Thanksgiving. Some think of it as a break from the daily bus­tle to sit down and spend time with fam­ily and friends. NBA fans may now think of Thanksgiving as a time when NBA play­ers and own­ers came together to set­tle on the 2011-12 season.

While fran­tic pep­per spray wield­ing con­sumers rushed Wal-marts, Best Buys, and other retail­ers in hopes for mega mark­downs, the NBA came together to final­ize a deal on Black Friday. After main­tain­ing a seem­ingly con­stant feud for the last five months, the NBA play­ers and own­ers have agreed to begin the 2011-12 sea­son on Christmas day.

Just as soon as I was begin­ning to believe there would be no sign of an NBA labor agree­ment by the end of this year and the thought of absolutely no NBA sea­son was becom­ing more and more pos­si­ble, the deal was struck.

Millionaires fight­ing over money seems petty to the sig­nif­i­cantly poorer class that the “99 per­cent” of us belong to. Unfortunately, greed runs the United States and money was the only thing that kept the pos­si­bil­ity of an NBA sea­son alive.

The play­ers wanted to play and the league felt respon­si­ble for pro­vid­ing enter­tain­ment to their fan base. But in the end, money was the only thing each party cared most about.

The lawyers of the play­ers union who filed a law­suit against the league, most likely informed their clien­tele that lit­i­ga­tion would take sev­eral months – pos­si­bly years. With their minds on their wal­lets, the play­ers and own­ers began real­iz­ing it was time to find a com­mon ground.

The legal process would have com­pletely absorbed the 2011-12 sea­son, flush­ing away bil­lions of dol­lars in rev­enue. And with the loss of the NBA sea­son, the mil­lion dol­lar salaries of every player would have never been seen again.

The idea of los­ing that kind of money would have made any per­son real­ize it was time to stop bick­er­ing. The amount of money on the line was what changed the minds of every mem­ber of the negotiations.

The chil­dren who idol­ize their bas­ket­ball star role mod­els, the cus­to­di­ans of the sta­di­ums, and each and every other mem­ber who helps a bas­ket­ball team or bas­ket­ball game oper­ate had noth­ing to do with the nego­ti­a­tions. But every bit of their lives was affected in some way by the lockout.

Both the own­ers and play­ers should feel remorse for hurt­ing these people’s lives for so long. But instead, their self­ish greed was far supe­rior to the lives they affected.

As bit­ter as I am know­ing that fin­ish­ing the deal wasn’t hon­estly for the fans, or the peo­ple who have been laid off that work in the are­nas, or the numer­ous lives ill-affected by the NBA Lockout, there’s still one thing to be thank­ful for: The great­est gift of all this Christmas will be the joy of pro­fes­sional bas­ket­ball mak­ing its much-needed return to the hardwood.