Last Modified: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 1:51 PM

BY JIM GAZZOLO / AMERICAN PRESS

This has turned into a simple case of labor pains.
While the rest of us await the birth of a new pro basketball season, players and owners fight over several issues that really center around one thing — control.
Yes, money is always an issue, but everybody agrees there is more than enough to go around.
Instead, the heart of this issue seems to be control.
The players have shown over the past few seasons that they were in control. They decided where they would play and whom they would play with.
This is really the first time in sports history where the players more than the owners were making up the teams.
Even in baseball, where free agency has run amok of the game itself, there is the belief that owners and general managers still have control when it comes to putting the teams together.
Not so in the NBA.
On the surface it seems like the owners and management should have total control. They have the draft, they have power to make trades and can even go over that soft salary cap of theirs.
But the players have gotten smarter as well. LeBron James is just part of the story.
James took less money to play in nicer weather with a few of his friends. This started the term super teams, though most of those before last year actually won a championship. James’ Miami Heat did not.
And if you think it is just the free agents who have done this, think again. Carmelo Anthony got his way out of Denver for New York just by saying he likely wouldn’t re-sign with the Nuggets. That forced a trade and allowed Denver to at least get something out of Anthony’s departure.
None of this is new, of course.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did the same thing back in the mid-70s when he told the Milwaukee Bucks he wanted to be traded to either his home city of New York or college home of Los Angeles. The Bucks, who at the time were a championship contender with Jabbar haven’t even sniffed the NBA Finals since. As for the big center, he won five championships with the Lakers.
Now we have today’s real struggle in the NBA. The two sides aren’t fighting for survival, which each claims, but rather the actual control of the game’s future.
It really is that simple.
Owners from small markets don’t want to become the Kansas City Royals. They don’t want to draft young players, train them, invest in them and then lose them to bigger markets and brighter lights.
They don’t want their overall investment of buying a franchise to come with a no-championship guarantee.
It’s not fun to watch your players win for other teams.
The players claim they are the game and have the right to take their talents to South Beach or any other place they choose to play. Of course, they are right, but is that what’s best for the game?
Is a sport where only four or five teams have any hope of winning a championship good for all?
Baseball will again crown a new champ within two weeks. That will be the 10th champion in the last 11 years, with only the Red Sox having won two.
Yet that doesn’t always mean great interest from the public.
NBA players have talked about playing overseas or even creating their own league. But would anything change if all the good guys sign up on four or five clubs? It could even be worse.
Yet the battle lines have been drawn and unless one side is ready to give in, these labor pains are a long way from going away.