RealGM Analysis
After the last-minute series of negotiations to save the season failed on Sunday and Monday, the first two weeks of the NBA regular season have been cancelled. The owners seem unwilling to compromise, confident the players will fold when they start missing paychecks, as they did in 1999.
Even in a best-case scenario, a good portion of the regular season will be missed. The optics are terrible: billionaires and millionaires who have benefited from publicly financed stadiums but can’t compromise on over $4 billion in revenues while unemployment is nearly 10%.
All the positive momentum the league’s 2010-11 season generated is being thrown away, while the system the owners are proposing will prevent the formation of super-teams responsible for most of it. But even if the season is lost, the NBA, and basketball in general, will survive.
If you compare the public indifference to the NBA’s lockout to the hysteria surrounding the possible cancellation of NFL preseason games, the league looks in bad shape. But the NBA, just like the MLB and the NHL, isn’t really competing with the NFL. The NFL is America’s new past time; everything else is a niche product.
The good news for those leagues is the NFL can only play five months a year. If football was less punishing to the bodies of its players, it would probably have expanded to a nearly year-round schedule to satisfy the demands of the American sports fan, much like soccer dominates the sporting calendar in Europe.
In the world of DVR and Netflix, sports are one of the only things that still consistently draw a live audience. The NFL’s short season creates a huge void of sports content the other seven months of the year; ESPN needs something on its airwaves February through August.
Baseball, a sport without a clock that routinely humbles even its greatest players, appeals to a very different demographic than basketball. Kids raised on alley-oops and last-second buzzer beaters aren’t going to become devotees of the double-switch and the ten-pitch at-bat, just as baseball fans who grew up with an endless array of “unwritten rules” to prevent showmanship aren’t going to switch allegiances to a sport where preening, chest-beating and taunting occur on a nightly basis.
Hockey and soccer, like basketball, involve a team moving a ball across a field in order to score it in a goal. The difference is the goal is raised ten feet in basketball, creating a more exciting game played in the air instead of on the ground, while also preventing one player from dominating the action by stationing himself in front of the goal.
More importantly, both sports have demographic issues that make them unlikely to resonate with the American public. People who play a sport recreationally are usually its biggest fans; most of the US doesn’t receive enough ice to make recreational hockey possible. Soccer, meanwhile, draws from a worldwide talent base, and Americans tend to be fairly provincial when it comes to fandom.
Basketball has a unique place in the American sporting landscape, one the other minor sports are unlikely to fill. It saddens me to see such a beautiful game become a victim of an economic struggle between two unimaginably wealthy groups of people, but labor disputes aren’t going to make me less of a fan of the game itself.
The one upside of the lockout is that it kept many of the game’s best young prospects in school an extra year. College basketball should have its most exciting regular season in recent memory: North Carolina and Kentucky have more talent than many NBA teams, while Baylor (Perry Jones) and UConn (Andre Drummond) have “black swan” players with skill-sets unlike any in the NBA.
And if there is not a season of professional basketball in the US, the intrigue surrounding the 2012 Olympics will be even greater. While previous US teams have lost because of chemistry issues and unfamiliarity with the international game, for the first time, an international team (Spain) won’t be over-matched in terms of talent when they play the Americans.
Even if the NBA doesn’t return until 2012, it will still have a near-monopoly in terms of the best basketball players in the world. The lockout will damage the league, but not to the extent its fans fear or its detractors hope.
Even in a best-case scenario, a good portion of the regular season will be missed. The optics are terrible: billionaires and millionaires who have benefited from publicly financed stadiums but can’t compromise on over $4 billion in revenues while unemployment is nearly 10%.
All the positive momentum the league’s 2010-11 season generated is being thrown away, while the system the owners are proposing will prevent the formation of super-teams responsible for most of it. But even if the season is lost, the NBA, and basketball in general, will survive.
If you compare the public indifference to the NBA’s lockout to the hysteria surrounding the possible cancellation of NFL preseason games, the league looks in bad shape. But the NBA, just like the MLB and the NHL, isn’t really competing with the NFL. The NFL is America’s new past time; everything else is a niche product.
The good news for those leagues is the NFL can only play five months a year. If football was less punishing to the bodies of its players, it would probably have expanded to a nearly year-round schedule to satisfy the demands of the American sports fan, much like soccer dominates the sporting calendar in Europe.
In the world of DVR and Netflix, sports are one of the only things that still consistently draw a live audience. The NFL’s short season creates a huge void of sports content the other seven months of the year; ESPN needs something on its airwaves February through August.
Baseball, a sport without a clock that routinely humbles even its greatest players, appeals to a very different demographic than basketball. Kids raised on alley-oops and last-second buzzer beaters aren’t going to become devotees of the double-switch and the ten-pitch at-bat, just as baseball fans who grew up with an endless array of “unwritten rules” to prevent showmanship aren’t going to switch allegiances to a sport where preening, chest-beating and taunting occur on a nightly basis.
Hockey and soccer, like basketball, involve a team moving a ball across a field in order to score it in a goal. The difference is the goal is raised ten feet in basketball, creating a more exciting game played in the air instead of on the ground, while also preventing one player from dominating the action by stationing himself in front of the goal.
More importantly, both sports have demographic issues that make them unlikely to resonate with the American public. People who play a sport recreationally are usually its biggest fans; most of the US doesn’t receive enough ice to make recreational hockey possible. Soccer, meanwhile, draws from a worldwide talent base, and Americans tend to be fairly provincial when it comes to fandom.
Basketball has a unique place in the American sporting landscape, one the other minor sports are unlikely to fill. It saddens me to see such a beautiful game become a victim of an economic struggle between two unimaginably wealthy groups of people, but labor disputes aren’t going to make me less of a fan of the game itself.
The one upside of the lockout is that it kept many of the game’s best young prospects in school an extra year. College basketball should have its most exciting regular season in recent memory: North Carolina and Kentucky have more talent than many NBA teams, while Baylor (Perry Jones) and UConn (Andre Drummond) have “black swan” players with skill-sets unlike any in the NBA.
And if there is not a season of professional basketball in the US, the intrigue surrounding the 2012 Olympics will be even greater. While previous US teams have lost because of chemistry issues and unfamiliarity with the international game, for the first time, an international team (Spain) won’t be over-matched in terms of talent when they play the Americans.
Even if the NBA doesn’t return until 2012, it will still have a near-monopoly in terms of the best basketball players in the world. The lockout will damage the league, but not to the extent its fans fear or its detractors hope.
