NBA Lockout: With Two More Weeks Gone from Schedule, Is There Hope for Season?

Coming into this morning’s NBA labor talks, two days of (comparatively) civil negotiations had produced an optimistic atmosphere. When talks broke off this evening, that optimism looked to be a mirage.

As reported by Yahoo! Sports (via Twitter), the league has officially chopped another two weeks from the schedule. All games through November 30th are now out of the picture, meaning that each team has lost (judging from last season’s schedule) on the order of 17-18 games.

The new cutoff date, by itself, isn’t a death sentence for the NBA season. After all, the lockout-shortened 1998-99 campaign didn’t get underway until January 20th, with the lockout having been settled just two weeks before that.

However, the bigger concern is the way that the talks seem to have taken a nosedive after a couple of days of apparent progress. Getting fans’ hopes up was bad enough, but raising hopes among the parties at the negotiating table and then dashing them is likely to lead to resentment on both sides.

Needless to say, more resentment is not what these discussions need.

The two sides do legitimately seem to be closer to an agreement on so-called “system issues”—questions like how to penalize teams that repeatedly exceed the salary cap. Until the problem of how to split overall revenue is solved, though, the NBA season isn’t going anywhere.

Indeed, it’s looking more and more likely that the only thing that will force the sides to agree on a revenue split is the reality of having lost the 2011-12 season, a reality that looms closer with each failed meeting.