It must be nice to argue over how many millions of dollars you deserve to play a sport. It’s apparently so great that every major sport has had a lockout in the past twenty years – two of them this year. It started with the National Football League, where the team owners must have needed new yachts because all of a sudden, they were demanding more money. But as the season drew closer, both sides agreed that playing was a better option, letting the season start just in time for a shorter training camp. Now, the National Basketball Association is in a lockout, and with their season rapidly approaching, everyone is going to have to start working harder to get this NBA season started on time.

It doesn’t look like there will be quite the happy ending for the NBA. With the season just a few months away, neither the players or the owners have budged, and meetings seem like a formality at this point. Players are packing their bags to go play in European leagues, or taking up odd jobs on the side, playing street ball, even learning new sports so they can stay in shape in case the season does begin on time.

But the players and owners aren’t going to be the ones who miss the money. This lockout affects a whole slew of people, starting from the front office staff to the concessions workers at each stadium. Think about the amount of people it takes to run a game. There are stadium workers, the people taking tickets and even people cleaning the floors between free throws.

There are TV production crews, broadcasters, sports writers, and newspapers that all depend on games for revenue. The food companies who have contracts with the stadiums won’t get paid. The cities and states won’t get the tax money charged from ticket sales and salary taxes. TV stations will lose viewers. It’s not just players who would be losing their contracts, it’d be a lot of people losing their jobs.

The people who will be most affected by this lockout are the fans. Sure, many people count on the NBA games to make money, but it’s the fans who get hurt. The fans are the ones who stick by their team, even when the team can’t make a free throw down the stretch. The fans are the ones who generate the revenue, and when a sport loses its respect from fans, the problems just keep mounting. The year after Major League Baseball cancelled a portion of their season, attendance fell sharply. The MLB had to scramble to find a way to win back their fans, something that took years to accomplish. The NBA may be in a similar situation after this year.

While the world won’t stop turning just because the NBA shuts down for a season, this lockout is going to change a lot of things for a lot of people. If the NBA does cancel the season, popularity for the sport is sure to go down, just as it did in every other sport that had to cancel a season.  It’s going to be a mess that may take years to clean up. Someone is going to have to start bargaining, and accepting the other side’s offer, because what they may not realize is that the repercussions could take years to overcome.

hrutt@mavs.coloradomesa.edu