DBWI early end to NBA lockout

One of the uglier chapters in American sports was the NBA lockout that covered the end of the millennium. Both sides thought that it would end in January 1999, but NBA commissioner David Stern and NBPA Head Billy Hunter got into another shouting match and no contract was finalized. Hunter rationalized it as a complete victory for the owners if he signed; Stern blamed Hunter for forcing him to cancel the season. As such, there was no NBA that year, and it wasn’t until MLK weekend of 2000 that the league had games again.

Years later, a destroyed Hunter said, “I should have just signed the damn contract and told my guys to vote for it. I was a stubborn bastard.” What if he had done so and saved the 1998-99 and, to a lesser extent, the 1999-2000 season?
 
The 2000 NBA draft was LOADED. All the players from 1999 who would have been drafted just rolled over to 2000 and were in that year's pool instead for the first (and only) time ever. I wonder what happens if there's a 1999 draft?
 
You delay the politicizing of sports a decade. Instead of the NBA embracing gay marriage and antiwar causes, it could be the NFL and I guess protesting the Rio Grande Wall, if we need an early/mid 10s analogue. Maybe this means Trump gets the nomination in '12 easier instead of a convention riot. Perhaps this means the ongoing streetfights we've been seeing since 2008 or so don't begin until 2018 or this year.
 
You delay the politicizing of sports a decade. Instead of the NBA embracing gay marriage and antiwar causes, it could be the NFL and I guess protesting the Rio Grande Wall, if we need an early/mid 10s analogue. Maybe this means Trump gets the nomination in '12 easier instead of a convention riot. Perhaps this means the ongoing streetfights we've been seeing since 2008 or so don't begin until 2018 or this year.

Those street fights were the result of a lot of things, not the least being the terrible economic situation at the time as well as the shocking upset of Senator Obama to the much-maligned Mike Huckabee. It was the shitty job Huckabee did that caused the riots at the GOP convention as anything else - tax cuts and austerity measures didn’t solve shit.

But as for the league itself, I know other leagues benefited greatly from the weakening of the NBA. After the lockout - and the subsequent referee scandal that blasted the league’s credibility - MLS switched to a winter schedule and gently encouraged its cold-weather teams to get into domed stadiums, and just about all of them did. Even the NHL got a bounce, possibly thanks to learning a hard lesson the easy way and solving its labor issues in 2004 well before it lost a season.

I just wonder what the NBA would look like if it had that kind of upward trajectory like the NHL and MLS rather than losing franchises like it did.
 
If the season would have picked up in Jan. 1999, maybe Phil, Scottie, and MJ don't decide to come back for another season or two to add to their team's legacy. After losing to the Pacers in the 2000 ECF, the Bulls added PF Brian Grant in the off-season from Portland (after failing to get Duncan), and they lost in the 01 ECF to the Shaq and T-Mac-led Magic in the ECF for the second straight year (leading to MJ's last retirement and Phil's resignation).

Also, if the season started in Jan. 1999, maybe the Lakers end up with Phil Jackson as coach for the 1999-00 season, instead of a half a year with Kurt Rambis, another early playoff exit, and Shaq getting traded back to the Magic in the summer of 2000 in a three-way trade (with Detroit, LA, and Orlando) that involved Grant Hill going to the Lakers.
 
Here's a wild idea I had (full disclosure, Spurs fan and all).

What if the San Antonio Spurs win the championship in that season, abbreviated as it would be? Looking at their pieces before the lockout you had a core of Rookie of the Year (and All-NBA) Tim Duncan and former MVP David Robinson. Add guys like Avery Johnson, Sean Elliott, Jaren Jackson, Mario Elie, and Steve Kerr and you have a solid squad.

I know taking them over, say, Shaq's Lakers or the Jazz to win the West would be improbable then, but then again, you likely get the Lakers keeping Shaq AND another threepeat in exchange.

The 2000 NBA draft was LOADED. All the players from 1999 who would have been drafted just rolled over to 2000 and were in that year's pool instead for the first (and only) time ever. I wonder what happens if there's a 1999 draft?

