NBA Lockout Will Only Serve to Implicate the NBAPA

With labor discussions already underway this weekend between the NBA and the players association, the consensus around the sports world is that either the upcoming NBA season will be significantly shortened, or it won't happen at all.

Leading into the weekend, Derrick Fisher, the president of the players association, acknowledged that, though both sides will try in earnest to reach a fair resolution, things remain fundamentally oppositional.

Meanwhile, NBA commish David Stern has echoed through media for months that the owners association is in no place to go halves in order to salvage the NBA season.

In a nutshell, if you're an NBA fan, things look bleak.

But if you really wanted to isolate any aspect of these turnabouts in a particularly sad light, consider this.

For as far back as anyone can remember, the NBA has taken great pride in marketing its players on a platform that outshines any other major American sport. 

To many sports purists, it was reason enough to alienate them from the sport, even on its best days.

"Those guys just care about money!" many of them would say. "They are living in a world that actually feeds the belly of the beast instead of invoking a balance of power!"

And everything that has transpired over the course of this greed-ridden NBA lockout has done nothing but proven them right.

The word "entitlement" gets thrown around too often in sports, but at this point in time, it cannot be highlighted enough.

If someone were to effectively pinpoint the key variables that have led to this joke of a meeting going on this weekend, it's this:

1) There is an understanding that players should have a disproportionate amount of leverage because they are the attraction.

2) Because the economy took an unforeseeable hit, owners have been losing money for years now while the players have yet to pay a dime out of pocket.

3) The players think it isn't fair for them to bare the brunt of what has happened when there is a clear division between small market owners and large market owners regarding revenue sharing among teams, which is nothing more than a convenient scapegoat for the players association. 

At the end of the day, this NBA lockout needed to happen.

Not because the players have specifically done anything wrong. But rather, because the system has been too skewed for too long.

How is it possible that the U.S. Bureau of Labor reports that nearly 10 percent of Americans are unemployed, but fat-ass Eddy Curry was making $11,276,863 as of last year?!

Once again, it is not the collective fault of the players that this is all happening.

But realistically speaking, it was only a matter of time before the ridiculous spectacle that once was known as the NBA trading deadline—but has since been annually referred to as the expiring contract palooza—was going to splatter on someone's face.

The NBA needs to reinvent the wheel right now, because there is no reason that the offseason and the trading deadline should continue to outshine the actual season, as it arguably has in the past few years.

There is no reason that, in order for a team to pick up Steve Nash at his current age of 49, they would need to sign him to a contract that would last well into his twilight as a player.

There is no reason that the NBA players association should forge a partnership with the NBA and its owners only to abstain from any sense of accountability when one side is clearly drowning in debt.

And if this lockout does end up forsaking the NBA season, won't it be hard to avoid re-conceptualizing the meaning of a slogan that once endeared us to the sport.

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