HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – If you thought October was filled with empty rhetoric from both sides and nastiness that prevents progress in the NBA’s lockout saga, wait until you get a load of the new narrative.
The only thing worse than yet another breakdown in lockout negotiations is the incessant finger-pointing that kicked off in earnest on what should have been the opening night of the season.
And it’s open season on any and everyone connected.
Both of the union’s top guns, executive director Billy Hunter and president Derek Fisher, have been targeted. The agents are taking their fair share of fire as well. And you know the players, in general, owners and NBA Commissioner David Stern should all be used to it by now …
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Ken Berger of CBSSports.com: It’s lawyer vs. lawyer, owner vs. owner, agent vs. union and logic vs. ego. Ego is winning in a blowout so far. There’s no basketball Tuesday night, and none Wednesday night, when the Knicks were supposed to host the Heat at Madison Square Garden. There’s none for the foreseeable future because the owners and players can’t compromise, and the hard liners on each side won’t let it happen. Who’s to blame? At this point, there’s plenty to go around. But we know enough about the portion of the deal that’s been negotiated — and I agree with the New York Times’ assessment that it’s “about 95 percent complete – to more narrowly assign blame. If I had to pin it anywhere, it would be squarely on the hard-line owners and hard-line agents. Each is preventing its side’s negotiators from pushing this basically done deal across the finish line. Much has been made of the owners’ intransigence, and for good reason. Every conceivable aspect of this deal has gone the owners’ way: minimally a $1.3 billion pay cut for the players over the first six years of a 10-year deal; shorter contracts; smaller raises; a more punitive luxury tax; more restrictions on trades and player movement. The players pulled into the dealership looking for a tune up and instead had their ride battered mercilessly with sledgehammers. The $500,000 fine assessed to Heat owner Micky Arison for using Twitter to expose the obvious rift between big- and small-market owners in the negotiations gave credence to something NBPA executive director Billy Hunter has hinted at for months: the owners are not on the same page. As of Friday, when the talks blew up again over the sacred split of BRI, the hard liners were still winning.
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Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports: After Billy Hunter made the grand stand of marching out of Friday’s bargaining session, refusing to negotiate below 52 percent of the NBA’s revenue split, a strong movement within the Players Association emerged that vowed the union will never let him act so unilaterally again. From superstars to midlevel players to rookies, there’s an unmistakable push to complete the final elements of the system and take this labor deal to the union’s 400-plus membership. Beyond that, there’s an even larger movement to push Hunter, the Players Association’s executive director, out the door once these labor talks are done. All hell’s broken loose within the union, and no one is exactly sure how they’re going to get a deal to the finish line. “Billy can’t just say it’s 52 or nothing, and walk out again,” one league source involved with the talks told Yahoo! Sports. “That will not happen again. It’s time that the players get to make a decision on this, and there won’t be another check lost before they do.” Rest assured, there’s a vast gulf in the union, and it’s growing with the passing of every day. Players Association president Derek Fisher’s letter to the players convinced no one otherwise. NBA commissioner David Stern and the owners know it, and it’s part of the reason they won’t raise their offer of the BRI revenue split to 51 percent. There are system issues that need to be resolved for players, but this deal gets done at 50-50, and that’s been true for a long, long time. In the end, there are two courses for the union: Take the deal largely on the table or blow this up, decertify and lose the season fighting the NBA in the federal courts.
