After cancelling the summer leagues and then the entire pre-season, gaming industry professionals braced themselves for more bad news coming out of the NBA, and earlier this week, David Stern said the words nobody wanted to hear, yet expected to hear.
With players and the league so far apart on a number of key issues and negotiation points, it wasn’t surprising to hear David Stern announce that the first two weeks of the 2011 NBA season had been cancelled.
Heading into this work stoppage, we knew it was going to be long and ugly, the scary part at this point is that the regular season has already been shortened and talks haven’t quite reached the ugly zone yet.
The players are sticking to their guns and the owners feel they can’t back down on some of theirs for the good of the league and as David Stern has explained, some owners are actually losing money.
For the second time in 13 years, the NBA will have a shortened season. That is, if they have one at all. The last time the league lost games to a work stoppage was in the 1998-99 season, which was reduced to 50 games. The San Antonio Spurs won the NBA Championship that year in what many believe should have been an asterix season.
Now the clock is ticking and the meter is running, for many teams, refunds plus interest are available for NBA season ticket holders for all preseason and regular season games that have been cancelled.
As for the players, the clock is ticking on their money too, November is when the paychecks are supposed to start rolling in, but with no games being played, some players are going to start feeling the heat.
Kobe Bryant won’t be one of them, but he probably won’t like missing out on receiving almost 2 million every two weeks.
Worse yet, for the gaming industry, it’s now a pre-season and two weeks of the regular season that won’t be hitting the books.