And since I can't resist stretching plausibility, what if the Spurs grabbed Manu Ginobili in that 1999 draft with a low second round pick instead of, say, the Hornets in 2000 at 19th?
 
Here's a wild idea I had (full disclosure, Spurs fan and all).

What if the San Antonio Spurs win the championship in that season, abbreviated as it would be? Looking at their pieces before the lockout you had a core of Rookie of the Year (and All-NBA) Tim Duncan and former MVP David Robinson. Add guys like Avery Johnson, Sean Elliott, Jaren Jackson, Mario Elie, and Steve Kerr and you have a solid squad.

I know taking them over, say, Shaq's Lakers or the Jazz to win the West would be improbable then, but then again, you likely get the Lakers keeping Shaq AND another threepeat in exchange.



And since I can't resist stretching plausibility, what if the Spurs grabbed Manu Ginobili in that 1999 draft with a low second round pick instead of, say, the Hornets in 2000 at 19th?

Sounds like a massive Spurs-wank. I mean, Tim Duncan did lead them to that improbable run in 2005, but by that point, a lot of the talent was overseas.

I also find it interesting that the Spurs survived - and contend even if they only got over the hump once - but the Mavericks (the basketball Mavericks, I must clarify) didn’t. I hear that the famous Mark Cuban always hung out at Mavericks games and considered buying the team until he decided in 2000 it was a poor investment and instead bought the city’s MLS team and renamed it, fittingly, the Mavericks (it was the Burn before, I think.) Ross Perot couldn’t find a buyer and took a tax write-off, which seemed to happen a lot after the lockout.
 
One of the uglier chapters in American sports was the NBA lockout that covered the end of the millennium. Both sides thought that it would end in January 1999, but NBA commissioner David Stern and NBPA Head Billy Hunter got into another shouting match and no contract was finalized. Hunter rationalized it as a complete victory for the owners if he signed; Stern blamed Hunter for forcing him to cancel the season. As such, there was no NBA that year, and it wasn’t until MLK weekend of 2000 that the league had games again.

Years later, a destroyed Hunter said, “I should have just signed the damn contract and told my guys to vote for it. I was a stubborn bastard.” What if he had done so and saved the 1998-99 and, to a lesser extent, the 1999-2000 season?
OOC: why you are So anti unión,So who won the Strike?
 
OOC: why you are So anti unión,So who won the Strike?
OOC: I’m hardly anti-union. I think it’s a bunch of shit that the players’ choices boiled down to “sign what the owners demanded” or “torpedo the entire season.” Most of it came down to Stern and Hunter not being able to work together, and most outside observers called it a win for the owners. The same thing happened in the NHL that cost them the 2004-05 season and had potential to be a lot uglier - I took this to the ugliest point I could find, which would cost the NBA the entire 1999-2000 season and a chunk of the next one. And given that the league would be on the heels of losing MJ, this could avert Cuban buying the Mavericks, and the Donaghy scandal could be a hell of a lot worse if it’s right off the lockout (see? They rig games just to rope us back in!) a worst-case scenario could be a nightmare for the NBA.
 
sign what the owners demanded” or “torpedo the entire season.”
That worked on baseball and not going that far is why NFL is a joke, have NFL won their Strike i think there would not be more strikes, Strike works.

We should make a WI if the NFLPA won both their strikes and how that affect all other strikes.

Or a mega Strike ie all sports goes into Strike the same season
 
That worked on baseball and not going that far is why NFL is a joke, have NFL won their Strike i think there would not be more strikes, Strike works.

We should make a WI if the NFLPA won both their strikes and how that affect all other strikes.

Or a mega Strike ie all sports goes into Strike the same season

I hear we almost had a three-fer in 1994-95. Baseball shit the bed and cancelled the ‘94 season. Hockey lost half a season. I understand the NBA could have gone that route too. Football was A-OK buuuuuuuut maybe a change here or there and the ‘94 season is in jeopardy.

Here’s my idea - the NFL labor agreement expires in March 1994 instead of whenever it really did. A lot of bitterness remains from 1982 and 1987 and the players want to strike back against the salary cap - for whatever reason, they decide it’s bullshit. So the season doesn’t start on time - or at all.