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Marc Stein of ESPN.com: Sources told ESPN The Magazine’s Ric Bucher that the union’s executive board has scheduled a Thursday session in New York in the wake of multiple public denials from executive director Billy Hunter and president Derek Fisher. The denials followed numerous published reports since the weekend that the union’s top two officials are no longer working in concert. In a letter sent Tuesday night to NBA players and obtained by ESPN.com, Hunter wrote: “Contrary to what is being said in the media, Derek, myself and the Negotiating Committee are of one accord. Derek is a fearless defender of player rights both at the bargaining table and behind the scenes, and he carries out his duties as President with the same degree of courage, focus and tenacity that he has exhibited on the court as a five-time champion. We are all well served to have Derek in a leadership capacity during these negotiations.” Those remarks echoed comments Fisher made Monday night in his own letter to union members in which he strongly attacked a FoxSports.com report from Friday. FoxSports.com alleged that Hunter and another unnamed member of the union’s executive board have questioned Fisher about his relationship with NBA commissioner David Stern and deputy commissioner Adam Silver. Later Tuesday night, after the release of Hunter’s letter, Fisher took it a step further, issuing a statement in which he revealed that he has “issued a letter through my attorneys demanding a retraction for the libelous and defamatory stories the site and reporter have continued to publish.” Fisher said: “The statements made in recent articles on the Fox Sports website are inexcusable. Among the many baseless accusations, to allege that I am working with the league for my personal gain is unequivocally false. The implication that I am doing anything but working in the best interests of the players is disgusting, defamatory and a flat-out lie. ”Regardless of the media reports, the Players Association, our staff, Executive Director and Executive Committee are unified and working side by side to serve our players,” Fisher continued. “There should be no more distractions. We must continue to negotiate a fair deal for our players.”
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Greg Cote of the Miami Herald: Twitter is so often numbing shades from innocuous to insipid, small bites of banality. You can follow celebrated sports figures on the social network and sift through an endless parade of Tweets no more illuminating than this guy’s lunch plans or that guy’s “Rise and grind!” testimonial. There are occasional specks of gold, though. There can be truths revealed, often unintentionally, as when unfiltered proclamations of prejudice say as much about a person’s absent judgment as about his bigotry. Sometimes great truths are revealed in surprisingly casual asides that speak volumes even in the brevity of 140 characters or less. That happened this week to Miami Heat owner Micky Arison. His truth said so much of what the NBA wanted kept hidden — revealing more about this ongoing lockout than a dozen of commissioner David Stern’s official statements — that the league punished Arison with a $500,000 fine for violating its strict gag order. It’s funny. Arison is forbidden to comment about the lockout, and yet during the lockout (when tampering rules do not apply) LeBron James is free to go on Twitter and openly invite Steve Nash to join the Heat “so we can help each other get our first ring.” It can be a complicated animal, freedom of expression. As a quick aside, Arison will require no second job or telethon on his behalf to settle his fine. To a man worth close to $4.5 billion, half a million is loose change under the sofa cushions. It was an extraordinary amount nevertheless, though, the punitive gesture mirroring the NBA’s embarrassment to see itself exposed.
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Howard Beck of the New York Times: For months, Commissioner David Stern has insisted that the league’s 29 owners are unified in the goals, methods and necessity of the lockout, which is in its fifth month. He maintains that stance, Arison’s glib posting notwithstanding. “He believes his tweets were taken out of context and understands our concern about them,” Stern said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “And he’s very much on board with the other 29 owners about the deal that we want.” If fans and commentators view Arison’s words as a declaration of self-interest, an attempt to distance himself from the more hawkish factions, Stern said he understood it. Arison himself conceded “that it might have had that impression,” Stern said, “but he didn’t intend it to.” The punishment leaves its own stark impression. The $500,000 fine is five times that of those levied on two other owners — Charlotte’s Michael Jordan and Washington’s Ted Leonsis — for labor-related comments. Without confirming the amount, Stern acknowledged that the fine was tailored to the circumstances, but not because of what Arison wrote. “It was more about his timing,” Stern said, noting that the message appeared on the very night that negotiations collapsed. “We’re trying very hard to get a deal done with the players, or we were, and we don’t need any external distractions to that focus.” At the moment, there are no talks, and none planned. Negotiators briefly discussed bringing back George Cohen, the federal mediator who presided over three days of talks last month. But Stern said that Cohen would not be returning.
