NBA Players Going Overseas Could Put Entire Season in Danger

Kobe Bryant to Deron Williams and everyone in between in the NBA has seemingly been linked to some sort of rumor about playing basketball in Europe or China, and at first it seemed like a shortsighted idea.

However, now that most of those deals are coming out to have clauses in them that let them return to the NBA if and when the lockout ends, it seems like most players would be careless not to sign an overseas deal, if not for themselves, but for the rest of the players in the league.

Back in 1998, the last time the NBA was faced with a lockout, David Stern and the owners came to the bargaining table with one mentality. They were going to get the best deal possible, and they had no problem missing a few months of the season.

When the lockout shortened the season to 50 games, then-Players Association President Patrick Ewing was famous for saying, "Sure, we make a lot of money, but we spend a lot, too."

Yea, that was kind of the problem.

Stern and the owners basically waited out the players, and an astounding number of whom were living paycheck to paycheck (probably a big reason why guys like Antoine Walker and Allen Iverson ended up with money troubles shortly after or even during their careers). By January they were ready to negotiate and get a deal done so they could get back to making money.

The players came out looking like greedy, irresponsible players, in part because of Ewing's quote, while the owners came out looking greedy themselves, but that's how owners are supposed to look. In all, they didn't look much worse than the owners in the MLB strike or the recent NHL lockout.

The key to the '98 lockout was that nobody really knew the financial situation of individual players, except themselves and perhaps David Stern. Now, they have an opportunity that wasn't afforded to them in the last millennium.

Sure, Deron Williams signing with Besiktas of Turkey for around $3 million isn't going to buy him a new mansion in the Maldives, but Omri Casspi making $40,000 a month with Maccabi Tel Aviv is going to keep him and players like him that sign similar deals afloat long enough, so they don't have to take a damning deal from the owners as soon as January.

While the players are overseas at least recouping some of their losses, owners will have to sit over here in America while they see Euro league teams rake in record attendance numbers.

The problem the players union still has is the perception of the problems that the NBA has throughout the country. I mean, it's not hard to see that Eddy Curry making $30 million over three years to play 10 games and score 31 points is at least a screaming hint of a broken system.

At the very least, the players now have at least a weapon at the bargaining table, something they didn't seem to have a mere month ago.

Whether that is good or bad news depends on whether you are a basketball fan or one of those players that enjoy making insane amounts of guaranteed money for multiple years.

If you are one of those basketball fans, or god forbid, a basketball writer (gulp!), you could be in for a basketball free fall, winter and spring.

It's looking more and more like the next bit of basketball above the NCAA level might not happen until the Olympics next summer.