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Will the NBA join the NHL in the land of the locked out?
By Noah Gold, Columnist
Friday, June 10, 2005   12:22 PM ET

Not you too, NBA.

The NBA’s present collective bargaining agreement expires on June 30th. And while it supposedly took less than ten minutes for the owners to agree that Las Vegas would be a fine destination for the 2007 all-star game (imagine being at a sports book for that game), the owners and player’s union are not near close to coming to a compromise on the particulars of a new collective bargaining agreement.

Talks have been happening in New York since February. And we are still here, the calendar approaching May, with no new deal in sight.

Gosh, this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The main difference that sets the NBA apart from the NHL is that the NBA is the context of the issues where the two sides differ.

With the NHL, the players and the owners butted heads on the notion of a hard salary cap. And even when initiating a salary cap was finally agreed upon by the players, the two sides failed to find a number that pleased them both. And so the entire NHL season and playoffs were erased in one fell swoop.

In the case of the NBA, a different issue has surfaced. With the high influx of high school students making the jump to the NBA in recent years, the owners (and Stern) hoping to raise the age minimum. Stern specifically wishes it could be raised to 19 or 20.

“We would very much like to get our scouts and general managers out of high school gyms,” Stern said (Associated Press).

Other issues include the maximum length of player’s contracts, the maximum raises allowed each year in those contracts, and the specifics of the luxury tax that is supposed to deter teams from overspending on players (Associated Press).

While the NBA is not as close as they would like to be in hashing out these lingering issues, they have shown resiliency in the past when it came to labor disputes. In 1999, while it took them longer than expected, the two sides were able to save the season, making a 46 game season with full playoffs.

Also, the NBA saw in 1999 that it took a little while for the league to regain the trust of their loyal fans. A lot of people still believe that the Spurs win over the Knicks in the finals never actually happened.

And so losing any part of the season over these issues could only hurt them. I am confident they will not follow their hockey counterparts and finalize a new collective bargaining agreement before the June 30th deadline.

It took an assault on one of baseball’s most sanctimonious records for baseball to climb out of the hole it dug itself when they canceled the season in 1994. What would it take for the NBA if they lose their season next year?

(I shudder to think how the NHL plans on gaining back their 15 loyal fans if/when they start playing again.)

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