(above : Cablevision CEO/genetic lottery winner James Dolan, who has never been seen in the same room as Joey Welz)
If there’s no resolution to the NBA labor dispute, league and individual team websites will undergo a radical transformation writes True Hoop’s Kevin Arnovitz. Once “the clock strikes midnight on the current CBA, all those images and videos of NBA players have to disappear off NBA-owned digital properties,” writes Arnovitz, adding, “depending on how you interpret ‘fair use,’ the prohibition could include the mere mention of a player’s name on an NBA-owned site.”
Over the past few weeks, NBA website administrators and support staff have endured two-hour conference calls and countless planning sessions to figure out how to eliminate all these photos, highlights, articles and promotional features from the sites.
There are additional gray areas that are still up for discussion: What about a photo of a Lakers fan wearing a No. 24 Kobe Bryant jersey? What about a retrospective feature on the John Stockton-Karl Malone Jazz teams? Do tweets from the team’s official Twitter feed that mention a player and/or link to an image need to be deleted? How about Facebook posts?
Nobody seems to know for certain the definitive answers to these questions and the criteria seem to be arbitrary. According to more than one team website staffer, the cutoff for images of retired players right now stands at 1992-93 — Shaquille O’Neal’s first season in the league. And social media is an area they’re still grappling with as the deadline approaches.