Two Solid Reads On The NBA Lockout

Because we can’t host public floggings on SB Nation every single day, today we’ll outsource some of the bile. First, there’s Dave D’Allesandro at the Newark Star-Ledger, taking a flame thrower to the whole negotiating process, and then there’s Dan Le Batard taking aim at the owners.

Here’s Dave D, who indicts both sides, but saves a special kind of loathing for David Stern.

Again, we love the game, but often hate the league, because of its decades-long quest to over-market a sport with legitimate soul into something that too often resembles schlock. That’s David Stern’s real legacy, when you get down to it: trying to broaden interest in the game so it motivates yahoos who show up at arenas to experience the thrill of having mascots blast air guns into their faces.

[...]

We don’t know precisely how the numbers must add up before they arrive at the agreement, and don’t care. We only know this: Stern and Hunter know exactly what it will take to get there. What they’ve done these last few months is patronize two disparate groups that have only three things in common: They are competitive, they are arrogant and they are not used to losing.

And then there’s Dan Le Batard from this past weekend.

...this lockout is not a fight between greedy owners and greedy players. It is a fight between selfish owners and selfish owners. The players, all of them, want to play. The owners? Not so much. The players were fine with the way the system was but have already given back hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions — something baseball’s union would never, ever do — for the overall health of the league, negotiating in good faith. But there are a few owners who would lose more money by opening their arena doors than by not, and those owners literally can afford to wait until players start getting restless and customers get furious.

Sigh.

Whatever.

If you need me, I’ll be over here getting psyched about college hoops.