Winter without NBA very likely

Associated Press

NEW YORK

NBA owners have their priorities, and playing games isn’t first on that list.

Instead, the league is looking beyond this month — and maybe beyond this season, if that’s what it takes — to implement an extreme financial makeover after years of sizeable losses. The goal, in the words of Spurs owner Peter Holt, “an opportunity to make a few bucks.”

Owners are determined to reshape the league by creating a system like the NFL or NHL, where spending is capped and small-market teams truly can compete with the big boys. But reforming the NHL’s financial structure required a lengthy lockout, wiping out the entire 2004-05 season. And the NFL is making money, not losing it.

After NBA labor talks broke down Thursday night, Holt was asked if owners might be willing to sit out a year to get the changes they crave.

“The competitive issues and the economic issues, certainly we don’t want to lose the season, I don’t think the NHL did either. It ended up happening,” said Holt, chairman of the owners’ labor relations committee. “There are certain things that we feel we must have.”

And that makes a lost NBA season a possibility.

That comes as no surprise to players’ association executive director Billy Hunter. He started to believe two or three years ago that owners intended to lock out the players so they could force through the changes they wanted. Now he doesn’t see enough owners who can stop it from happening.

“And unfortunately. I think what we have to do is we have to miss more games for it to really set in,” Hunter said.

The first two weeks of the season — 100 games in all — already have been canceled. And it won’t be long before more games are scrapped.

Commissioner David Stern has long warned that once games are missed, both sides might stiffen their proposals in hopes of recovering what’s been lost, which is why he said he feared games could be lost through Christmas.