Entire NBA season in peril

NEW YORK—NBA owners have their priorities, and playing games isn’t first on that list.

Instead, the league is looking beyond this month—and maybe beyond this season, if that’s what it takes—to implement an extreme financial makeover after years of sizeable losses.

The goal, in the words of Spurs owner Peter Holt, “an opportunity to make a few bucks.”

Owners are determined to reshape the league by creating a system like the NFL or NHL, where spending is capped and small-market teams truly can compete with the big boys. But reforming the NHL’s financial structure required a lengthy lockout, wiping out the entire 2004-05 season. And the NFL is making money, not losing it.

After NBA labor talks broke down Thursday night, Holt was asked if owners might be willing to sit out a year to get the changes they crave.

Derek Fisher fears the entire NBA season will be lost.

“The competitive issues and the economic issues, certainly we don’t want to lose the season, I don’t think the NHL did either. It ended up happening,” said Holt, chair of the owners’ labor relations committee.

That makes a lost NBA season a possibility.

That comes as no surprise to players’ association executive director Billy Hunter. He started to believe two or three years ago that owners intended to lock out the players so they could force through the changes they wanted. Now he doesn’t see enough owners who can stop it from happening.

He identified big-market owners Jerry Buss of the Lakers, the Knicks’ Jim Dolan, Miami’s Micky Arison and Dallas’ Mark Cuban as owners he believed were open to anything that could lead to games, but there were many more from the small markets “that were dug in, and I think they’re carrying the day.”

“I think what we have to do is we have to miss more games for it to really set in,” Hunter said.