If you listen to NBA Commissioner David Stern, it’s the players fault. If you listen to the players, it’s the owners’ fault, and while that makes for entertaining arguments, it’s the fans who are actually losing here. Not the owners and not the players. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop the Stern from throwing the players under the bus:

“The NBA’s terrible offer, and the Players Association’s response”

Which features perhaps the best take on the NBA lockout I’ve read, at least from a perspective of rationality:

These owners aren’t bullies. They’re apathetic. They’re uncaring about the thousands of lives they’re affecting just in their own region in terms of lost income. They’re certainly not concerned with the millions of fans that want NBA basketball back. They’re as greedy as anyone, haggling over ridiculous minor items after the Players Association has given in hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars worth of concessions. They can’t even throw the players a few bones, so to speak, in eliminating those relatively minor items while the players give in. And they’re geniuses in leaving the great unwashed to think, “50/50? Sounds about right.” [Emphasis added]

One wonders why Stern doesn’t address things like what the bold text points out when he’s blaming the players association for everything wrong in the NBA today? Another story for another day, apparently. Needless to say, once the players rejected the latest offer, Twitter blew up with tons of reaction, a lot of it from the players themselves.

The first one nails it perfectly:

So what does this mean going forward? Lost money and European contracts, apparently:

The sad thing is, in relation to professional sports, a quarter of a million dollars is almost chump change. Three cheers for hitting the genetic lottery, right? Perhaps this is bad of me, but one of the things I’m enjoying about the reaction are all the “hey, maybe my favorite player will respond to me on Twitter” tweets, or those “I have no idea about what’s going, but since everyone else is talking about the NBA, I should too,” posts, like so:

Um, Earl, I hate to break it to you, but Rondo has no more of an idea about when the lockout ends than you do. So what are all the players doing now that there won’t be pay-for-play basketball for the foreseeable future? Tweeting, apparently, and they don’t seem really supportive of the owners or Stern, either:

Some players are trying to figure out what to do with all this free time they have now, and it looks like college admissions will be going up around the country:

However, some are aiming a little lower:

Others are just mad their “I’m in the NBA” cache is temporarily not available:

What about Ron Artest? What’s he been up in the face of not being having the NBA? About what you’d expect:

In light of the “no NBA” idea, here’s something positive concerning the sport of basketball:

But I’ll end this laundry list of tweets with some much-needed perspective:

Any thoughts when/if we’ll be seeing the NBA again? Do you even want it to return? Let us know what you think.

Since serious sports fans spend more time online, watch more online video and shop more online, sports sites need to integrate the right balance of video and social features into their destinations, the report found.

Twenty-one percent of dedicated sports fans, who tend to be younger males between the ages of 25-34, watch streaming video monthly. With young men being avid fans of online video, sports sites have an opportunity to become leaders in online video.

As an example, ESPN has become one of the top 10 providers of online video, and the NHL’s redesigned video section attracted 12.4 million unique visitors in April, an increase of 43 percent over the previous year, according to comScore.

Devoted sports fans also value local media, with local TV, radio and newspapers rating as sports fans top news sources. Local Web sites should not only focus on adding social media and video features, but should look to create a network of local bloggers along with developing spin-off sites.

"To fully tap into this lucrative audience, local sites must make a commitment to search engine optimization and search engine marketing," said Bobby Tulsiani, Analyst and lead author of the report for JupiterResearch.

"During the 2008 NBA Finals, none of the local TV or radio stations ranked among Hitwise’s top 10 sites for traffic from the search term ‘Lakers’ or ‘Celtics’."

According to David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch, "Serious sports fans’ heavy involvement with shopping and fantasy sports presents an opportunity for revenue streams outside of advertising, such as paid video, ticketing, and merchandising."