NBA Lockout: Hoops Fans Need to Prepare for a Long, Drawn-Out Battle

The NBA Lockout Will Not Be Lifted Any Time Soon

We knew it was coming, and it's finally here. The NBA lockout has begun.

With the 2010-2011 NBA season just a few weeks behind us, Thursday was the last day for the league's players and owners to agree on a new collective bargaining agreement before the NBA went into its second work stoppage in 13 years.

They could not, meaning that the lockout will go into effect as soon as the midnight deadline comes and goes.

As Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports tells the story, there really wasn't much for the two sides to discuss heading into Thursday's last-ditch meeting. They went into the proceedings in New York knowing that they were hopelessly far apart on all the major issues, and three hours was not enough to bridge any of them.

"The gap is too great," said union head honcho Billy Hunter.

According to a report from ESPN, all league business is officially on hold. That means no free agency, which would have started on Friday, and it presumably means there will be no trades in the next couple hours as well.

Get used to it, folks. This is how things are going to be for the immediate future. There will be plenty of rumors, no doubt about that, but the only real news concerning the NBA will be about labor negotiations. Picture the NFL lockout, and then turn the dial up to 11.

Make no mistake, this little bugger is not going to be over in a hurry. The owners basically want the players to take a massive pay cut, and they have a number of ways to get the job done.

For starters, they want the players' 57 percent cut of revenues to come down, and they also want to install a hard salary cap (pay this "flex" cap nonsense no mind) that will limit team payrolls to $62 million.

All told, the players could very well end up losing over $500 million.

In an attempt to counter the league's desires, Wojnarowski reported that Hunter said the union gave the owners a proposal on Thursday, as if urging them to mull it over before they did anything too daft. Supposedly, it was not well received by commissioner David Stern and deputy commissioner Adam Silver.

You can get used to this too. Essentially, what the league did with its initial proposal was back the players into a corner. It is from that corner that the players will have to fight, and a new deal won't be reached until the players progress to a point of fair compromise. Stern and the owners probably already know where that point is.

The troubling part is that the players are probably not going to be so easily coaxed into reaching a settlement. After all, many of them are aware that this is essentially what happened in the last lockout. All Stern had to do was threaten to cancel the season, and a deal was reached soon after. If you're going to light a fire under someone's rump, the best idea is to use paychecks as kindling.

Long story short, come to grips with a shortened season now. Doing so will save you some grief when the lockout actually starts eating into the regular season. You can hold out hope that there will still be basketball at some point in the next year, but do so at your own peril.

Personally, I'm going to shelve my basketball fanhood for the time being. I'll see you all on the other side.