According to Ken Berger of CBS Sports the NBA officially locked out this afternoon after another failed attempt to avoid the first work stoppage in over a decade. Berger reports that the union has no plans to decertify, and will attempt to continue to negotiate.
This is the news that most NBA fans have been expecting for a long time now. There has been a growing suspicion that the owners and players have been far apart on their negotiations and haven’t been making any headway in the labor talks.
There are many issues that will need to be hammered out before the league can return to work, and most of them include the financial state of the game. Owners claim they’re losing money quickly, while players want to be able to earn the same amount of money they’ve been generating the past several seasons. Other rumors claim that contraction is a possibility, while more still are saying that a hard salary cap may be inevitable.
Whatever the case may be all that is for certain is that as of this afternoon the NBA joins the NFL in lockout, jeopardizing the 2011-12 season.
