"There is no `fair' distribution between the two parties," says Professor of Sociology Aage B. Sorensen, who teaches Social Analysis 38: "Social Stratification."
When the settlement was finally reached, both sides were forced to make concessions. The league achieved its goal of limiting the amount players are paid. As a result, basketball is the only professional sport to have a salary cap for an individual player.
But the players--who previously made an average of $2.6 million, the highest of any pro-sport--will still receive 55 percent of league revenue. They also managed to raise the income of players with mid-range salaries.
Under the terms of the six-season agreement, players who have been in the league for more than 10 years can make no more than $14 million in the first year of their contracts. The ceiling drops to $11 million for players with fewer than 10 years experience and $9 million for players with under six years of experience.
However, any player may renew a contract with his current team at 105 percent of his previous salary--meaning that Michael Jordan could still make $34.7 million a year were he not stepping down from his throne as king of basketball.
Still, the players gave a lot of ground. Like Gienapp, Wheeler says the athletes were forced to make so many concessions because they "realized they had lost their following."
He adds that the lockout will have a negative effect on the NBA and all professional sports.
"You can sell hoopla only so much," he says. "The game has to be something regarded as special. It looses mystique when the players and owners seem so concerned with their personal wealth."
According to the professors, the fans' negative reaction to the NBA lockout may in part be backlash to the sky-rocketing salaries all professional sport players have received of late.
Wheeler says the high salaries arrived with the advent of televised sports, when "athletics became entertainment."
Lucrative TV network contracts give professional sports leagues a large portion of their income, but networks will not be willing to pay so much if the fans do not want to watch.
Gienapp says the key to keeping fans interested is "competitive balance" between the various teams across the country.
"The sport that has done the best job of promoting competition is football," he says. "The worst is baseball, where two-thirds of the teams have no chance at all, and where the same handful of teams dominate post-season play year after year."
Strong competition may bring most fans back to the NBA. Nevertheless, the professors say the lockout was a losing proposition for both players and owners.
And--as Wheeler points out--the off-court personnel whose livelihoods depend upon basketball lost a lot, too.
"The people who sell the hot dogs at the games, for example...those people could not afford the lockout while the players and owners easily could," he says.
But despite the negative outcome of the last six months, do the professors think the players and owners of the NBA learned their lesson?
"Of course not," says Wheeler, who believes the lockout was caused by greed. "It's hard to see what's changed or who will be chastened by this experience."