Rico won't miss it, but others will

Rico says that would be the NBA season, now in jeopardy, according to an article by Howard Beck in The New York Times:

The union representing National Basketball Association players formally disbanded on Monday and declared it would take its labor standoff with the league’s owners into federal court, a development that pushed the league as close as it has ever been to losing an entire season of play.
The players, no longer unionized, said they would file an antitrust lawsuit in the next two days and would seek a summary judgment declaring the league’s four-and-a-half -month lockout to be illegal. With negotiations effectively ended and legal proceedings about to intensify, a season that has already had six weeks of games canceled may never take place.
“We’re about to go into the nuclear winter of the NBA,” Commissioner David Stern said darkly in an interview with ESPN.
The players’ decision came four days after Stern gave them an ultimatum: take the league’s current offer, or see it withdrawn and replaced by a deal that would be more onerous. The league, Stern said, was done negotiating.
Faced with what they felt were two unpalatable options, the players said they had no choice but to disband the union and to seek legal redress. They announced their decision after a three-hour meeting in Manhattan that involved more than forty players, including the union representatives of all thirty teams.
“We’ve come to the conclusion today that that process has not worked for us,” said Derek Fisher, the union’s player president, who spoke with the other players packed tightly behind him. “It has not put us in a position to get and to negotiate the fair deal that we’ve been working to try and complete.”
Billy Hunter, the union’s executive director, called the union’s move the end of the collective bargaining process, which he said has “completely broken down”.
By disbanding, the National Basketball Players Association will be converted into a trade association. It can negotiate with the league, but within limited parameters. For any new collective bargaining agreement to be approved by the players, the union would have to be reconstituted.
The players’ key leaders will now be two high-profile lawyers: Jeffrey Kessler, who had been serving as the union’s outside counsel and chief negotiator in the talks, and David Boies, who earlier this year represented the NFL in its defense against an antitrust lawsuit by its players association.
Hunter, meanwhile, will continue as the head of the trade association. Hunter, Kessler, and Boies can continue talks with the NBA on a possible settlement while any lawsuits proceed, assuming negotiations resume at some point.
Stern issued his ultimatum last Thursday, saying the NBA could still salvage a 72-game season, with a 15 December starting date, if the players approved the league’s latest offer. But with no deal, no hope for negotiations and legal battle lines now drawn, Stern conceded that “the 2011-12 season is now in jeopardy.”
The league has claimed that it is losing $300 million a year and, before talks collapsed, it was the union that had been making all the concessions. It conditionally agreed to a massive reduction in salaries— about $3 billion over a projected ten-year deal— along with shorter contracts, lower raises, and new spending controls on the richest teams, a bow to the league’s claims of competitive imbalance.
Having received 57 percent of league revenue in the previous contract, the union was now grudgingly agreeing to carve a $4 billion pie in half. But union leaders said they had conceded enough, and rejected the owners’ push for still more restraints on free agency and team payrolls.
In the ESPN interview, Stern called the union’s decision to disband “irresponsible” and lashed out at Hunter, saying he had put the season in jeopardy and “deprived his union members of an enormous pay day”.
He blamed Kessler— a pugnacious antitrust lawyer who recently accused Stern of treating players “like plantation workers”— for pushing the union toward dissolution.
In legal terms, union leaders issued a “disclaimer of interest”, indicating that they were no longer representing the NBA’s 430-plus players. The players had authorized the disclaimer in the previous season, via signature cards, and were not required to vote on the decision again. Still, Fisher and Hunter maintained that the forty-plus players who were present Monday were unanimous in reaffirming support for the move.
In the absence of a union, the players are now considered individual employees who can challenge the lockout by claiming it is an illegal group boycott under antitrust law. The NBA could be subject to treble damages if it is found liable.
The union’s action effectively renders moot a separate effort by dissident players and agents who were seeking to overthrow the union leadership through a process known as decertification. That group felt the union had already conceded too much in the course of negotiations. A lawyer representing the group was set to deliver more than two hundred player signatures to the National Labor Relations Board, which could have scheduled a decertification vote of the entire membership in perhaps six weeks. The disclaimer accomplishes the same goal, but sooner, giving the players immediate access to the courts. The NFL players pursued the same route last March, dissolving as a union and seeking an injunction to end that league’s lockout. Their legal efforts failed, however, and the conflict was ultimately resolved at the bargaining table, in July.
The NBA players have a stronger case than their peers in the NFL did, according to Gabe Feldman, director of the Tulane University sports-law program. The NFL. players dissolved their union before their labor deal had expired. The NBA players have been trying to negotiate a new deal for more than four months, and did not disband their union until the league ostensibly stopped negotiating.
Any prolonged legal battle would surely doom the NBA season, which usually runs from November through June. In 1999, the league staged a fifty-game season after a 191-day lockout. League officials have indicated that they do not intend to play another season that short.
Anticipating Monday’s developments, the NBA filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the union last August, accusing union officials of threatening to decertify as a “negotiating tactic”. That suit was filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which is considered owner-friendly and which has ruled for the NBA in the past.
Legal experts expect the union to file suit in California, where the courts are considered more employee-friendly. That would require another legal fight, to decide where the lawsuit should be heard. “That initial battle over the venue could have a significant impact on the results of the case,” Feldman said.
Players at the meeting said there was little sentiment to take the NBA’s latest offer, or to submit it to a vote of the full membership. “We’ve continued to want to go to work, want to get back to work, want to negotiate a fair deal,” Fisher said. “But that process has broken down.”

Rico says that he has family members who will undoubtedly be pissed, but he could care less about basketball. Yet this is surely a case of the greedy killing the goose, or the fatted calf, or something...