NBA Lockout: The State of Flux Continues

It's officially been 123 days into the NBA lockout and so far, the entire 1st month of the NBA season has been canceled.  The NBA owners and players have made agreements on close to every issue except for 2 important ones.  Those issues being the salary cap debate and the league revenue split. 

To start off with the salary cap, the idea of anything other than a hard cap being implemented into the league is a complete joke.  The NBA does have a salary cap at this point, but it isn't as hard as other leagues.  If the NBA wants to make their product interesting, they need to make the league more balanced and to do that, the hard cap is the way to go.  If you look at the NHL right now, their system is a hard salary cap.  Now while, hockey may not be as popular as basketball is in this country, you can't argue the fact that after the NHL Lockout and the implementation of a hard salary cap, the NHL has become a much more balanced league and more entertaining in this blogger's personal opinion.  The NBA can still manage to have teams with 3 All-Star players, but the hard cap will create some better and tougher competition for those teams. 

As for the league revenue split, whoever agreed to give the players 57% of the revenue in the previous Collective Bargaining Agreement, should really be looked at with disdain.  57 percent? Are you kidding me?  Players should not be getting more revenue than the owners in any type of professional sports league.  If you ask me, the whole story of how 22 of 30 franchises last year lost money in one of the NBA's better seasons can be blamed simply on the fact that players were making most of the money, not the owners who have to fund these franchises. 

The bottom line is simple.  The owners need to demand 50-50 revenue split and a "very" hard salary cap.  Players will protest and be angry obviously, but players need to realize that the owners agendas, at least in this blogger's mind, are the absolute right call.  I wonder how Kobe and LeBron will be spending their extended time off?