Sapp, Rose aren’t buying LBJ as NFL player

It’s an image that LeBron James has helped cultivate over the years.

Back in the day, James was an All-State wide receiver at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, as a  sophomore.  He helped lead his team to the state semifinals in football as a junior.

Those performances, his 6-foot-8, 255-pound size and his 44-inch vertical jump have led some to believe he could have been a standout receiver in the NFL if he .

If the lockout continues for an extended period, who knows? Seattle coach Pete Carroll even had James’ name stitched on a .

Despite those indicators, there’s a big difference from thinking you can play NFL football and actually thriving in the league. It’s why former NBA player Jalen Rose and NFL player Warren Sapp both doubt that James could really play in the NFL.

He’s a tremendous athlete, probably the best physical specimen you’ll see in sports,” Rose said earlier this week while serving as a guest panelist on the NFL Network’s No Huddle. 

“The one thing about football — you can go up for the football — I don’t think his feet’ll hit the ground on the way down because they will take him out. I think that game is too physical, I think it’s too demanding, I think that it’s hard to block defensive ends — it’s more to that job of being a tight end than just running routes.”

Sapp was even more forceful, wondering if James was competitive enough to play against the NFL’s best.

“How about LeBron do one-sixth of what Jordan did, let’s see him go win a championship,” Sapp said.

“Go do that. Go see if you can conquer your sport before you come over here because them boys on defense, we like pretty boys like that. We want to split them.”

But it’s also interesting to consider that basketball players a lot less accomplished than James — Tony Gonzalez, Jimmy Graham and Antonio Gates — have had a lot of success after leaving basketball to become NFL tight ends.

None of them have the combination of size, speed and explosive athletic ability that James has. Given time, he might be able to develop into an accomplished tight end.

But whether he could morph into an NFL contributor is a big, big stretch — particularly when there’s so much money for James to make in the relative safety of the NBA.

Buck Harvey: In private, would Spurs take the deal?

NBA players aren’t being greedy. They haven’t been given a chance to be.

Their leadership made the decision for them Monday. Their player representatives said they “unanimously” agreed to begin anti-trust action rather than put the owners’ proposal up for a full vote.

That’s the nature of unions; the reps don’t forward to their members what they don’t like. But this isn’t another union, and this isn’t just another wage scale they are debating.

That’s one reason all of the players should have been able to vote.

There are a few million more.

As it is, the NBA took a step Monday toward what David Stern called “nuclear winter.” Billy Hunter responded with something that hasn’t happened often. He agreed.

Hunter said there is a “high probability” there will be a lost season.

All of it still falls under negotiations, no matter how many lawyers are now collecting fees. That’s why it is too early to say there won’t be a season; at this point in 1998, the agreement was still six weeks away.

Still, everything is at risk, including the players’ reputations. To the majority of fans, they are greedy or worse, undeserving in today’s job market.

The average salary of an NBA player, $5.1 million, equals the combined average salaries of the NFL and Major League Baseball. And they can’t come to a deal?

The details say something else. The players are the ones who have compromised, yet as recently as last Friday, were blindsided by further owners’ demands.

Stern’s arrogance also has done little to reach compromise. He’s already won, yet keeps running up the score.

Little wonder the union stood in defiance Monday. “The players feel that they’re not prepared to accept the ultimatums,” Hunter said.

But only about 30 players felt that. These are the reps, some of whom got the job because no one else wanted it. They try to do the best they can, but a few things are working against them. One is a confusing business world that is out of their comfort zone.

Another is a dynamic that has a locker-room feel to it. They’ve built their careers trying to be tough-minded teammates. So, given the group mentality, who wants to be the one arguing for surrender?

Individually, however, they are like their teammates in their respective cities. They have their own careers to worry about. Their shelf lives as NBA players are short, and, for every insulting clause Stern throws at them, the pay is still good.

So imagine what was going through Matt Bonner’s head as he stood at a press conference Monday as the Spurs’ rep. He’s 31 years old, with a contract that will pay him through 2014 — yet he would prefer to sacrifice something tangible for something that is not?

If Tim Duncan had a vote, he would likely be divided. He would want to be loyal to the cause. But he would also be voting against the largest one-year salary of his career, as well as perhaps his last season.

Tony Parker would have little reason to vote no; he’s under contract until 2015. Manu Ginobili is facing the last two years of his career at a combined $27 million. He wouldn’t want to play?

Richard Jefferson not only is under contract until 2014, he would also be an amnesty candidate. If the Spurs cut him, he would get his money, as well as a chance to sign with another team.

The younger players could have a different agenda. But they also might need the money more, too. DeJuan Blair, back after a brief adventure in Russia, could use some dollars to make up for lost rubles.

Not all NBA rosters are like the Spurs, but there is a similar thread that runs through all of them. They are angry, and they are not sure if that should matter to them personally.