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Mike Bresnahan of the Los Angeles Times: Above the din of millionaires arguing with billionaires, there was an email from George Moreno, a fourth-grade teacher at Micheltorena Elementary School in Los Angeles. ”Yesterday at our school fall festival one of my molars hurt. I make a mental note to schedule an appointment to see my dentist in January 2012, since my miserable $1,000/year insurance ran out in July. A minute or two later, a 9-year-old student of mine shows up to the fall festival wearing a homemade Halloween costume made from the two large sheets of paper I gave out on Friday. I bought the paper at Staples Office Supply with my own money. The student had colored the paper and came as a slice of pizza. Since the student is homeless, I did not charge admission and handed the student’s mom a $3 card to spend, courtesy of the PTA. They stayed the whole day. The bigger moral question for me is twofold: 1) Do these owners and NBA millionaires deserve my support at all? 2) Is it time for my friends and family members to bring up this topic in workplace lunchrooms? Feeling a bit beat up and sad here….” He’s not alone. Pistons forward Austin Daye tweeted: “Today is a sad day today was the first official day of the NBA Season!!!” He added: “Who wants free tickets to the pistons game tomorrow night????? #lockout”
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Mike Monroe of the San Antonio Express News: Spurs owner Peter Holt seems to understand the debt he and Robinson and other Spurs owners owe to Tim Duncan. Chairman of the owners’ labor relations committee, he said as much to reporters after negotiations blew apart on Oct. 20. In refuting the notion the Spurs proved it possible for a team to thrive financially and win championships in a relatively small market, Holt said the Spurs had lost money in 2009-10 and 2010-11 and would have run in red ink sooner if not for good fortune in the draft. “Fortunately, a fellow named Tim Duncan showed up and David Robinson before that, and we won some championships,” Holt said. “We were able to go deep into the playoffs. It helped cover our losses. If we had not had that situation, we would have been losing money even before these last two years in this last CBA.” Now Duncan will pay dearly — about $211,000 per game — with each one that isn’t played in what could be the final season of his brilliant career. Duncan was just entering his second season when the owners locked out the players in 1998, not yet of a stature to play an important role in collective bargaining. Then, it was left to Michael Jordan to intercede in collective bargaining talks. His Airness famously told Washington Bullets owner Abe Pollin that if he could not afford to run an NBA team, he should sell it. This is not to suggest Duncan should confront Holt the same way, but wouldn’t his presence add a rich texture to the fabric of the union’s stance? And perhaps he might be just the right union member to make the same suggestion to Jordan, now owner of the Bobcats, that Jordan offered to Pollin. After all, it’s when selling a franchise that the owners truly cash in, with no obligation to split those proceeds with anyone.
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Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times: The sad thing is, in many NBA markets, Day 124 of the lockout was met with apathy. That’s usually the response when we watch millionaires argue with billionaires. Bulls have big year ahead. Not in Chicago. The fact that opening night in the NBA came and went without a game being played should have stung a little. Make that a lot. This is a Bulls team with unfinished business. This is a fan base that still has a bad taste in its mouth courtesy of the Heat’s “Big Three’’ ending the playoff run in the Eastern Conference finals. There is something empty about winning a title in a shortened season. It’s an asterisk. And what’s holding it all up? A 2 percent gap in revenue sharing between the players and ownership. Two percent. Five hundred jump shots a day, six days a week, and it’s 2 percent that’s keeping the lockout alive and well. That’s hard to swallow. In most labor disagreements between players and owners, I’m on the side of the players. This one, however, is a no-brainer. The blame is solely on ownership. If you spend the last decade handing out bad contracts that you eventually can’t afford, that’s on you. And if NBA teams are going broke, let’s see the books. Show us the evidence of your demise. But it will never happen. Do you think NBA owners want the average fan in a struggling economy to see him paying his buffoon of a son-in-law $500,000 a year to make paper airplanes and not be an embarrassment out in public? No, thanks, they’ll take the pass on that.
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