When the NBA announced that it wouldn’t cancel the 2011-12 season, if you listened carefully, you could hear the collective sigh of every hockey fan in America.

It seems ironic that at the same time the 99% protests were going on in this country, millionaires were arguing with billionaires over just one measly percentage of NBA revenues.

As a white kid who grew up on Long Island, New York, my love for basketball went out the window when the Knicks era of the 90s ended.

After living in South Florida for a few years, and now Orlando, I’ve become a self-admitted front-running basketball fan. For the last few years I’ve been teetering between teams to root for.
The Knicks just started rebuilding their dismal franchise, and it seemed like I would once again become a Knickerbocker. But then the lock-out happened, and it left a sour taste in my mouth.

My favorite sport is without a doubt baseball, America’s past-time, but my second passion is hockey; a sport which has virtually no respect amongst Americans and the mainstream media.
Networks such as ESPN, who dominate the thought-process of sports fans in this country by controlling what they see, just started paying attention to hockey. While I am in no way a fan of Sidney Crosby, I was ecstatic with all of the coverage he was getting when he made his 2011 debut following a concussion.

Then, the NBA players and owners agreed to terms, and suddenly it was ‘Sidney Who?’

So now the 2011-2012 NBA season, which will go down in infamy, will begin its 66-game season, and go on as if nothing ever happened. Pro basketball will continue to be a vastly popular sport, for reasons which I don’t understand.

I’m happy for all of you basketball fans who can now enjoy your one true love. You’ll be able to turn your televisions to ESPN at any point during the day and find out the latest on the NBA, and you’ll forget this season started late, just a week into 2012.

But, why? Why isn’t this strike going to have the affect a lost NHL season had? Do you even remember which season the NHL lost to a strike? Did you even know that the NHL recently had a strike-plagued season? Probably not.

If you ask me, it seems unfair that the NBA was able to devastate its fans out of pure selfishness, and not face the same repercussions MLB faced in 1994, or the NHL did in 2004.

Nonetheless, the NBA will go back to being king of sports in America, and fans like myself will go back to watching an hour of Sports Center with the glimmering hope that the 30 seconds devoted to the NHL will be geared towards my team.