NBA Lockout: Good riddance!

Last week Pete wrote a great piece about the NBA lockout.  I was going to throw in my unsolicited two-cents, but Jeff MacGregor at ESPN beat me to it. His article pretty much sums up my feelings on the lockout and the NBA in general, especially this passage: 

Let it fail. I'm tired of being played for a sucker. 

There's basketball everywhere. 

In an economy this bad, most of us will be happy to watch college ball the next six months; or the satellite package withLega Basket Serie A on it and the Israeli Basketball Super League, down at the corner bar; or we'll thumb through our own season on the Xbox. Or just watch the kids play in the driveway. These are lean days, Clueless Billionaire. 

Or maybe the players will start their own league and barnstorm from armory to armory the way they did it back when. The value in the NBA is the talent, after all. And as start-ups go, it wouldn't cost much: just $89 to incorporate in Delaware. Call it the Peoples' Traveling Basketball League (patent pending). Twenty bucks a seat.

Read the rest of the article at ESPN.

At this point, I would MUCH rather see an independent league run by the players, for the players, than the current rich guy, country club economic model they have now. Wouldn't you?

Just Walkin'

Marvin Webster and his fiancee, Madeira Meadows, as they stroll across the Morgan State campus in the early 1970s. Madeira passed away in 1992 and Marvin, as you'll recall, passed away just two years ago. For a nice story about how Marvin Webster affected the life of a young Seattle boy, be sure to visit Sweva's P-Patch.

(Photo via Sports Illustrated).

Lockout Rant

I haven't written too much about the lockout because, in all honesty, I think everyone else is as sick of it as I am.

Look, you've got lawyers, meetings, contracts, and David Stern - it's the perfect combination of everything Americans hate. We'd much rather look at 20-year-old YouTube clips of Shawn Kemp dunks than ... wait, hey, come back here!

As I was saying, I haven't written too much about the lockout, and I'm not interested in writing (and I'm guessing you're not interested in reading) what I think is the best way to solve this mess. 53% of BRI, 50% of BRI, no more long-term deals, no more Bird rights ... I just don't care, and I'm not nearly smart enough to figure out an easy way to solve it.

What I am interested in, though, is the perception that exists that the NBA is on the verge of blowing some sort of "momentum" that it built up during last year's playoffs. This, friends, is garbage, and the people who run the NBA know it.

They know it because they know we're all a bunch of suckers. Look, the NHL - a league who plays in the shadows and edges of sport society, a sport with a participation rate approximately 3 notches below lacrosse among American youth - gave up an entire season half a decade ago, and how do you think that hurt them?

Not at all.

If you're curious, that's the per-game attendance for the NHL for every season since 2000-01, with the exception of 2004-05, when there was no season. Now, can you tell me how the absence of the league for an entire season negatively affected the NHL? I sure as hell can't, and those numbers include Phoenix, where hockey is about as popular as pro-immigration lectures, and Atlanta, a city which so loved its team that it staged a massive rally when they left for Winnipeg this summer.

The people that run the NBA know they'll survive because even when they roast a fan-base over a pit full of hot coals, then douse them with whatever they use to get the diseases out of locker room hot tubs, those fanbases still clamor for more. For crying out loud, in Seattle, home to the whiniest fans on the planet, we're still itching for more NBA. Sacramento, even when their owners treat them worse than they do their airplane latrine staff, is falling all over itself to keep the NBA in town.

So spare me the rhetoric about how the NBA is "blowing its chance" to build on a successful post-season, or that the lockout - if it costs the league an entire season - will devastate the NBA's popularity in North America. It's all crap, because the people that run this league know full well what its fans are.

Suckers.