Welcome to We Want Basketball

Author: DL

Since July, all we’ve heard about as far as professional basketball is concerned is millionaire players bickering with billionaire owners on how to split the pie. We’ve heard about franchises losing money, shady accounting tricks, ‘blood issues’ and salary caps and Basketball Related Incomes (BRI) and #LetUsPlay and grim press conferences on sidewalks in front of New York City hotels. Derek Fisher and the NBA Players’ Association comes together with straightened spines and puffed out chests to tell us all they’re in it for the long hall while Commissioner and his entourage of owners sit in their five figure suits with their pockets turned out, showing us all how poor they really are.

What we haven’t heard about is the fans. And we sure as hell haven’t heard about the ‘little people’ who are losing their jobs, the stadium workers and the team marketing folks, the interns and the sales reps who work for the clubs. Sure, we’ve seen ‘apologies’ via Twitter to the fans from stars such as LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, and fan-friendly Steve Nash making an impassioned case via Twitter from the players side on October 10, but we really haven’t seen anything honest come from either camp.

And frankly, as far as the negotiations go, we don’t give a shit.

Our enjoyment of the game is not based upon how the two sides split their BRI, whether or not the Buss family is paying a luxury tax, or whether Tom Sarver is getting richer at the rate he would like (hard to imagine that Sarver has brought anybody any enjoyment, ever). We care about basketball. And what keeps us constantly coming back to the NBA is not the suits or the numbers, but the basketball.

For all the flak NBA basketball takes, there isn’t a better product out there. College and European leagues have raucous crowds, engaging tournaments and a kind of frantic energy that provides your sports fans with solid basketball, but the NBA is the top of the line. The greatest athletes in the world play in the NBA, and while it may not challenge the NFL as America’s passion sport, the interest in the league is growing at an incredible rate.

No sports league has better embraced the internet, with basketball videos being among the most watched on Youtube, its players among the most responsive on Twitter, and the quality of writing and fan bloggers on the sport is legitimately incredible. The Internet is rich with relevant basketball blogs and writers, and water cooler and sports bar talk hasn’t featured the kind of NBA chatter we saw last summer since the glory days of Michael Jordan.

This is all at risk. The NBA owners and players, regardless of who is at fault, don’t care about you, the fan, at all. They know you’ll be back regardless of how they treat you. Next week, players and owners will again reconvene, this time with a federal mediator to try to sort the differences out. You weren’t invited.

We aren’t naïve and we know it’s a business. They provide a service, and NBA basketball isn’t a birthright. This isn’t life or death, either. There’s a lot more important things to worry about. If the NBA goes away, we’ll all find something else to do. The NBA is taking for granted how many will come back.

That said, we are fans. This is a game we grew up playing and watching and talking about with friends, and we don’t want them to drive the NBA into the ground and turn us away. We don’t really care that much about the details of the negotiations, how they’re splitting the pie, the blood issues and the negotiating tactics. We want the players and the owners to show they actually care about the fans, beyond the painfully PR-driven ‘NBA Cares’ phot ops and t-shirts.

We want them to set aside their differences and realize they’re part of something that maybe isn’t totally, absolutely, 100% solely about the bottom line. We want to come home on a cold December Tuesday and be able to sit down and turn the game on and irrationally hate on the Heat.  We want to see Derrick Rose crossovers, Kobe buzzer beaters, and Dwight Howard shots blocked into the fourth row. We want to see Benny the Bull spraying people with silly string and complain about ridiculously overpriced stadium beer and make fun of Metta World Peace.

We want basketball.