Rant #626: Through the Hoop

Now onto some better news ...

The NBA's 2011-2012 season will actually be played.

On early Saturday morning, the owners and players agreed, in principle, to a deal which would salvage the season.

Again, this is a tentative deal, and if it passes both the owners' and players' wrath, we will see a 66-game season this year, beginning on Christmas Day.

I am happy that the NBA season might be saved, but I wish they would have waited until this thing was 100-percent approved by both parties.

But I know why they announced a tentative agreement when they did.

It was the Thanksgiving weekend. People were out to shop 'til they dropped.

And now, they had a reason to buy NBA merchandise.

You can bet that merchandise sales--like T-shirts, jackets, hats, and every little chotchka imaginable--dropped while the two sides were haggling.

People were getting turned off big time.

But now, with an agreement supposedly in hand, people could show confidence again in the NBA, and buy its merchandise with pride.

There is always a tie-in to why things happen, isn't there?

The owners seem to have won this duel. They got their percentage of basketball-related income--BRI, another new acronym that we really don't need--to a more manageable level, and that is really all they wanted, wasn't it?

Sure, there are other things that they wanted, but this was the big thing, carving up a billion-dollar pie to their advantage.

But, raspberries to both sides.

With so many people out of work, underemployed, and miserably employed, and with so many people finding it hard to put food on the table during this prolonged recession that we are in, for millionaires to be fighting with billionaires like this puts them out of the realm of reality.

At least baseball gets this, years after their own strike, and ratified their own collective bargaining agreement without any fanfare or acrimony at all.

More importantly, all the industries that feed off an NBA season, like ticket takers, vendors, and restaurants, took a hit with this.

Of course, the players and owners claim they care about these people, but, c'mon, do they really? If they did, they would have settled this thing a long time ago.

And again, it is not yet a done deal, so while I would love to get some Knicks tickets for my son and myself, I am not reaching into my wallet just yet.

Let's see what happens.