Sports

NBA lockout among top 5 worst stoppages

NEW ORLEANS — Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?

If you are a veteran sports fan, then you have come to accept that every couple of years, part of the cost of doing business is watching the cost of your sports doing business, which means every few years somebody is walking out, someone is locking out, players and owners drone on and on about this and that and leave you in the lurch, angry and frustrated and making empty vows and promises you won’t keep.

Oh, sure: Some of you will stay away from the NBA for a few weeks, for a few months, for the year. Some of you are gone forever. Just not most. Preliminary polls indicate near 75 percent of fans will be unaffected by the lockout that ended in a handshake agreement early yesterday morning. It sure seems like damn near 99.8 percent of all football fans came down with amnesia within 10 minutes of the NFL lockout ending in August.

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How devastating are strikes, really? Here’s one man’s look at the five most damaging work stoppages ever:

1. Baseball, 1994-95: When David Stern coined the term “nuclear winter,” he was absolutely describing this, the granddaddy of them all. Only hockey has immolated itself worse, but it’s hard to argue with how the NHL properly realigned its business model during the lost 2004-05 season. Baseball? There really are people who left 17 years ago and never came back. There was that much hurt, that much damage. And even if enduring that has yielded, all these years later, the kind of good feeling on both sides that allowed the rancor-free negotiations that brought us this week’s collective bargaining agreement, there remains a residue of angst that there will never, ever be a 1994 champion in the national pastime. And nothing will ever change that.

2. Football, 1987: The only time in history when a league actually did the unthinkable and hired scabs to cross picket lines, wear NFL game uniforms and play a disgraceful game of dress-up. In some ways, those replacement players did everyone a solid, though: It is impossible to believe any league would ever dare do something so audacious ever again. Right? Right?

3. Hockey, 1994: Even more so than the work stoppage that cost the NHL an entire season, the one that came on the heels of the Rangers winning their first Stanley Cup in 54 years seems, in retrospect, apocalyptic. Hockey had so much momentum, had inspired national magazines to wonder if it was about to shed its image as a niche sport … and that question hasn’t been asked even once since then. That’s some brutal timing. And they STILL had to cancel a season, too, 10 years later.

4. Baseball, 1981: For one thing, it was the first time a serious chunk of any season was lost (the ’72 season was shortened, but only by about a week). For another, the Cincinnati Reds somehow had the best record in baseball … and didn’t make the playoff under a system that temporarily doubled the number of playoff teams by splitting the season in half.

5. Basketball, 2011: The last time the NBA pushed itself to the brink, the product that returned was substandard by any measure, made weaker by out-of-shape players and a grueling 50-game schedule that had back-to-back-to-back games in it, and was only rescued because of a great playoff run that reinforced how much a weather vane the Knicks really can be when they’re doing well. Some think the season is too long anyway, that once games start on this 64-game version whatever residual anger lingers will dissolve. Let’s hope so.

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Whack Backs

Richard Siegelman: It’s not surprising that Rex Ryan cursed the fan who merely said, “Hey, Rex, Belichick’s better than you.” Because, as Jack Nicholson might say, Ryan “can’t handle the truth.”

Vac: Also, depending on how sturdy it is, you might not “need him on that wall … and want him on that wall.”

Marty Gavin: Rex opens his mouth and gets fined for saying a bad word … then the media reports and repeats it, over and over, so that, if you missed it the first day, eventually you run into it somewhere, whether you want to see it or not. And I think: You know, Rex was wrong. But he only did it once.

Vac: I hate reasonable, logical fans, don’t you?

Rich Glanzer: If you’re not watching “Homeland,” you should lose your TV column card. My God, you’d love this show, and since I don’t remember you talking about it, I don’t think you have.

Vac: Oh, I have, all right, and for as long as “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men” are in hiding, it is the single-best show anywhere on TV. And gaining fast on those two.

Greg Patrei: The Red Sox need a strong leader to correct the dysfunctional behavior in the clubhouse, an organizer who can right the ship and run the show with an iron fist if necessary. I can think of nobody better qualified to do this than Nucky Thompson!

Vac: Although I’d probably shy away from hiring Arnold Rothstein as the bench coach …

Vac’s whacks

Here’s a helpful suggestion for Ndamukong Suh: If you do something to an opponent that, if you did it in a bar, would prompt that opponent’s friends to jump and pummel you? Then you probably did something wrong.

* The ’72 Dolphins may have felt like they dodged a bullet with the ’07 Patriots. But more and more, week after week, the ’11 Packers are starting to look like a cannonball.

* Please tell me that was a turkey-infused dream Thanksgiving Day, and State Farm hasn’t really bogarted the “Cheers” theme song? First Nike steals “Instant Karma,” and now THIS?

* It isn’t for the faint of heart, or for the scatalogically-sensitive, but there is more passion, anger and sublime writing in Scott Raab’s two-year chronicle of LeBron James, “The Whore of Akron,” than any 50 other books you’ll read this (or any other) year combined.