Baseball goes on strike as scheduled. No 1994 Series, and the 1995 season not only doesn’t start on time but it’s in jeopardy as well. If it does go off, it’s a greatly shortened season, like 84 games at most.

Hockey goes into lockout, Bergman makes the threat he did in OTL (sign soon and play a 48-game season or we shut it down completely) and it goes tits-up and the whole season is shot.

Basketball goes down a similar trajectory to 1998-99 but loses the whole year. If the blood is bad enough, especially if Jordan doesn’t step in, it could go into the 1995-96 season.

One more possible screw - OTL MLS started in 1996 and managed to hang on long enough to establish itself. With all these leagues on strike or locked out, MLS decides, what the hell, we’ll start a year early. It isn’t ready and it falls apart within a couple of years, just another failed soccer venture that “proves” Americans won’t consume soccer.

Best case, 1994-95 is less than fondly remembered as the Year Without Sports. Every league, save for MLS, rebuilds, some teams disappear, a lot of the sports boom is undone, and teams are much more at the mercy of cities for stadiums (city councils tell team owners, either make do, pay for it yourself, or fuck off to Memphis; we don’t care.) The fans mostly come back but a lot are turned off permanently and even some young fans are left with a permanent bad taste in their mouths.

Worst case, fans and cities are turned off en masse. All the gains made are completely undone, and the fans stay away in droves. There is MASSIVE loss of franchises and franchise value, and an entire league may go under (at that point, the NBA is the best candidate for that.) If American fans do take up for soccer, it will be EPL, La Liga and other Euro leagues, and they won’t be interested in an MLS reboot. Sports will be reduced to a sideshow and something else will fill the void.
 
Year Without Sports
I thikt the opposite show owners are the mess, as you Say OTL owners screw cities. Here they would have to fund themselves and with out the big three a season that might be when owners finally loss ( sorry Packers but that is one for the best of the players and you still have Brett favre)
 
I hear we almost had a three-fer in 1994-95. Baseball shit the bed and cancelled the ‘94 season. Hockey lost half a season. I understand the NBA could have gone that route too. Football was A-OK buuuuuuuut maybe a change here or there and the ‘94 season is in jeopardy.

Only the 1994 World Series was cancelled. You're right about the NHL lockout costing a half season, but it managed to bounce back. I have to wonder if the NBA would have survived a lockout, or there would have been a significant-to-severe contraction of the league (perhaps almost to the point it was in the late '60s / early '70s, with roughly a dozen teams).
 
An early end to the NBA lockout probably butterflies away the career of one of the NFL's greatest wide receivers: LeBron James.

LeBron has admitted in interviews that he picked football to focus on in his junior year after the NBA lockout disillusioned him from playing basketball. The high school basketball teams he played on won the state championships in his freshman and sophomore years and sold out the Rhodes Arena in Akron (the University of Akron's basketball arena) because of the high number of people who wanted to see him play. After he focused on football, the teams he was on his junior and senior years went to the state semifinals and were state finalists, respectively. After deciding to play at the University of Texas, he led them to two straight national titles (in 2004 and 2005), winning the Heisman in 2005.

Then he was drafted by the Houston Texans in 2006. He, Jason Whitten, Larry Fitzgerald, and Philip Rivers (the QB of the Houston Texans, who was drafted in 2004) were nicknamed the Four Texans of the Apocalypse and they became a nightmare for the rest of the NFL in the late 2000s-early 2010s, bringing hope back to Houston, which needed it after the devastation that Hurricane Irene had inflicted upon the Houston-Galveston area in 2005...

(OOC: The Texans take Julius Peppers instead of Tony Boselli in the 2002 Expansion Draft. Butterflies explain the rest, including Larry Fitzgerald deciding to wait until after his year before coming out for the NFL draft. BTW, it should be obvious that I don't care much for the Dallas Cowboys.:D)
 
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An early end to the NBA lockout probably butterflies away the career of one of the NFL's greatest wide receivers: LeBron James.

