Does anyone out there in the land of casual basketball fans care that the NBA has yet to start its season? Has anyone noticed? There may be some diehards who are feeling the pain, but the rest of the country seems to be reacting with a collective shrug. After all, sports fans of all stripes are not without substitutes, both professional and amateur. College football and basketball, the NFL, which missed some of its own preseason activity but kept its season intact, and the NHL are all there to fill the void. Some of those alternatives may actually pick up fans from the parallel universe of the NFL, and some of those fans may stick around even if the NBA manages to crank itself to life and put together an abbreviated season.
The nation is not exactly showing signs of hoops-withdrawal-syndrome and its streets may not be lined with mourners, but the populace does feel the pain of missing something desperately. However, what is missed, apparently unnoticed by the NBA, is not the spectacle of athletic multimillionaires playing a game in an arena. For the vast majority of Americans, what’s missing is an economy that can revive itself from a stagnant recessionary coma. For many, what’s missing is a job, or the feeling that the job is secure, or a home that doesn’t have the sheriff at the door, or, for that matter, any home at all.
Is it any wonder, then, that sympathy for anyone and everyone involved in the NBA negotiations is in such short supply? By now, whatever sympathy might have attached to one side or the other has deteriorated into disgust, an outcome that was completely predictable given the times in which we live. Meanwhile, the uninspiring quality of the contestants, who bear an uncanny resemblance to two spoiled brats fighting over the last cookie, has only made things worse.
In this corner, we have the owners. Yes, they have some problems, especially those poor, poor owners whose teams play in smaller markets, but these are not the kind of problems that resonate with us morlocks who struggle far below the luxury boxes. We can only imagine the exalted levels of wealth that make it possible to buy a professional sports team, but, if that alone failed to alienate the public, the plutocrats’ problems are also largely of their own making.
As a group, the owners have been all too willing to pay astronomical amounts for mediocre talent, throwing vast sums at journeyman players whose presence on a team will never sell a single ticket. The league has expanded without rhyme or reason, installing franchises in cities for the same reason that climbers scale the Himalayas: because they are there. The season itself is virtually interminable, and it has become more of a challenge to miss the playoffs than to qualify.
In the other corner, meet the players. It should come as no great surprise that they are greedy and self-centered or that many are overpaid underperformers. Do they love the game? Not enough, apparently, to make noises that might sound like negotiation. Are their hearts tied to the teams they play for? Ask the good people of Cleveland if a paycheck, even one that would be a lottery win for most of us, would be enough to keep a beloved star in town.
The players do what they can to get the fans on their side, but most of us have trouble buying into the fantasy that these multimillionaires are working stiffs just like the rest of us or that their union is the voice of the working man. Players have problems that the rest of us wish we had.
Basketball has changed, the NBA has changed and the basketball business has changed. The economy is tough, to say the least. Tickets are hard to sell, because people are strapped for cash, yet ticket prices go through the roof. More people are staying home, and few are concerned about a labor dispute in which everyone involved has more money than sense. When the rest of us are struggling, it’s hard to care about who wins a battle that, for all intents and purposes, is being fought on another planet.
If we don’t care about the lockout, what about our protagonists? Do the owners or the players care? Remember that the lockout was already a hot topic during the last NBA playoffs and that the two sides spent months ignoring the iceberg dead ahead. In that light, the question of caring is, sadly, a fair one. Is there a silver lining? Perhaps there is, as the NBA has united the country in a way that politicians have failed to do. We can lift our voices and say as one, “Who cares?” We have better things to worry about.
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