams could pay 58 million in salary but if they have the extra resources they can pay a luxury tax of $1 for every dollar spent that exceeds the cap. A third of the NBA currently is over the salary cap. Owners are also trying to protect their investments in the form of overpaying players when they either do not produce as they liked or get injured. Instituting a hard cap will prevent owners from over paying players like Gilbert Arenas or Rashard Lewis. Players, on the other hand, do not want a pay cut and who does? If someone told any worker that they will need to take less money, regardless if your making millions or thousands, your going to disagree. Here's an excerpt from a ESPN article :
"The players contend that the league is more profitable than it has led us to believe, and say that certain categories of expenses should be excluded from these discussions. One of these is the interest payments on debt used to finance franchise purchases. It is common for some of the purchase price of teams to be financed, and the interest on this debt counts toward the team's bottom line. According to union president Derek Fisher, this interest totaled $130 million in 2010-11, and none of it should be the players' problem. Just as players aren't entitled to share in the profits when a team is sold, neither should they be saddled with expenses related to buying the team in the first place.
The players say that if you remove the expenses that don't apply to them, the losses are closer to $100 million than $300 million, and seven to nine teams, rather than 22, are really struggling."
If players aren't willing to include a hard cap and owners are going to want to enforce one, then canceled regular season games are deemed inevitable. In my opinion, as a fan i just want the NBA to reach an agreement and start the season. I feel as though i am a child that is going through a divorce and is stuck in the middle. All i want is for the fighting to stop and games to be played.
