And Now It's Official. The First 2 Weeks Of The 2018-19 NLL Season Have Been Cancelled
So I already said pretty much everything I had to say about the potential of an NLL lockout yesterday. If you didn’t get a chance to read that blog, you can catch it right here.
Long story short, this couldn’t have come at a worse possible time. The NLL and the sport of lacrosse in general have been building up a ton of steam over the past year or so. There are 2 new expansion teams playing their 1st season in the NLL this year. The league was supposed to announce a new team in New York today but they had to cancel that event because of the ongoing negotiations on the CBA. The Premier Lacrosse League is about to take over the sport on its model that is built by the players, for the players. And now the NLL is cancelling the first 2 weeks of the season because the owners are saying it’s either their deal or nothing.
It sucks because this sets the sport of lacrosse back so far. After all the progress the sport has been making, this has the potential to cancel out all of it. The biggest hurdle the sport has to face is that nobody outside of the lacrosse world respects professional lacrosse. It hurts to say but it’s reality. And the reason why they don’t respect professional lacrosse is because the majority of players need to work some form of a 2nd job to make a living. Most of these guys either coach or work for equipment manufacturers or do construction or whatever. But up until the Premier Lacrosse League was announced a couple months ago, nobody was making a living by just playing lacrosse alone. So if being a professional lacrosse player isn’t viewed as an actual career path to take, well then you can’t really expect the sport to continue growing at the rate it should be at this time.
What this lockout says to the world right now is that owners are still not yet willing to make professional lacrosse a full-time career. From the numbers that I’ve heard, it’s literally either hundreds or just a couple thousand dollars that are separating the two sides. Obviously I don’t know anything about the business model the NLL is working on, but I think “overpaying” the players right now is would end up looking like a damn good investment 10 years from now. But instead, the league and the owners are too focused on the short term financial status of the league and it is damaging the long term growth of the sport. I’m sure that they have their numbers and think they are doing what is best for the league. But that isn’t going to change the public opinion on this lockout. I’m not saying the owners should have to give into every single demand given by the Players Association but it doesn’t seem like they’re budging from their original offer at all.
Anyway, shoutout to all the players right now for not caving. I mentioned this in yesterday’s blog but these aren’t millionaire athletes we are talking about. These are all blue collar guys and a lot of them are probably in the middle of moving to new cities to play for new teams. I’m sure there’s not a single player right now who wouldn’t want to be getting paid and playing lacrosse at the moment. But they’re staying strong right now so that a future generation of lacrosse players can have it better than they have right now. The players make the game. And without the players, the owners have nothing. Maybe they’ll start to cave once they realize that and have to start refunding ticket sales. I can’t imagine the lockout will go much further than these first 2 weeks once it starts to have actual financial impacts.