OOOHHHHH LAAAAWD!: NBA Lockout is Upon Us!!!

There will be a whooooooole lot of violence if the year passes with no basketball and football.......

"Back in February 2009, union head Billy Hunter appeared on stage with commissioner David Stern. Hunter was asked, with the global economy in crisis, whether the two sides would begin talks on a new collective bargaining agreement ahead of schedule. 

“Your question presupposes that David and I haven't been talking,” Hunter answered. “Yeah, we have been. I can't tell you that we are close to reaching a deal. But we have been talking.”

Two years and four months later, there’s still no deal, and the owners will lock out the players, effective at 11:59 p.m. ET on Thursday. The players and the owners held their final meeting here at the Omni Berkshire hotel just hours before the scheduled expiration of the current collective bargaining, and could not make enough progress to come up with a new agreement. 

”We tried to avoid a lockout, but we couldn’t get a deal,” Spurs player rep Matt Bonner, who was in the meeting, said. “We’re going to keep working at it.” 

The main issue, still, is the form that the league’s salary cap will take. Currently, the NBA has one of the softest caps in sports, set at about $58 million but easily surpassed, but the owners are seeking a “flex cap” with a hard ceiling. The players want to keep something approximating the status quo.

“They haven’t changed that,” NBPA president Derek Fisher said. “There was nothing new from them in terms of their proposal.” 

There was little actual progress made during the three-hour meeting, and no further meetings have been set up. While Hunter indicated that the sides might take as much as a month off to see how their stances might “soften,” Silver anticipated that meetings could start again next week, possibly setting up agendas as early as Tuesday." - read more - via AOL SportingNews

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET9UPnYP4aY&feature=player_embedded