There aren’t many things I enjoy about winter. Christmas cookies are pretty good, I guess. And Christmas carols. And Christmas. Other than that it’s just rain, more rain, a slight chance of snow and freezing your ass off in your heater-less house. But there is one thing that I look forward to every winter: the NBA.
I’ve been a Blazer fan for about as long as I can remember, but the recent resurgence @@So… before Roy had bad knees?@@of the team has pushed me into a full-on obsession. I gobble up all Blazer-related media during the offseason and keep constant tabs on standings during the regular season. At the end of close games I pace, pull my hair and swear quite a bit. During the season, the NBA is a fairly large part of my life, to the point where my roommates stopped allowing Blazer broadcasts in the house. No worries, I just go over to my neighbor’s.
The NBA is that nice middle ground between the short NFL season and the unending slog through the MLB months, and it’s just more exciting, damn it. There are colorful personalities (Shaquille O’Neal, Dwight Howard, Kevin Garnett),@@checked names@@ stupidly amazing athletes (LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade)@@checked@@ and the recent resurgence of a classic rivalry (Boston-Los Angeles). There are young teams with passionate, driven players (Oklahoma City, Chicago) and outrageous sex scandals (Steve Nash’s wife, anyone?).
During high school, watching the NBA became a big thing at my house. We were all Blazer fans, of course, but we loved watching the marquee matchups every week and seeing Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith@@checked@@ goof off on TNT. The recent announcement that Shaq would soon join Charles and the gang only increased my excitement for this season.
Then came the news of the lockout.
I’m no economics expert, and the finer points of the negotiations between the National Basketball Players Association@@http://www.usatoday.com/sports/basketball/nba/story/2011-10-27/labor-negotiations-thursday/50949524/1@@ and the league’s owners had pretty much gone right over my head. I spoke with Patrick Malee, sports editor for the Emerald, who explained the cause of the potential lockout.
“Basically, the holdup comes down to a bunch of smaller issues: contract length, whether there should be a hard cap on salary, competitive balance — and one giant one — the split of basketball-related revenue,” Malee said. “The owners, claiming that they’re losing money every year, want a share larger than the 43 percent they’ve been granted in years past, and the players don’t want their share to be lowered unreasonably. That’s where most of the hostile bickering and finger-pointing has come from.”
Complications from negotiations have already forced NBA commissioner David Stern@@http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slug=ap-nbalabor@@ to cancel the league’s preseason games, including a planned matchup between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Sacramento Kings at Matthew Knight Arena, and the first two weeks of the regular season, which was slated to begin Nov. 1.
The cancellation of those games hurts enough; I’m not sure what I would do if the entire season was canceled. And I’m not the only student whose winter term revolves around the association.
“Following the NBA in and of itself is a ritual for me. I don’t play in a fantasy league or anything, but I always put aside money to buy the NBA League Pass so that I get every game on TV,” Malee said. “Basically, during the season a good portion of my free time is spent watching games, because they’re always on. And with the NBA in the middle of such a golden era in terms of sheer talent, almost every team is worth watching.”
There have been suggestions that no NBA would mean an increased audience for the National Hockey League, which suffered through its own canceled season in 2004-05. But Greg Humphreys, a junior at Washington State University,@@http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gregory-humphreys/3a/b/385@@ thinks they are unfounded.
“If there is no season this year, I honestly don’t know what I will do,” Humphreys said. “I for sure will not watch hockey until the Stanley Cup Finals. Maybe no NBA season will lead to more coverage for college basketball, which I would definitely follow more than I already do.”
What the players and owners seem to be forgetting here is the fans. We’re the reason they have these jobs in the first place; we’re the ones who spend our hard-earned money on tickets, merchandise and cable networks to watch their games. Where’s the sense of allegiance with the fans? Don’t they kind of owe us something? Like, say, a season?
“Especially in this economy, with people struggling to even find a decent 9-to-5, it’s sickening to watch billionaires fight with millionaires over a few percentage points,” Malee said. “Even for professional sports, this is really a new definition of ‘tone-deaf.’ But to be real, whenever I get to watch basketball again, I’ll probably forget about all of this. They know people like me will come back, and that’s why they fight on.”
Frankly, at this point, I don’t care how the players and owners figure this stuff out, I just want them to hurry up and do it. It’s not just their jobs at stake now, it’s the jobs of thousands of employees associated with NBA teams, arenas, broadcasts and merchandise. I hope the two sides can put aside their differences and get back to doing what they do best — providing the most exciting professional sport there is.
And I know one thing for sure: If I have to resort to watching hockey this winter, I’m knocking someone’s teeth out.@@hehehehee@@