Today I and a lot of NBA fans feel like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes.
You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
The ultimate stupidity of what has happened with the NBA lockout is that in the fight over the system of movement and the last dollars in this new Collective Bargaining Agreement, the two sides will have cost themselves hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.
They are fighting over how to divide up the pie, but that pie is about to get a lot smaller. Fans are pissed.
There is almost zero chance of games on Christmas Day, which is when football starts to wind down and the average sports fan starts to turn his or her attention to the NBA.
There will be no games that day, and the backlash will cut the league and its revenue for years. Fans will feel the recession and see no NBA games and rightfully be disgusted.
Fighting over percentages of revenue while at the same time reducing the amount of revenue is maybe the ultimate foolishness on the players? and owners? part.
While nobody is blameless, I side with Ray Ratto of CSNBayArea.com that the owners have been the worst offenders.
They created this system, and everyone?s franchise values rose dramatically since Stern first masterminded the star-players-in-star-cities Strategy. This the owners deciding that profits can be increased and maybe even maximized with a new and more punitive system whose only real feature is that the owners can now be indemnified against their witless exuberance, poor judgment and flat-out mistakes.
And if you think the owners are taking all the financial risk, then you should see who paid for most of their stadiums. You, the taxpayer, did.
The owners? biggest mistake was not giving the players a way out of the negotiations to save face (it didn?t have to be much). The owners had the big win, but to win by 30 was not enough, they kept on the full-court press and wanted to win by 40. So they gave ultimatums and drove this kind of bargain that was almost certain to make the players fight back with the biggest club they had.
The players are not blameless. They should have decertified long ago, not pushed the button and blown it all up Monday as time to save the season has run out. You can make an argument that they should have taken commissioner David Stern?s latest offer or at least put the entire thing to a vote of the entire union membership. If they accepted the offer, they still would be making incredible money to play a game.
But where we are now is that the sides are fighting over a shrinking pie. If they had solved this like adults, everyone would have gotten their fill. Now the game suffers and everyone goes hungry.
I feel like Heston right now.
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