Nba Lockout History

1488 Words3 Pages

Basketball was invented in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith, a Canadian from Almonte, Ontario (NBA.com). Basketball’s popularity rose when it gradually began being played in the Olympics, the first tournament coming in 1936 (NBA.com). Like baseball and football, people saw basketball as a money-making business. And so in 1946, the Basketball Association of American (BAA) was founded by Dr. Arthur Gulick. Three years later, a merger with the National Basketball League created the National Basketball Association (NBA), the official professional basketball league in the United States (Freedman 27) (NBA). There were only eleven teams at the time, versus the thirty there are today.
Many began to notice the success of the NBA and chose to replicate it. …show more content…

There is the NBA’s minor league, called the Development League, or D-League. This is not the best alternative, because it is a means of helping young players develop, so salaries and skills are quite low. However, foreign leagues, like Euroleague and the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) are available. The 2011-12 NBA season was shortened due to a lockout in 2011. A lockout is the “exclusion of employees by their employer from their place of work until certain terms are agreed to.” This was due to the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) regarding the negotiations between owners and players about salaries. That year, more than 90 players signed overseas, but for only half a year, in order to be able to return to the NBA after the lockout. This shows that the professional basketball market in the United States is an oligopoly in the short-run, but still a monopsony in the long-run (Neale 6). An oligopoly is defined as: “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.” A monopsony is a market that has only one purchaser of a good or service, and it is similar to a monopoly, which is a market with one seller (Mankiw

Open Document