Will NBA Thrive or Suffer Horrific Downfall Following Lockout?

In the wee hours of the morning on Saturday, November 26, the NBA's players and owners agreed in principle to key components of a new collective bargaining agreement.

For all intents and purposes, the lockout that started way back on July 1 was over. At that precise moment, the only real question worth asking was a simple one:

Now what?

It's a question that is going to take some time to answer. The NBA did itself no favors by going into such a lengthy lockout, and the key parties alienated a lot of people with the way they went about their business. 

The key concern for the NBA right now should be whether or not the alienated will come back. Goodness knows both the league's players and the league's owners gave people plenty of excuses to stay away.

For a period of several months, the NBA was not a major sports league. It was a bastion of buffoonery, and the image is going to linger for some time.

Fortunately, there is hope for the NBA.

If the NBA is lucky, it will walk the same path that the NFL walked after it lifted its own lockout. There was no shortage of anger directed at the NFL while it was in lockout mode, but as soon as the lockout was lifted fans were eager to put it in the rear-view mirror. It was, to use the NFL's own words, back to football.

It helped that the NFL was able to squeeze its entire offseason into a period of a couple of weeks. Instead of complaining about the lockout, the NFL's vast fanbase was happy to soak in the flurry of free-agent signings and trades that occurred before and after teams opened their training camps.

Before long, the preseason arrived, and it took everyone straight into the regular season. USA Today reported at the start of the season that the NFL was expecting attendance to rebound after three straight down years, and so far the numbers are looking solid. Attendance is not likely to be what it once was, but the league drew an all-time-high 207.7 million television viewers in 2010, and that number could be eclipsed this year.

In so many words, NFL fans are treating the lockout like it never happened.

Make no mistake, this same formula is what the NBA is hoping for: Distract the fans with an offseason that is both brief and wild, hit them with the preseason and then hit them with the regular season. Once it arrives, everyone can sit back and enjoy the ride, and hopefully forget the rocky road that led to it all.

There are reasons for the NBA to be optimistic about this working out. As soon as an agreement was reached between the players and owners, rumors immediately started flying about which players were going to get traded where and which players were going to sign with which team.

These rumors have yet to die down, and it helps that they concern some big names. Chris Paul might get traded, and so could Dwight Howard. Concerning the free-agent market, the focus is on where big men like Tyson Chandler and Nene are going to end up.

A lot of people are plugged into all this. All you have to do is take one look at Twitter these days, and chances are you're going to see NBA-related terms among the top trending topics. People are talking about the NBA, and that's a very good sign.

In addition, many have already opined that starting the season on Christmas Day is ideal for the NBA. The NHL is taking a day off on Christmas, and the NFL is only going to be showing one game. The NBA will be showing a whopping five games, and they're going to be showing them to an audience that, let's face it, will have nothing better to do.

Besides, the general consensus is that the casual fanbase doesn't start caring about the NBA until Christmas anyway. The NBA may actually want to consider starting on Christmas every year.

The obvious hope is that people will forget that the NBA sacrificed a significant portion of its schedule in order to even have a season this year. Perhaps the sight of high-flying dunks and clutch three-pointers will serve as a kind of memory-wiping agent. Instead of being angry at the NBA, people will recall why they love it as soon as they see it.

If so, tickets and merchandise will be sold, games will be watched and fans will be happy. At long last, it will be back to basketball.

The above paragraphs represent the best-case scenario, which could very well come to fruition. 

Unfortunately, there is a worst-case scenario. Put simply, it's what will happen if people are unable to cast aside their anger at the NBA. Or worse, it is what will happen if the angry crowd becomes indifferent.

The NBA has had this happen to it before. Following the 1998-1999 NBA lockout, ticket sales took a dive and average attendances shrunk. In addition, television ratings dropped in each of the three seasons that immediately followed the lockout (see HoopsWorld.com).

It didn't help that the NBA only had a 50-game season to help bring back fans.

When leagues suffer through long work stoppages, this kind of fallout is typical. We saw Major League Baseball struggle for years to win back fans after its strike in 1994-1995, which was a particularly huge disaster because it led to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.

If you take a look at baseball's attendance figures for the 1990s, you'll see that plenty of ballparks saw attendances drop in the years following the strike. People stayed away, and a good percentage of those people stayed angry until Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa started blasting balls out of the yard.

Then came the steroid mess, and people got angry again.

Meanwhile, the National Hockey League is still trying to win back fans who were driven away by the league's lockout in 2004-2005. The NHL's fanbase is small enough to begin with, and the league made it even smaller when it lost an entire season thanks to its lockout.

That reality is not reflected in the NHL's attendance figures following the lockout, but the NHL's TV ratings took a serious hit. One Associated Press report described post-lockout ratings as "minuscule," an indication that casual fans didn't want the NHL's product. TV ratings are just now coming around.

The NBA thankfully didn't lose an entire season, but fans are perfectly aware that the NBA has gone through two very long, very ugly work stoppages within the last 15 years. From a PR perspective, that's a disaster, as the NBA looks from afar to be a totally dysfunctional and totally greedy organization.

For those who view the NBA this way, the question is why they should come crawling back. 

That's another question we don't have an answer to yet. But if these fans do stay away, there's no denying that the NBA is going to be in trouble. The key reason the league's lockout lasted so long is because there wasn't enough money to go around. If the NBA doesn't win fans back, there will be even less money to go around the next time the players and owners have to negotiate. That could happen as soon as 2017, as the new 10-year CBA has a mutual opt-out clause that kicks in that year.

If so, the NBA is right back where it started on July 1, 2011.

So what's the more likely outcome?

Sadly, we can only speculate. Personally, my hope is that people will flock to the NBA like people flocked to the NFL. The short offseason should help, and I think the NBA is going to score big time with its Christmas Day extravaganza.

I also think the key difference between this lockout and the last one is that the NBA didn't have Michael Jordan to sell to fans after the league came back. He was gone, and the NBA didn't have a young star ready to take his place.

That won't be an issue this time around, as the NBA has numerous stars that fans have come to know and love (and hate), and no doubt fans will be glad to see these stars back in action.

However, I wouldn't rule out the worst-case scenario. The NBA really screwed its image during the lockout, and a lot of people out there aren't very forgiving.

As such, here's a message to David Stern and everyone else responsible for the 2011 lockout:

Cross your fingers.