Report: NBA to cancel two more weeks Tuesday

The NBA will announce the cancellation of two more weeks of games Tuesday, according to the New York Daily News. David Stern has already canceled the preseason and the first two weeks of the season.

The report says this cancellation will wipe out 102 games and carry through Nov. 28.

For the Thunder, this means seven more games are gone on top of the eight already lost. It looks like this: home versus New Jersey, home versus Denver, home versus Utah, at San Antonio, home versus the Lakers, home versus Memphis, at the Clippers, at Golden State.

If a deal is reached soon, Christmas Day games could still be preserved, but as it stands right now, pretty much all of November is gone. Not everyone’s favorite month of the NBA, but losing a month of basketball is a pretty large dent in the season.

The NBA has reportedly established extra contingency schedules that would allow for a complete 82-game season, but that’s only rumor at this point. At it stands, the league will have lost almost 20 percent of the season.

Owners and players haven’t met since they left their last round of long negotiations fizzled out because of system issues as well as the dreaded Basketball Related Income split.

It’s not really a surprise to be back at this point of cancelling games, especially since Stern had previously indicated that Monday would be the day for games to be lost. He had actually said about two weeks ago that if meetings didn’t advance negotiations that Christmas Day games would be gone as well. As of now, the Christmas games are still intact.

After last week’s talks fell apart, Billy Hunter said that the path of losing games isn’t always the wisest to walk down.

“This thing is on a slippery slope and we’re already losing games, the first two weeks, and if we continue to go in that decline, it may become intractable to get people to move from their respective positions,” he said.