While it isn’t talked about with nearly as much intensity, the NBA is about to venture down the same slippery slope that the NFL is crippling itself with.

Later this summer, NBA owners will likely lock out the National Basketball Players Association, putting a damper on a postseason that the league is touting as the most exciting playoffs potentially in years and placing the league in the untenable position of eventually having to restore an image that has never been exactly pristine.

While there is no Michael Jordan — the last NBA lockout actually forced his second retirement — the NBA’s postseason is laden with storylines.

Can the hated Miami Heat coalesce in the playoffs and win the title? Can Kobe Bryant earn his sixth world title and in the process lead the Los Angeles Lakers — already trailing the upstart New Orleans Hornets 1-0 in their first-round playoff — to a threepeat? Or might the newly aligned New York Knicks, with Amare Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony, in the playoffs for the first time since 2004, make a surprising run (one that really might inspire New Orleans guard Chris Paul to eventually cast his lot with the Knicks and make it a legitimate multi-championship winning threat).

But the lockout looms large over the these playoffs, casting a pall and promising to do more damage to a league that always seems to be in the process of rehabilitating its image for one reason or another.

Despite fears of a labor stoppage after the season, the NBA reported success across many platforms. Arena capacity was 90.3 percent, its seventh straight year of 90 or better, and the 17,306 average was up 1 percent from last year and was its fifth highest.
Merchandise sales jumped more than 20 percent and NBA.com saw an increase of more than 140 percent in video views.

While the lockout will be cast as a battle between billionaire owners and millionaire players — their always has to be a good guy and a bad guy in these skirmishes — in essence, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Labor disputes between players unions and owners always crop up when the owners — the biggest risk-takers in all of this — decide that they are not making the money that they should be, usually because of poor business decisions they have made in the past.

While they like to use warm and fuzzy terms such as “growing the pie” — the NFL owner’s term for wanting to take back $1 billion in revenue from the players in their current dispute — NBA owners are dissatisfied with their revenue as well and now they want a new collective bargaining agreement. Think about it, when was the last time you heard a bunch of NBA players complaining about their salaries?

NBA owners say they have been losing about $300 million per season, and that this season will be no different. When the collective bargaining agreement expires on July 1, they will be looking for a reduction in players’ salaries, shorter contracts and a hard cap, like the NFL’s.

If this sounds familiar, it should. When the owners locked out the players in 1998 they got pretty much everything that they wanted, including caps on players’ salaries, a rookie pay scale and a negligible increase in the league minimum salaries.
.
In the process, they broke the union, which at the time featured a stark divide between players earning at the top and bottom of the pay scale. Players didn’t help their public perception when guys like Kenny Anderson said that he was considering selling one of the eight cars that he owned in order to make ends meet.

Years later, the owners are feeling the crunch again, and they are now ready to put the screws to the players once more. And while I don’t anticipate that a huge swath of the American public is going to be sympathetic towards the players, I don’t think you can view this as the players being equal conspirators in the shooting of the goose that lays the golden egg.

If the lockout comes to pass — and considering the huge divide that separates the two sides now is greater than it was in 1998 — the league, which has been fruitlessly chasing the days when Jordan led it to the heights of its success and popularity in the mid-1990s, is going to suffer further damages. Unfortunately, with great young players such as likely MVP Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls — he’s just 22 — Kevin Durant in Oklahoma City and Blake Griffin in Los Angeles, both, like Rose just 22, ready to join the upper echelon of the league that is reserved for players like James and Dwyane Wade, a grand opportunity is going to be fumbled away.

In 1998 the All-Star Game was canceled, and the league finally began playing a truncated 50-game season in January of 1999 that often had teams playing three games in a three days. Television ratings and ticket sales fell precipitously, and it took the league a few years before it showed signs of recovery.

This, of course, was in better financial times, before America became gratuitously indebted to China, before the possibility of $5 per-gallon gasoline, and before double-digit unemployment settled in. Recovery is slower now, and this will be the case with the NBA as well.

So enjoy these playoffs with all of the possible plots and storylines. There is a very good possibility that it’s not going to be around for a long time after they are over