That, my friend, is called agent-speak, and pure hype.

First of all, history doesn’t support this assertion, which appears to be truth steeped in wisdom to the untrained eye. Perhaps the biggest blow to fan confidence in the integrity of the game in a major American sport was dealt by the fixing scandal that submarined the 1919 White Sox, handed the World Series title to the Cincinnati Reds, launched a federal probe, and resulted in the lifetime ban of 8 White Sox players from major league baseball. The fans never left.

Then there were the 1951 betting scandals in major college basketball that saw the record setting NIT and NCAA champion CCNY team banned from playing in Madison Square Garden and subsequently dropping out of Division I athletics all together (they remain in Division III to this day), and 33 players (several big-named) from 7 major schools around the country barred from the sport for life. The fans never left.

And do I need to waste our time on professional wrestling? And look, they still have plenty of fans.

So, labor disputes are different than scandals you say? Okay, let’s look at the most recent lockout. How long did it take you to tune in a game once the 50 game season finally began? And I don’t remember there being any shortage of fans or interest in the NY-San Antonio NBA Finals that year.

Fans don’t watch basketball because they believe the players and owners are virtuous people. They watch because they enjoy the pace of the game, the eccentricity of some of the players, the artistic talent on display that inspires them to pursue their own greatness in whatever arena they happen to incubate talent. They spend the major bucks to go to the games to impress dates, or get dates, or be seen, or transact business, or feel the buzz, the electricity in the fourth quarter of a close game that swallows up the mundane ritual of their own lives.

Until someone comes up with a better product to satisfy those needs, NBA fans ain’t goin’ nowhere.

If asinine comments by cerebral giants like Patrick Ewing (We might make a lot of money but, we also spend a lot of money) are pilloried and pounded in the press ad nauseum, then it is time to give the same treatment to asinine comments uttered by reputed cerebral giants like David Stern and Adam Silver (we want guaranteed profits for every team in the NBA).

This position, which sits at the center and circumference of this labor dispute, is not getting the press it deserves, nor is it being used enough as an indicator of the level of sanity with which the NBA owners and brain trust is currently functioning. Their unreasonable guaranteed profit demand flies in the face of the capitalistic principles that undergird a free society and enabled their wealth in the first place; and makes you wonder whether Stern really is a feudal lord in pinstripes. He has ruled every other aspect of the NBA with a dictatorial fist, and now seeks to extend his reach to the pockets of the players and the fans.

Nothing short of capitulation by the players and their union will derail this train hurtling along a straight track toward a lost season, which left the NBA Headquarters depot several seasons ago. Stern and the owners are in complete control, and deserve an academy award for pretending to be victims of circumstances beyond their control.

Indeed these are circumstances orchestrated by a masterful conductor who is accustomed to getting what he wants. No matter what the cost to others.

FIBA is hurting the NBPA and its overstated chances to get a fair deal.

FIBA calls to the individualistic tendencies of NBA players and foils the ‘teamwork’ machinery and mindset necessary to ‘beat the owners’ in this ‘championship series’ of debits and credits. In this ‘series,’ the players, without the familiarity of ‘home court,’ have been overmatched from the beginning and are likely to get ‘swept’ unless they figure out how to become greater than the sum of their parts by becoming a better ‘team.’ Stars and scrubs alike jumping to lesser leagues to make less money instead of facing the NBA legal and PR machinery and fighting until the buzzer rings is a product of a basketball culture, perpetuated by Stern and Silver themselves, that glorifies the individual above the team, even in a team sport.

The elephant in the room that everyone but Billy Hunter politely declines to acknowledge is that a fundamental part of the Stern-Silver strategy to change the economic landscape of the NBA is to have the rank and file members of the NBA miss a significant number of paychecks.

Enough to be lifestyle disrupting and future transforming.

The overseas option today’s NBA players enjoy supplies enough fool’s gold to insure that the lockout will extend into the summer of 2012, when the financial carnage will begin in earnest. Fool’s gold because the FIBA calendar is much shorter than the NBA calendar, and there is much more time between seasons. When NBA players return from abroad Stern and Silver are betting their money that most players will begin to feel the economic pinch in the spring and summer of 2012, with no imminent overseas option to save them.

A pennies-on-the-NBA-dollar FIBA paycheck, if they get paid at all, will only delay the inevitable collapse of most NBA players’ financial house of cards. With no recourse in the spring, the players will be much more willing to take what Stern-Silver will be offering. Let’s hope, for their sakes, that the current offer from the owners doesn’t shrink.

NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver and commissioner David Stern

Since the lockout began on July 1st, have you heard Peter Holt wax eloquent in the press about his thoughts on the labor impasse? Have you heard Mark Cuban‘s bombast, Paul Allen‘s passion, Clay Bennett‘s chicanery, or Donald Sterling‘s insanity? Why aren’t the owners talking?

Because they’re all afraid of the big, bad wolf. David Stern has threatened them with sanctions if they speak to the media about the lockout. And in David Stern’s NBA, threats have proven very effective.

The only people authorized to speak for the owners are the commissioner and deputy commissioner. This insures a precisely calculated and perfectly executed legal and media campaign devoid of energy draining confusion and the perception of infighting. Even if the owners weren’t together, but bickering over their own varied interests, we wouldn’t know it because the perception of unity is much easier to advance and protect when there is only one voice.

One has to assume that it is precisely because there are differing opinions and agendas among the owners that Stern has silenced them. Billy Hunter and the NBPA could learn a thing or two from the commissioner.

About 50 NBA players arrived at CBA talks on June 24, 2011 wearing matching STAND t-shirts.

The public relations aspect of the NBA lockout is and has been overlooked by the players and the union, to their detriment.

All along the owners saw the apex of the games popularity as the best and safest time to lockout the players because it is much easier to rebuild from strength than weakness, and because the people most visible in the conflict would be the players, so they were guaranteed to receive the brunt of the blame from the public. With history and psychology on their side, the owners are holding fast to the old adage: out of sight, out of mind.

The players pulling the solidarity stunt at the negotiating meeting the day after the draft played right into David Stern’s hands. He was so happy to see the fifty or so players filing out of their bus for their unwittingly Pyrrhic photo op in their STAND t-shirts that when asked what he thought about it he said, ‘It was great,’ and ‘Nicely done.’ What the commissioner was really thinking was that it was like serving a loaded gun on a platter to your sworn enemy because it helped to put a public face on the conflict: the players’.

The average fan wouldn’t know most of the owners of the thirty NBA teams if they saw one of them walking down the street. But the players are globally visible, thanks in large part to the NBA’s PR machine. The owners, half of whom boast a net worth north of half a billion dollars, can go two seasons without basketball and let the players get the blame. The players, half of whom notoriously live paycheck to paycheck, can’t go one season; but even worse, are so dependent on the adulation of their fans that they can’t handle being blamed.

That is when, the owners are betting, the players will cave. Not when they run out of money, buy when they run out of popularity.

The players have been poor before, but they’ve never been unpopular before. That would REALLY hurt! The common thinking among the media and most basketball fans has been that this is the worst time to lockout. But to the pr savvy David Stern and his cohort of  NBA owners, it’s actually the best time of all!