We're hearing it's bad business, if not bad manners, for the NBA to hold its conference finals without inviting anyone from a monster market, but we're used to that.

We're seeing the Oakland A's, those poster children of small-market success, buried so deeply in the American League root cellar that they're starting to mold. Joining them there are tiny Tampa Bay and bite-sized Kansas City. But that's standard operating procedure.

Class warfare is old news in two-thirds of our major sports, and so nobody's surprised when pundits from both coasts predict pro basketball ruin if the game doesn't find a way to steer its stars to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston. It's when the other third shows signs of struggling to keep up with the Joneses that we have to take notice.

Which is literally the case in the National Football League, where suddenly some of the bigger kids don't want to share. NFL owners met in Washington two weeks ago where they gave the 2009 Super Bowl to Tampa Bay and let a New Jersey real estate man buy the Minnesota Vikings. What they didn't do was figure out how to deal with Dallas' Jerry Jones and some of his debt-ridden brethren, who like keeping the money from local radio, TV and luxury suites instead of tossing it into the community pot.

The community pot has made the NFL America's most prosperous and competitive league while making it possible for the Green Bay Packers to win Super Bowls. When teams hold out, the system's in trouble, and pretty soon the Packers will be, too.

Commissioner Paul Tagliabue has been dragging his owners to the table for months trying to pass a new revenue sharing plan and not getting much done. Which worries Packer president Bob Harlan and most of his colleagues.

"It drags on, and you wonder if we're making progress," Harlan said. "It's a major concern. We've got the best system in sports, and I just don't want to see us lose it. We need to resolve this problem, so we can extend the collective bargaining agreement, because 2007 is an uncapped year, and then you get chaos. You wonder, do you ever get the cap back?"

Think Drew Rosenhaus with an automatic weapon, and you get some idea of what could happen if the salary cap expired after 2006 and big-market teams went around signing football players to baseball contracts. The union would be fine with that, but right now it's just saying that everything should count when the teams add up their revenue for salary cap purposes.

Naturally it feels that way because the players get a percentage of the total, which puts them on the same side of this fence as most of the owners. Imagine that.

Harlan would like to have an agreement this fall, although he's not betting on it. If that happened, it would actually cost the Packers money in the short run, because they're in the upper half of the league in revenue, and they'd have to kick more into the NFL treasury. But they remember being in the lower third before they remodeled Lambeau Field.

"I always tell the owners, nobody needs the other 31 cities as much as the Green Bay Packers," Harlan said. "Right now we'd be a donor, and we're fine with that. But if you're a donor now, the day may come when you're not, and you just want to know that if we're going to give now, some day we would like to receive, too. Things change."

Not always for the better either. Not even in the NFL.