Does anyone realize that the NBA season was supposed to start already?

Aside from hearing about the lockout on ESPN, did you know the first game was supposed to be over a week ago? A better question yet: Does anyone care at this point?

We didn’t think so.

This is like a brother a sister fighting over who deserves the majority of the cookies in the cookie jar. It’s a joke, and both sides are to blame.

Allow us to try and put this into a simple perspective for us, casual fans.

The previous labor agreement was set up where they had to pay 57 percent of all basketball related income to players. What was also included in this was a tax. The owners believed this would help scare teams from overpaying players.

It hasn’t.

If anything, it’s become a regular thing and they don’t care. It appears as though they think in order to win, they have to overpay players, but what this does, is create a league of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.

The Lakers spend about $91 million on salaries and the Nuggets spend about $29 million.

It’s no coincidence the Lakers won back-to-back titles in 2009 and 2010.

The model just doesn’t work. So the change that needs to be made is that the number needs to come down to about 52 or an even 50 percent.

Right now, players are making a lot of money playing on bad teams that are paying them because they have to use up that 57 percent.

Try to tell us that it’s right that Baron Davis making $14.9 million per year compared to Dwayne Wade making $15.7 million per year is right.

When Gilbert Arenas and Rashard Lewis are two of the top five paid players in the NBA, something needs to change.

The bottom line here is that the NBA is a star-driven league. The NBA should reward these stars by paying them a little more.

You take the money general managers would be overpaying to an average player and pay the star.

That way teams don’t doom themselves for several years by being stuck with a bad player when they give them too long of a contract with too much money. You want to know why we haven’t heard from the Pacers for a while? In 2003 they gave Jermaine O’Neal $126 million over seven years. His salary would now be just as much as Kobe Bryant’s if he still played for them.

You think those two players are similar in skill and marketability?

We didn’t think so.

The players and owners need to agree that time is of the essence at this point. They just came off one of the best-rated NBA seasons of all-time. They’re going to lose a lot of fans and more money if they don’t figure it out in a hurry.

The system is flawed, and they need to each make some compromises to fix it.

The casual fan is who they want to win back. The only thing they’re doing now is making us resent them for being greedy. If they don’t stop pointing fingers and trying to make the other side look like the bad guy, it might be too late, and then we, casual fans, are just going to keep enjoying our weekends watching football.