Denver Nuggets point guard Ty Lawson asked his followers on Twitter Monday if he could file for unemployment.

Obviously Lawson was joking. But for many of the NBA’s team employees this lockout, which started precisely at midnight EST July 1, is no laughing matter. Teams have begun cutting their costs by any means necessary, and that means the lower-level employees are getting tossed to the street.

According to NBC Sports, the NBA laid off 114 of it’s league office employees last week, which is about 11 percent of their total workforce. The Detroit Pistons fired 15 people, the Charlotte Bobcats let go of seven workers including their radio play-by-play man and even the Los Angeles Lakers had to let go of 20 people despite having the league’s highest player payroll, according to the HoopsHype website.

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It’s easy to get lost in the players vs. owners saga that both the NBA and NFL lockouts have become, when trying to figure out which one is attempting to pull one over on the other while hammering out the details of a new collective bargaining agreement. Those who are truly getting the short end of the stick are the team employees who weren’t making millions of dollars as they have now become expendable.

NBA spokesman Mike Bass told the Associated Press July 14 the layoffs in the league office had nothing to do with the work stoppage and said they were “a response to the underlying issue that the league’s expenses far outpace our revenues.”

That sounds like the exact reason why the NBA is in a lockout in the first place. ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith said 22 of the 30 NBA teams are losing money, and cuts are certainly in order. The issue with the bargaining agreement is just how much of a cut the players are going to have to take. And with guys such as Miami Heat guard James Jones telling the Associated Press that the owners “want it all,” it does not seem like an agreement is going to be reached anytime soon.

This creates some interesting problems in the upcoming months. For players such as Kyree Irving, Derrick Williams and Kemba Walker, they left college early to get a jump on their NBA careers.

“It sucks. I wish I could play because that’s the reason I came out of school,” Walker told ESPN’s Andy Katz Monday. “But everything happens for a reason, and I’m just going to wait and see what happens.”

For NBA veterans who don’t want to wait and see, the European basketball market is as enticing as ever. Deron Williams is the first star to sign overseas, according to ESPN, and it has been speculated that players such as Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash and Dwight Howard will do the same.

All of this is leverage for the players to use against the owners, letting them know that if the NBA is not willing to pay them what they want, somebody else will. With teams hemorrhaging money, it doesn’t seem like the owners will be conceding soon.

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For the people inside the NBA who actually have to walk the unemployment lines now, they will just have to wait this out like the rest of us. It’s too bad they don’t have millions of dollars, endorsements or a contract waiting for them in Europe to fall back on.