It's Time to Fear the NBA Lockout

No one cared about the lockout. That is, until the NBA up and canceled the first two weeks of play.

From the beginning, negotiations between the owners and the Players Association revolved around questions of bottom lines and workers’ rights. That’s business and labor law, not basketball.

Granted, it’s become increasingly hard to cover sports, or enjoy it as a fan, without acknowledging these aspects of the game. Cap size and trade exceptions are part of serious fandom.

Except there's a huge difference between trying to determine if the Knicks can land Chris Paul, and trying to figure out how the owners may be misrepresenting their financial plight, or just what is at stake when the two parties get locked in a stare-down over basketball-related income.

Lockout fatigue was very real. The updates from the talks were abstruse, frequently contradictory, and felt like a bad dream that we hoped to wake up from just before the really bad part started.

On Monday night, we learned, in the most harsh way possible, that we were dreamers to think these talks did not matter.  There would be repercussions for the game itself; the 2012-13 season could start to fall away.

That’s when, realizing the lockout’s true power, people started to care.

Then again, in the abstract, we had always known this was a possibility. As much progress had been made, every inch had been hard-fought, every compromise made grudgingly.

Still, though, all of these talks had taken place during the off-season, and so far, only the kooky summer leagues and the truly meaningless preseason had been affected. There was too much of a distance, too much of a disconnect, between these meetings and any kind of real basketball.

But when it all fell apart (for the time being), shock set in. This is no longer just an especially prickly offseason, it's the stand-off that will eat into the amount of times we get to see LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Kobe Bryant play.

Monday night's news was a tremendous bummer. Maybe that's a selfish attitude to take, seeing as these athletes have the terms of their employment at stake. That they make millions isn't really the point here.

In the hours since, it's been hard to regain that perspective. Basketball is disappearing. It's sad, and we can either blame everyone or no one. If it's the latter, we should throw ourselves in there, too.

Granted, two weeks is not a lifetime in basketball. Even a month wouldn't be the end of the world. The problem is that, in the NBA's warped version of visibility, that first month is often all that casual fans watch until April or so.

It's when players make their grand entrances, teams find their stories for the season, and surprises remind us why exactly we missed this game so much. Then, silence and doldrums for all but the die-hards.

In part, it's because long stretches of the season do seem like zombie-world; competing against all manner of football, and the more fervid NCAA hoops, makes it hard to get a real foothold after that first month.

So maybe it's only two weeks. But it's as important a two weeks as you'll find outside of the playoffs.

Go a month, and all of a sudden, we're in real trouble for 2012-13. It will be without an opening act, a rudder, when most of the country tunes back in after the All-Star break.

There’s reason for optimism, though, even if we end up with something as ghastly as a half-season. For one, there are just too many story lines left hanging from last season.

Like it or not, the Heat still exist, and will remain the focal point of the league. Kobe Bryant and his aging Lakers have probably one more serious run left in them. The Knicks, souped-up with Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony, are bringing major firepower to the nation’s most basketball-hungry market.

The Thunder are on the verge of taking the West, and Durant may soon challenge LeBron for league’s best player—however, they have to re-sign Russell Westbrook, which might not even prove to be such a great plan.

MVP Derrick Rose and the Bulls surpassed all expectations and should continue to challenge the Heat. Blake Griffin will dunk. And that’s just the league’s most visible players, teams and cities.

In short, the NBA is doing too well, at least when it comes to stars and stories, to ever fall into too big a rut.

This isn’t 1999, when the league had to live without Jordan, as well as deal with controversial figures like Allen Iverson. This season should still be perfectly enjoyable, if nothing else because it will answer some questions. Next season? No problem.

However, for the moment, none of this matters. One of the most exciting parts of one of the most anticipated NBA seasons in decades is starting to decay and fall away.

Who cares that we can staunch the bleeding, or that the players are doing the right thing? We would have preferred to never have seen it come to this. No matter how impractical that is.

Maybe, when talks resume, fans will be a little more interested in following the specifics of the debate. The lockout isn’t so benign anymore. It has fangs. And no matter how boring it may be, it has real-world consequences. At least if part of your world is NBA basketball.