So given a private ballot on Monday, weighing their own lives against a tactic that might backfire, what would they have done?

Here’s a guess.

The Spurs would be preparing for training camp right now.

bharvey@express-news.net

NFL, NBA labor disputes tale of two lockouts

forward was watching back in March, when pro football players such as and announced they were disbanding their union and suing the NFL under antitrust law.

“We’ll see how the next steps go,” Tolliver said at the time. “Hopefully, we’ll learn from them.”

Well, now it’s time to find out what Tolliver and his peers picked up. He’s one of a handful of basketball players, including All-Stars Carmelo Anthony and , who filed class-action antitrust complaints against the in federal court during the past week.

That could lead to a dragged-out legal process or — as happened with the NFL’s labor dispute — wind up bringing the sides back to the negotiating table.

“We’ve seen every twist and turn, and I imagine we’ll see many more. Hopefully a settlement can be reached, relatively quickly, and the (NBA) season can be saved,” said , outside counsel for both the NFL and NBA players’ associations. “That would be the best result for everyone, to have a litigation settlement now.”

The NBA’s lockout came swiftly on the heels of the NFL’s, already has lasted longer, and there’s one significant difference: Football’s labor dispute resulted in the loss of only a single exhibition game, while the NBA is on its way down the path toward a shortened regular season — if one is played at all.

NFL commissioner spoke repeatedly about getting a deal done and keeping the season intact. When the most recent round of NBA talks broke off Monday, commissioner spoke about a “nuclear winter” and said it appeared “the 2011-12 season is really in jeopardy.” Tuesday was the first time players missed out on a twice-a-month paycheck because of the lockout; people who work at an NBA arena or a nearby bar or restaurant already began feeling lighter in their pockets last month, when preseason games began getting wiped out.

“This lockout doesn’t just hurt players. It hurts workers. It hurts cities. It hurts people who really need the income provided by the NBA,” Kessler said. “But what people have to keep in mind is that the players don’t want this lockout.”

For the time being, the only chance to see All-Stars such as or in action is to catch one of the player-organized games for charity. Unless, that is, some of them follow through on opportunities to play overseas: was in contact with a team in Italy; authorized his agent to listen to viable offers.

NFL players didn’t have that international option, of course.

Both leagues’ labor problems began, at their heart, as arguments over how to divide billions of dollars in revenues — about $9 billion for the NFL, $4 billion for the NBA — but also over how to change the rules governing player contracts and free agency. Both featured acrimonious dialogue in public.

Both bothered fans who couldn’t understand why it was so hard to find common ground.

“The NFL owners and players had time to let the legal battle play out,” said , director of the Sports Law program at Tulane. “The NBA owners and players don’t. This has to be a quick legal strike and, unfortunately in our litigation system, there aren’t many opportunities to get a quick legal strike.”

The two disputes’ timelines:

After 16 days of negotiations overseen by federal mediator , the announced it was dissolving on March 11, hours before the old collective bargaining agreement expired as a result of the owners having opted out of the deal. That day, Brady and others sued. As the calendar changed to March 12, the owners imposed the lockout, creating that league’s first work stoppage since 1987. There were nearly five months to go until the first preseason game on Aug. 7 (the only one that eventually was wiped out) and nearly six months until the start of the regular season on Sept. 8. After legal proceedings began, with some wins and losses for both sides, discussions with a different mediator led to progress and, eventually, the NFL’s new, 10-year CBA was signed Aug. 5.

The NBA owners had an option to extend their CBA for one year but allowed it to expire on June 30 and imposed a lockout as the calendar turned to July 1, saying they lost of hundreds of millions of dollars in each season of the old deal and needed to fix things. The league and union accused each other of bargaining in bad faith. They said they were far apart philosophically and financially and didn’t meet again until Aug. 1. With not enough progress made, the league began postponing the Oct. 9 start of the preseason on Sept. 23; by Oct. 11, the Nov. 1 start of the regular season was being pushed back. Here we are, more than two weeks past that date, and there’s no indication when the sides might be back in a room together.

NBA players announced Monday they were rejecting the league’s latest offer and disclaiming interest in their union — and, no longer governed by labor law, would sue under antitrust law, something they did Tuesday in California and Minnesota.

But it was the NBA that first went to federal court, filing a complaint Aug. 2 in New York, saying the players were threatening to dissolve their union. At the time, Stern told that players were “preparing to use the same strategy that the NFL — who uses the same lawyer — used.”

That would be Kessler, the top negotiator for both sports’ players, and he’s hardly the only familiar face. Cohen, for example, tried mediating between the NBA and basketball players, too, but couldn’t help them get a deal done, either.

Kessler recently was joined on the NBA players’ legal team by , who gained fame representing during the recount fight in the disputed 2000 presidential election — and, it so happens, was one of the lawyers who opposed Kessler only months ago while working for the NFL.