Talks on a new collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and its players broke off on Thursday afternoon, and players leaving the midtown Manhattan hotel where the two sides met told reporters that the owners said that they will lock out the players when the current agreement expires at midnight. The lockout would effectively shutter the league and could end up jeopardizing parts or all of the 2011-12 season.

The last time the league went through a work stoppage, after the expiration of its deal with the players in July 1998, owners and players trudged through more than six months of fitful bargaining and sometimes contentious rhetoric before coming to an agreement in January 1999. The NBA season was sliced to 50 games that year.

This expected lockout comes as the league completes one of its most successful seasons ever, with attendance, broadcast ratings and revenue up virtually across the board. But owners insist that the current labor agreement is no longer financially viable, and they point to player salaries as the main culprit. Commissioner David Stern has said that the league lost as much as $300 million in the 2010-11 season and that 22 of the league's 30 teams were in the red. Owners are now asking for player concessions, including a more equitable divide of income, more rigid rules that will limit the amount that teams can pay players (the often-mentioned "hard cap" on salaries), givebacks in an escrow system that the players have paid into and changes in the length and terms of certain types of player contracts.

Players have publicly challenged the league's claims of dire financial hardship and have remained adamantly opposed to many of the league's proposals. Chief among those is the "hard cap," an idea that the union staunchly rejects, saying it would unfairly restrict player salaries. National Basketball Players Association head Billy Hunter also has called for improving on the plan that moves revenue from the league's richer teams to its more financially challenged ones.

Hunter and Stern were the key players in the last work stoppage in 1998 and have helped steer the league as it's grown into a more than $4 billion industry worldwide, featuring the world's highest-paid professional athletes. NBA players make an average of more than $5.7 million a year.

During the last few weeks, each side in the dispute has made what it considers concessions, though both parties admit that the gulf between the two remains considerable. The league has pulled back its initial call for player contracts that are not fully guaranteed, for example, while the union says it is willing to reduce its share of the split of "basketball related income," or BRI. The players receive 57 percent of BRI in the expiring agreement, with the remaining portion going to owners.

Still, the two sides remained so far apart that their meetings -- most notably during a rousing NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and the eventual champion Dallas Mavericks -- have produced negligible gains, if any. After a meeting last Friday in New York, the owners and players did not meet again until Thursday's deadline-day get-together, which lasted about three hours.

The last time the league locked out its players, the two sides did not meet for more than a week before the deadline passed and the lockout was imposed, and then went 37 days until meeting again. That session lasted only 90 minutes before owners walked out. The first two weeks of the 1998-99 season were officially canceled on Oct. 13, 1998, and negotiations continued to sputter throughout the fall and into the winter.

Stern announced late in December of that year that he would recommend the season be canceled if an agreement was not reached before Jan. 7. After an all-night session, Hunter and Stern finally announced an agreement on Jan. 6, 1999.

Link