Marking Time Until Spring Training

Remember when reason No. 1 to like basketball over baseball was the hoops action was so much better?

The NBA lost more ground in the sporting world this weekend, at least in Los Angeles. Now it’s to the point that watching NBA players on a court isn’t as exciting as following the baseball off-season.

Some 2,000 or so people came to Pauley Pavilion on Sunday to watch a charity game featuring the locked-out hoopsters.

There were the mandatory number of alley-oops and no-look passes. There even was a traveling call thrown in, just to see if everyone was paying attention.

There was Eddie Jones, Kenny Anderson, Jalen Rose, Tracy Murray, Maurice Taylor, Lamond Murray, Pooh Richardson.

And Jack Haley. There’s just no getting rid of this guy. He somehow manages to sign at least a couple of 10-day contracts every season, and no one can give a definitive reason why. Now they shut the entire league down and he’s still around.

All in all, these 40 minutes of basketball didn’t do much to whet the appetite for the real NBA season.

The only question on my mind now is one I never would have asked in the middle of NBA seasons past: When does spring training start?

After the Dodgers signed Kevin Brown to keep up with the Angels’ signing of Mo Vaughn, I can’t wait for baseball season.

This should have been the Lakers’ time for high expectations. They would still have the core of the team that made the Western Conference finals, Jerry West would have added a couple of finishing touches to the roster and we’d be talking Showtime.

Now it’s all about Mo-Time. And Brown’s Town.

And the Lakers, like their league, are fading from thought. (Uh, where does that leave the Clippers?)

What Magic, Kareem, Worthy and the crew brought to L.A. in the ‘80s, what Magic, Bird and Jordan brought to the NBA as a whole is gone. At these ticket prices, the last thing the fans can afford is goodwill.

It took a lot of hard work to bring the NBA to the forefront. Now, “it seems as though it’s all going down the drain,” Laker point guard Derek Fisher said.

At this point, the only way to salvage the season would be for one side to cave in. And that would make the past five months look like a complete waste.

Some people in the mix think a deal won’t be struck because the fight has become too personal. That must be it, because if you look at the issues the whole battle is absurd.

If the percentage of the NBA pot given to the players had stayed below 52%, this whole lockout wouldn’t have happened. But it climbed to 57% and the owners exercised their option to reopen the collective bargaining agreement.

You know how much money those five percentage points represented? About $100 million. That’s the approximate total of the 1997-98 salaries of Michael Jordan ($33.1 million), Patrick Ewing ($20.5 million), Horace Grant ($14.3 million), Shaquille O’Neal ($12.8 million), Juwan Howard ($11.2 million) and Dikembe Mutombo ($9.6 million).

You could add a Gary Payton here, subtract a Mutombo there and the numbers would stay about the same. Basically, the whole league is shut down because six guys pulled in some big bank last season.

Right now, it’s impossible to think of big salaries without thinking of Kevin Brown. His seven-year, $105-million contract might start baseball down the path to same predicament. But the way the Dodgers operate now, by the time Brown is pulling in $15 million to lob 60-mph fastballs at age 40, most of this Dodger front office will probably be gone anyway.

From a player’s perspective, a guy like Derek Fisher looks at Brown’s numbers and thinks “That doesn’t sound like a group of owners that’s losing money.”

Simply put, if people can afford to shell out those types of contracts, they shouldn’t complain about the players gaining too much of the revenue as the NBA owners are.

In baseball, there are teams that definitely can afford huge contracts. The problem is there aren’t many of them.

Let’s be grateful we live in a town of the “haves.”

Give Dodger General Manager Kevin Malone his props for doing whatever it took to get Brown. The fans and the media (including yours truly) demanded Brown. Now when we say “Malone delivered,” we’re talking about Kevin, not Karl.

If the Dodgers and Angels are going to raise the prices of their already costly tickets, signings of the Brown and Vaughn magnitude are what they must do in return.

Baseball has already been through a labor shutdown and constantly has meetings to address the big-market, small-market dilemma. It hasn’t stopped the salary explosion.

What makes the NBA think that this lockout and whatever agreement they reach will make it any different?