The 2004-2005 NHL season was locked out. The highest professional league of hockey in the world took a year off when the players association and the owners could not come to an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement. Fast forward to the summer of 2011 and both the NFL and NBA are in lockouts. At this point we have not last any games due to either of these lockouts, unless you count the Football Hall of Fame preseason game which no one does, but with the NBA we might lose some games or lose the whole NBA season.
The NFL is too big to lose games. There is too much money involved in the National Football League that both the players and the owners will come to an agreement at some point soon. (This could possible happen on Monday, the owners voted to agree to the CBA, collective bargaining agreement, Thursday night and the players seem to be waiting until the weekend is over to vote on the CBA.) The NFL's main issue is how money will be split between the owners' pockets and the players' paychecks. The NFL made almost $9 billion last year, there is plenty of money to go around for the players and the owners. Everyone wants a piece of that money and if they don't play, no one will get paid. $9 billion is too much money for the players and owners to not come to an agreement.
The NBA has other issues though that could result in losing the 2011-2012 NBA season. The National Basketball Association just had a great year. The league is full of young, fun players and teams, the Miami Heat have made a lot of people watch basketball (either to see a lot of talent on the court together or in hopes that the team would lose and lose a lot), the major markets have good teams, (LA, New York (maybe), Boston, Dallas) and the general direction of the on-court product is moving in the right direction. But the owners are not making a lot of money on the product.
The players would like to say this is false but there are facts that point to the league not being profitable. The Sacramento Kings are doing their best to move closer to LA and the huge market that exists there. Now the Kings are a poorly run franchise so they aren't a great example. But the Philadelphia 76ers were just sold by Comcast Spectator, a company that also owns the Philadelphia Flyers and the arena both teams play in, the Wells Fargo Center. That means that Comcast Spectator does not think they can make money on the 76ers but they can on the Flyers, an NHL team, and owning the arena the team will play in. The 76ers aren't a small time operation, that is a long standing team that plays in a city with passionate sports fans. Something is wrong with the system when a company decides there is more money to be made in a hockey team and an arena than in a historically well-known NBA team.
The NBA has to figure out a way to restructure their profits between the owners and the players. The teams will have to make more money so that owning a team is a profitable venture. The only way to do that is to take some money from the players in a drastic way. If your boss came in and said for the betterment of the company we are going to pay you 10% less (I don't know the actual number the owners are asking the players for, I just used this number as an example) than last year then that is not going to go over well and that's exactly why this lockout is happening. The owners need to make more money and the players, understandable, don't want to give it up.
The NBA lockout might drag out until the point we lose a whole season and that would not be good for the league. I think the NHL had a great season last year and if the NBA is not around, people will watch hockey again and probably find that they like the product. Both sides of the NBA lockout are not supposed to meet again until August giving them under three months to find a solution, as the league is scheduled to start playing games on November 1. Less than three months is not going to give the league and the players a lot of time to solve this issue and we, sports fans, will have to suffer through a year without professional basketball.
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