LeBron has admitted in interviews that he picked football to focus on in his junior year after the NBA lockout disillusioned him from playing basketball. The high school basketball teams he played on won the state championships in his freshman and sophomore years and sold out the Rhodes Arena in Akron (the University of Akron's basketball arena) because of the high number of people who wanted to see him play. After he focused on football, the teams he was on his junior and senior years went to the state semifinals and were state finalists, respectively. After deciding to play at the University of Texas, he led them to two straight national titles (in 2004 and 2005), winning the Heisman in 2005.

Then he was drafted by the Houston Texans in 2006. He, Jason Whitten, Larry Fitzgerald, and Philip Rivers (the QB of the Houston Texans, who was drafted in 2004) were nicknamed the Four Texans of the Apocalypse and they became a nightmare for the rest of the NFL in the late 2000s-early 2010s, bringing hope back to Houston, which needed it after the devastation that Hurricane Irma had inflicted upon the Houston-Galveston area in 2005...

(OOC: The Texans take Julius Peppers instead of Tony Boselli in the 2002 Expansion Draft. Butterflies explain the rest, including Larry Fitzgerald deciding to wait until after his year before coming out for the NFL draft. BTW, it should be obvious that I don't care much for the Dallas Cowboys.:D)

Of course. That 2007 Texans team was more than special, even if they only eked out a wild card birth at 12-4 behind the Colts. I mean, the Patriots were off-the-chain good that year going 16-0, but a Pats radio jockey commented that the Pats has the Texans where they wanted them all year - off the schedule. And then in the Pats’ first playoff game, LeBron shredded the Pats D and opened things up for Rivers and Fitzgerald to pick them apart the rest of the way and allow the Texans to embarrass the Pats in Foxboro. It was astonishing - the Pats don’t lose all year and then get ripped 41-14 at home by Houston, who went on to beat the Giants 31-17 to win it all.

Everyone wanted their own LeBron. They searched high and low and no one could equal him. Until Rob Gronkowski got drafted.

By the Texans. Figures.
 
Watching old YouTube clips of LeBron as a basketball player, he was pretty good (to the point that he was named Ohio Mr. Basketball in his sophomore year and was also selected to the USA Today All-USA First Team). If he goes with basketball instead of football, IMO, he probably gets drafted into the NBA. Maybe he helps the NBA recover from the lockout, similar to how the home run race saved the MLB (however steroid-assisted that was) and to how the Fierce Five saved gymnastics with their performances in 2011-2012 (especially at the London Olympics) after the fallout of the Larry Nassar case in 2009-2010 (1)...

(1) ObWI: WI the thief who stole Nassar's computer doesn't turn it in after finding child porn on the computer or doesn't break in at all? Maybe Nassar doesn't get caught or gets caught much later; either way, maybe Penn State football avoids getting the death penalty, since it is widely believed that the reason the NCAA came down so hard on PSU after the Sandusky scandal was because of the Nassar case and the public revelations of MSU's coverup of it...

(OOC: Yeah, Nassar gets caught earlier ITTL (butterflies). This leads to the NCAA, after the Sandusky scandal, deciding to teach PSU football (and all of college athletics) a lesson about covering up sexual abuse/rape and to them dropping the death penalty on it (it considered doing so IOTL).)
 
Watching old YouTube clips of LeBron as a basketball player, he was pretty good (to the point that he was named Ohio Mr. Basketball in his sophomore year and was also selected to the USA Today All-USA First Team). If he goes with basketball instead of football, IMO, he probably gets drafted into the NBA. Maybe he helps the NBA recover from the lockout, similar to how the home run race saved the MLB (however steroid-assisted that was) and to how the Fierce Five saved gymnastics with their performances in 2011-2012 (especially at the London Olympics) after the fallout of the Larry Nassar case in 2009-2010 (1)...

(1) ObWI: WI the thief who stole Nassar's computer doesn't turn it in after finding child porn on the computer or doesn't break in at all? Maybe Nassar doesn't get caught or gets caught much later; either way, maybe Penn State football avoids getting the death penalty, since it is widely believed that the reason the NCAA came down so hard on PSU after the Sandusky scandal was because of the Nassar case and the public revelations of MSU's coverup of it...

