"The NBA’s owners’ central argument—that the league’s crisis can be solved only through massive labor concessions—is weapons-grade dishonest on its face. But given how well the Divine Right of Profit argument has done recently in the non-sports world, it’s easy to see why NBA owners decided to try to swing a deal that would allow them to upgrade to quail eggs on those horse-omelets. That sort of unenlightened self-interest is just the market at work, and thus nothing new. The drag part is that this is exactly the sort of crass, coarse, real-world thing that makes basketball-court transcendence so sweet an escape, and at the same time the obstacle that’s going to make it impossible to witness that transcendence."