Do you hear any of it: Growing shrieks of outrage or a rising din of discontent spreading across the land in the wake of the announced cancellation of the first two weeks of the NBA regular season?
No, we don’t either.
And, if you are the NBA or the locked out players, that should be a concern.
Plenty of people are upset about Wall Street, bank fees, gas prices and a lot of other things. The NBA lockout? Not so much, just yet.
How billionaires and multi-millionaires choose to snipe at each other while being unable to come to terms on the dividing up of $4 billion is far down most folks’ lists of pressing concerns right now. Especially when the parties have had more than 100 days to sort it out and show no more urgency to get a deal done now than they did on the Fourth of July.
Now, if this were the first two weeks of the NFL regular season, well, a lot of people would be worked up. Which was undoubtedly part of the reason the NFL owners and players finally came to their senses and got a contract concluded before it became a September to dismember.
Which is something the parties to this ill-advised NBA lockout would be wise to consider amid the finger pointing and tweeting. With the NFL going full blast, college football at the halfway point and, oh, yes, baseball’s postseason under way while college basketball prepares to tip off, it could be a while before the mainstream misses the NBA.
Somewhere around the junction of spring training and the end of the football season, perhaps.
Which is too bad because the NBA gave us a compelling postseason four months ago. The stars supplied the kind of drama and action that everybody involved should want to capitalize on sooner rather than later. The floor should belong to LeBron James and Dirk Nowitzki now, not David Stern, Billy Hunter and their bag-toting acolytes.
But the reality is that both sides have been itching for a showdown over finances for a couple of years now. They are so firmly entrenched and intent upon waging that battle they don’t see straight.
They don’t see there is a deal to be made if only they could put their pent-up animosities aside. They don’t want to see there is a middle ground they could all live and prosper with. They don’t care that the people who lose most are the ticket takers, concessions workers and others. The ones who can’t jet over to Italy and pick up a paycheck.
The owners want not just to recoup whatever losses their accountants say they have accumulated, they want to ground down the players for good measure and recast the foundation of the game to their liking. And the players, the way they have gone about it, have been playing into ownership’s hands.
What the parties haven’t had, short of a scorch-the-earth wish, is an exit strategy to back them out of their stalemated mess. So the second labor-management-shortened season in 13 years is soon to be upon us.
Maybe, instead of the full 82 games, they get in 50 or 60 with fewer paychecks. And just maybe, if that happens, everybody discovers what has been suspected all along, that the NBA season is too long anyway and we can get along with less.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