(OOC: Yeah, Nassar gets caught earlier ITTL (butterflies). This leads to the NCAA, after the Sandusky scandal, deciding to teach PSU football (and all of college athletics) a lesson about covering up sexual abuse/rape and to them dropping the death penalty on it (it considered doing so IOTL).)

OOC: Seriously? texans fans are so insecure, the only good thing here either we got eli or CFF

OOC: Wasn’t expecting a Texans-wank, but no reason AZ couldn’t have a run as well, bearing in mind they did have Warner and could draft well afterwards. I always like a good DBWI that takes a different track at times.

IC: Yeah, drafting Eli and going defense-heavy, letting the ground game and short passes do their work for the Cards was what got them a ring in 2011 over that Pats team that couldn’t figure OU how to stop JJ Watt and the Red Sea. I tell you, after Spygate, Tom Brady is the modern Jim Kelly - five trips to the Super Bowl and no wins. Stopping him is too easy for a good team. Even the Dolphins did it in ‘08 when they got Warner his second ring (OOC: I can do it too.)

But the Nassar thin followed by Sandusky...MSU got off with probation because the school was indirectly involved, but the Big Ten was less kind. PSU got the death penalty partly because of coming off Nassar and partly because the football team was directly involved, and all the players went off to other schools free and clear. I remember that because my Ohio Bobcats were scheduled to play PSU in 2012 and had to slot in another school - it ended up being Rutgers and we won big.

But in any case, that was what finally got Norte Dame into the Big Ten - out with PSU and MSU, both voted out of the conference (PSU hasn’t recovered and now tools around as a shitty independent; MSU joined the AAC and has to beg the likes of Michigan to play them.) The Big Ten signed up Nebraska, Notre Dame and West Virginia and then later added Maryland and Missouri to balance out the divisions and dip its toe in the South (I heard it was almost Rutgers for the NYC market but no one in NYC gives a shit about Rutgers football and the OU loss turned the Big Ten off - you’re welcome, Big Ten.)
 
OOC: Yeah, I decided to wank the Texans because, hey, at least they aren't the Dallas Cowboys, and I feel they needed it after TTL's Irma (Irma is TTL's Katrina, only in Houston; New Orleans isn't hit here)...

IC: Yeah, if the Sandusky case hadn't been preceded by the Larry Nassar case, I don't think that Penn State gets the death penalty dropped on it and doesn't get expelled from the Big Ten (along with Michigan State).

With regards to the Texans dynasty, the reason they got LeBron in part was because, the previous season, they had to either play their games in San Antonio or on the road, since Reliant Stadium was damaged by Irene (1) and, as a result, struggled, going into the top 5 of the 2006 draft. The Saints passed on LeBron and drafted Mario Williams (which annoyed the QB for New Orleans, Ben Roethlisberger; the TL Saint James by @OriiGiins explores that WI well, IMO) to shore up their defense; reportedly, Texans head coach Les Miles had the biggest grin on his face when he was told that the Texans were drafting LeBron James...

(1) ObWI: WI Irene doesn't hit Houston in August of 2005? Irma made landfall as a strong Category 5 hurricane (with a barometric pressure of 26.00 inches and winds of 185 miles per hour, making it the most intense hurricane to hit the US ever) between Freeport and Galveston and then hit Houston with 155-mile-per-hour winds, causing a massive storm surge that overtopped the Galveston Seawall and would flood Houston, while the winds would destroy or damage most of Houston's buildings. To their credit, Governor Rick Perry called out the Texas National Guard, while President Bush and Houston mayor Bill White (which would foreshadow his successful run for Texas governor in 2010) appeared in a joint address to urge people to evacuate the metro area (over 2/3rds of the population did so), which arguably lowered the death toll. Still, 724 people died in Texas as a direct result of the storm (making it the second-worst hurricane disaster in Texas history--only the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was deadlier), with over 100 people dying in the evacuation, not to mention the over $30 billion in damage in Texas (and the cancellation of many collegiate and high school football seasons in Texas)...
 
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