In 1994, my Dad said that he would never directly financially support Major League baseball again. It is now 2011 and he stuck to his word after 17 years. Being from Central America and being from that generation that really loves the sport, he was a huge baseball fan and from the time he came here in the 70's as college student to 1994, he was always at Dodger Stadium and my brothers and I have many memories of going there as kids.
However, we only games on TV and that is about it. I hope that NBA fans are willing to be are hard as iron as the owners are hard as iron in their negotiating position and that is because a credible threat of a lose of fan goodwill is what might make the owners act more reasonable and drop most of their outrageous demands. The owners think that fans will come back as if nothing as happened or that they will regain fan goodwill within a year or two. They are thinking in the long term and and we fans are willing to not buy tickets to the game or to not even buy TV League pass for our cable premium packages and only passively watch on broadcast channels, games on our basic cable package and at sports bars or on streaming websites that are free to the user we will still get to follow our favorite teams but we can make the owners suffer, long term.
I would say that maybe it would okay to reward the owners who actually love this game like a Jerry Buss or a Mark Cuban. If you are in the Dallas and LA metro are, maybe buy tickets but if the new CBA also tries to be like the NFL and gives a large portion of ticket revenues to the road team's owner, do not go to games.
Fans have to think in generational terms, we have to make the owners feel losses 30 years from now, they have to be aware that even three decades hence, their "invest," their team will not be made to appreciate because they sacrificed an entire season. A lost season means lost fiscal future for the owners who see owning an NBA team the same way owning widget factory, an opportunity to maximize factories. Perhaps after 10 or 20 teams of fan illwill, they might just cut their losses and sell their teams and only owners who care about the game will step in and buy the team and best of all maybe we could adopt a Green Bay Packers style of ownership, where fans buy stock in the team. We could cut out the owners and we would negotiation with players collectivel yand we would only ask for reducations in pay if it meant that we could not afford to operate but otherwise we would be part of a nonprofit coop and we could leave the copper counting, conniving, basketball hating basketball team owners by the wayside.
More likely, most of you guys will have colonial mentality and will be good subjects and will dutifully pay through the nose for your season tickets and your $20 beers and nachos and vote for your cash strapped Midwestern town to buy the team owner a new pleasure palace at tax payer expense.
I said in another and much longer post that many of the new, hard line owners, really think that the NFL makes so much more than the NBA in revenues because it has a hard cap and other owner friendly provisions. The National Football League Makes more money because they play Football, the sport that gets the most attention in America, fan reference is the reason why the NFL makes double the money. The NFL would make about the same in revenues if it had soft cap, no cap, super teams, super parity, what ever. Football in the the Mid West and South especially, get more viewer for their college power house teams then they do for their powerhouse basketball teams.
Basketball is a very popular sport but Football is even more popular and professional Football will be even more popular then professional Basketball will be when professional Basketball misses an entire season and not just that it is missing an entire season entirely my design. What the owners are doing is premeditated murder not a crime of passion. The owners in the NBA, who want this long lockout, are not starting a lock out to save bankrupt league or to extract some small concession and it spirals out of hand, they are imposing such onerous terms so that a lost season is all but guaranteed. A living NBA made less then the NFL, imagine how much more a living NFL will make then a dead NBA?
For all of the joy that NBA basketball has given me and for all of the exhilaration that the Lakers have given to myself and to five other generations of my family, I am ready and able and willing to no longer attend to forgo that pleasure so those responsible for this lock will never recoup their loses. In 1998-1999, we got a partial season and a full play offs but this time around, if their are no playoffs and no finals in 2012, their may as well be no NBA in 2013 and beyond. If the NBA owners care that little for their fans, those who pay them their tens and hundreds of millions (even in years of little or no revenue, teams have appreciate consistently in value and over a decade or more the value of the teams will rise and they rise faster then the normal rate of inflation ad they rise faster then many asset classes so eventually even the owners who only care about dollars and cents can flip their team for a large profit), the league can falter, flounder, financially fail, fold and fade away from existence. Absent a season and with those same owners in place the league will be dead to me and if it is dead to other fans and the owners are made aware of this, their own greed will compel them to "settle for their modest billion and a half or so dollars per year in income and courtside seats and unlimited access to the best basketball players and league on the planet."
After the last lockut, the owners made the players greet fans at the door and apologize for the owner's lockout, thus creating the impression that to the economically uneducated and racist fans that the aggressive, greedy, flash, black millionaires were the cause of the lose of half of a season. I wonder if the owners would ever actually apologize if their, suicidal-to-the-sport-designs, fail and only kill half of the season, will they, in early February of 2012, be willing to give away from Jerseys, shake hands and apologize to the fans. We know the answer to that and that answers anyone's questions as to why this lockout and this lost season is entirely the fault of the owners and anyone whop disagrees is either not informed of the situation or they are the child of one of the owners, simple as that.