As the title says, the 2011 NBA lockout was not the only one seen in the History of basketball, in fact people believe that “It’s been worst, this is nothing” (psht! Yeah right this lockout is killing me slowly!) In 1999 the NBA was to celebrate its 53rd season. But due to a lockout the season did not start until early February, when both sides agreed on a new six year collective bargaining agreement. Now you’re possibly wondering why? Well I will tell you why, because of greed it is always about money. ( ok maybe I’m exaggerating..) but the lockout happened due to NBA owners looking for a change in the salary cap system in one of my blogs I explained to my readers what the cap is so I won’t go into details again. But that became such a big problem that the players, the national basketball players association opposed the owners new deal, instead they decided that players who make a league minimum salary should have a raise.
The Lockout became such a big problem that the league had to cancel the 1999 All star game, which for most who know what that is, it’s really big. You have kids, Hollywood stars and much more coming to watch both teams go at each other with 3 point competitions, dunk competitions, best basketball handles and all type of fun stuff. Not only that, the games got reduced by to 50 games that season, when regularly teams play 82 games including the playoffs. That year most fans felt that it was unfair because it’s the year the San Antonio Spurs won the championship. (yeah it was all luck..) Some teams did not meet each other at all during the course of that shortened season, therefore did not compete with the strongest teams. As the lockout went on things even got worst, going into September the preseason games were shortened to two games per team compared to the eight. This caused even more tension as teams began to fight and argue after each play from frustrations. The commissioner also postponed training camps for players in a way to put pressure on the owners and players to come down to the final decision.
As that month went by, things got way out of hand, in September it was the first time in basketball history that a game got cancelled due to labor dispute. Eventually the owners and players reached an agreement on January 18, 1999. Both sides came down to an equal agreement for the cap. They agreed that 53% should not be a hard cap and that there should be a few more exceptions to allow teams to spend above their cap limit. As I mentioned in my other blog, “ The Larry Bird exception” with this, teams are allowed to re-sign one of its own players at any salary even if the team has room under its salary cap to do so. A great example of this was with Micheal Jordan ( The greatest man to play the game) I know you all know who he is so I won’t say much, just know he is the man! What happened with M.J is the Chicago Bulls has already spent up to $28 million if their 11 players for the 1998-1999 season and since Michael had kept changing his mind on whether to play golf or baseball, he finally decided to come back, even when the bulls had a cap of $30 million. The exceptions allowed the bulls to pay Jordan anything it wanted without their cap budget.
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