If there is one owner who wants to see basketball ASAP, it is Heat owner Micky Arison. Arison is the one paying the super trio of the 2010 free agency class and he knows what ever collective bargaining agreement is made is going to threaten the crazy collection of talent that he signed last year.
Arison is thought to be one of the leaders of the group of owners who want to get a deal done sooner rather than later. That appears to be the minority. And fans don’t know the difference.
With two more weeks of games canceled, fans sent lots of questions over the owner’s intentions to Micky Arison through his Twitter account (@mickyarison). Arison publicly re-affirmed his position that the owners should get a deal done and start playing games. That is before he deleted those tweets.
Don’t worry, Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel saved them:
“It started with a post directed to his Twitter account that read, ‘Guess what? Fans provide all the money you’re fighting over you greedy (expletive) pigs.’
“Arison responded, ‘Honestly u r barking at the wrong owner.’
“Arison then retweeted a post from another account that read, ‘Heat ratings proved that fans want to see super teams in big markets instead of a ton of small-market teams each with one st(ar).’
“Another account offered, ‘NBA labor is a joke! You owners don’t care about us FANS at all!,’ to which Arison responded on his account, ‘Wrong we care a lot.’
“Later, he retweeted the question, ‘are you allowed to comment about ur feelings on the small market/big market issues some of the owners bring up?’ He replied, ‘No.'”
Obviously there is still some division in the owners ranks. And I am sure Arison will receive a somewhat hefty fine from the league office for breaking ranks and saying what he truly thinks (unless it was some planned PR move from the league to make it look like they were really working for a deal… I would not put it past them). He deleted the tweets fairly quickly.
Arison wants games. He stands to lose a ton with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh sitting on the sideline or playing in exhibition games. That does not help his bottom line. Sitting out games hurts him. Maybe not as much as it hurts some players, but it hurts him.
So Arison, and his outspokenness, is an exception to the owners who seem dead set on making the players miss paychecks and start really feeling the hurt. This kind of honesty from Arison sure is refreshing. Expect some more negative rhetoric to surface (both internally and externally) before the two sides start meeting again.
