Forget Main Street. You know the economy's in a bad way when the slowdown hits 645 Fifth Ave. in New York, the NBA headquarters.
The NBA might still be Fantastic!, but it isn't as profitable as it used to be. So a couple of weeks ago commissioner DavidStern announced the league is eliminating about 80 jobs, or 9 percent of its American workforce.
The NBA might be downsizing and the future is not very promising, but in Los Angeles and Boston, prospects couldn't be brighter.
The Lakers and Celtics are favored to repeat as Western and Eastern Conference champions this year and cook up one of those perfect, historic, dramatic NBA Finals that the advertisers and TV networks love so much.
Sixty-five percent of the NBA's 30 general managers picked either Boston (19 percent) or the Lakers (46 percent) to win the championship this year.
Then again, Bud Selig probably thought he was going to end up with the Red Sox and Dodgers in the World Series this year and you know how that turned out.
Could the same cruel fate disrupt Stern's dream scenario? Could the New Orleans Hornets, or worse, the Utah Jazz go all Tampa Bay Rays on the NBA and crash the ratings bonanza that a repeat Lakers-Celtics final would be?
"Obviously those are the favored teams, and rightfully so because they represented their conferences in the championship last year. But there's a lot of good teams out there,"
Toronto Raptors center Jermaine O'Neal said.
"You've got to play the games. Anything can happen. You take a Kobe Bryant from (the Lakers) and you can shut the Staples Center down. It's kind of like all the stars have to align and things have to go well."
Last season they most certainly did for the Lakers and Celtics, with general managers in Minnesota (Kevin Garnett), Seattle (Ray Allen) and Memphis (Pau Gasol) contributing to the cause.
"Things had to fall into place, but when things fall in place you call it destiny, right?"
Lakers forward Lamar Odom said. "So hopefully they'll fall in place again. We're the target now. So we'll have to prepare for every team to come out with their best against us."
Already, the rest of the league is showing tough love. New Orleans outbid Boston for free agent swingman - and Kobe-stopper - James Posey, while the Warriors overpaid for Ronny Turiaf, depriving the Lakers of their most energetic big man.
Then there are all those other teams that missed out on their own championships a few years ago and have been reassembled, and in some cases retooled, for one last hurrah before they all go gray.
Phoenix, with 34-year old Steve Nash, 36-year old Shaquille O'Neal and 36-year old Grant Hill, let coach Mike D'Antoni escape to New York in favor of defensive and detail-oriented Terry Porter.
Dallas is going to see if a full season of the Jason Kidd experiment changes what were disappointing early results, and Houston is going to use glue, tape and nails to keep Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady healthy for an entire season.
"Right now we have to think about that and the opportunity we have. Nobody can predict the future so we've just got to take advantage of that now,"
Suns forward Amare Stoudemire said. "It's never going to be open forever, whether it's for us or any other team. If you got your shot at it, you gotta take it and move forward."
The class of the West over the past five years, the San Antonio Spurs, is doing just that, letting veterans Brent Barry and Robert Horry go in favor of the sprier legs of George Hill and Roger Mason Jr., while maintaining the core group of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. If the Spurs can stay in contention until Ginobili comes back from ankle surgery in late December, they should once again make a deep playoff run.
Over in the Eastern Conference, having eight winning teams in the playoffs would be a nice goal. Last season Philadelphia (40-42) and Atlanta (37-45) somehow made the postseason. And what's more embarrassing - or encouraging? - is those teams took Detroit and Boston, the two supposed best teams in the East, to the brink of elimination in the first round of the playoffs.
While the Hawks did all they could to kill the buzz they'd created, letting a Greek team outbid them for Josh Childress and allowing every team with salary-cap space to flirt with promising young forward Josh Smith before finally re-signing him, the 76 ers got serious about challenging the Celtics by luring Elton Brand away from the Clippers.
All of this is immaterial if the Lakers and Celtics stay relatively healthy and play as well as they did last year. It's not always easy to do that. A trip to the Finals has been known to cause a nasty hangover. Lakers teams of the past were known to sleep it off all the way into January or February. But those were the days before eight or nine teams in the Western Conference could win 50 games.
"We have to get it going before then,"
Lakers coach Phil Jackson acknowledged. "Sometimes when you win and you know you're good, the season comes along and those first 30 games seem like eternity. But this team is young, they're vibrant, they know they have to get into a homecourt situation because that's what really cost us last year (in the Finals)."
Which brings us back to the Celtics, who were driven by the aggregate hunger of three perennial great players on bad teams. Now that they've won, will the title still mean as much?
"I don't know the answer yet,"
Celtics coach Doc Rivers told Boston reporters recently. "That's something we'll see. I can only tell you what I've seen is they are hungry. They have a great sense of urgency in practices, so right now it's not a concern."
But let's not dwell on all the things that could derail the dream rematch.
The Lakers and Celtics are still the two best teams out there, so let's assume the season ends with the same two teams playing in the Finals.
Is Andrew Bynum enough to sway the series? Are the Lakers tough enough now?
The first step of course, is acknowledging the mistakes of last year, which the team seems to have done.
"We were beat,"
Odom said. "One game we were up 24 and they came back and beat us. In Game 6, they pretty much beat us up. It's an eery feeling. Sometimes the truth hurts ... and they beat us."
"That just means we're hungry now."
