Well, so much for an NBA preseason being played in 2011.
After a failure on Tuesday to overcome the any major hurdles, the National Basketball Association canceled the exhibition schedule and we find out that if there is not an agreement by Monday the league will scrub the first two weeks of the regular season.
Monday might be an achievable date -- except that no new talks are planned, according to this story via Yahoo!
The issue, not surprisingly, remains money. The deal-breaker as far as Tuesday's meetings in New York went was when the players refused to consider a 50-50 revenue split.
“We were not able to make the progress that we hoped we could make and we were not able to continue the negotiations,” David Stern said after nearly four hours of talks between owners and players ended without gaining ground on a new deal.
According to the Yahoo! story, it could be a month or more before more meetings are held, and folks, putting on the commentary hat here, if it is November or later before there are more talks, we may not have to have anxiety over LeBron James winning an NBA title in 2012. Winning a title would follow playing a season -- you have to get up early to fool me!
Anyhow, back to being serious here...the 50-50 split that was proposed to the players is well below the 57% that the players were guaranteed under the previous collective bargaining agreement, but better than the 47% that was originally put on the table in this go-round.
Even so, when the even split was rejected, down came the curtain on the exhibition season.
This is nauseatingly like Canton, Ohio losing the Hall of Fame Game in the NFL. Yes, sure, special activities were held in conjunction with the game to try to recoup some of the lost revenue, but vendors lose out, ushers lose out, and what may matter most of all, fans lose out when there is nothing to look forward to where something to look forward to was supposedly a given.
Be sure to have a look at the seed article linked to above. It gives more detail to how each side sees this 50-50 split, and whether or not all sides see it as fair and as legitimate (hint: they don't).
Further updates will be passed along here when they occur.
Hopefully that will be some time before the Indians head for spring training.