Timeout: NBA Lockout Expected to Be Worse Than NFL Shutdown

The 2011 NBA lockout began just before midnight June 30. Although this lockout doesn't have the hype that the NFL's does, an NBA shutdown may be even more damaging. Fittingly, this is happening right as the NFL is presumably inching toward a settlement that would save its season. But for basketball, it could lose the entire 2011-12 season before a deal is finally struck.

Since fans were raving over the postseason and the Mavericks' championship victory over the Heat, it was easier to ignore the buzz a few weeks ago. But now it is unavoidable, as almost no one expects a last-minute deal between the owners and players before midnight.

In fact, the odds for next season to even happen may be at less than even money given all the negativity and low expectations. Even the NFL didn't have this kind of ominous cloud over it when it shut down. But that might be because the NFL has released fewer details about its dire financial plight.

According to NBA owners, 22 out of 30 teams are losing money, and the league itself is losing hundreds of millions a year. As such, owners want a new collective bargaining agreement to cut into player salaries, since the players allegedly made out too well in the last CBA. However, the players don't want to give up that much, although some major concessions could be needed all around to stop the bleeding.

Given how the last NBA season was the biggest in some time, bringing more buzz around pro basketball since the Michael Jordan era, these kind of dire straits seem more improbable. But they are real, as the game does not have a $9 billion pot to split up, unlike pro football.

This is the year of the lockout in pro sports, as one shutdown is starting just as hope grows for the end of another. Football fans have lived through it for over 100 days, yet fingers are crossed that a deal will be struck by July 15, if not by the Fourth of July, reports Yahoo! Sports.

But for all of the hysteria around the labor crisis in football, fans would have still flocked back even if the season was delayed or canceled. After all, football has become America's new game, as evidenced by the panic over a potentially canceled season. That league might well get past this brutal off-season, especially if a deal comes shortly, yet the NBA could be another matter.

At the least, if a lockout cancels the forthcoming basketball season, the league still has LeBron James and the Heat, Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, and other superstars and super teams to help the recovery. But no one knows what kind of NBA these players will return to, what kind of rights they will have, or when they will return at all.

Sources:
Arizona Republic- "Owners, players face uncertainty as deadline arrives"
Yahoo! Sports- "Signs continue to point to pending NFL labor deal"