Tag: Billy Hunter

Takes from blog brothers: Spurs get mention in George Will column

I’m back after a week of vacation and it seems that we are no closer to a solution in the NBA lockout as we were when I left.

The cancellation of the first two weeks of games last week will likely be followed by the announcement of more missed games as soon as later this week. There appears to be little chance to see games on Christmas — the traditional start of the NBA season for many casual hoop fans — unless some remarkable work is done behind the scenes by David Stern and Billy Hunter in the next 48 hours.

The NBA’s lockout has become a topic for editiorial pages across the country as both sides appear to be entrenched in their positions.

George Will, the Washington Post’s fine editorial columnist, figures that the NBA lockout is such a strong topic that he even in the middle of his beloved baseball playoffs.

Will mentions that the Spurs are an anomaly in sports after winning four NBA titles during a nine-year period despite playing in a small market.

And he also describes what appears to be the central difference in the two sides.

“Labor-management disputes test the two sides’ animal spirits and pain thresholds,” Will writes. “The former favor the players, who — owners frequently forget this — have climbed to the narrow peak of their profession’s pyramid because they are ferocious competitors who loathe losing at anything.

“Owners, however, have higher pain thresholds because they have longer time horizons: They do not have short careers; they do have deep pockets.”

Here are some other Spurs-related tidbits from around the web from the last several days. Enjoy them.

  • Judy Battista and Pete Thamel of the New York Times mention the Spurs’ losing season when they pondered the Indianapolis Colts’ opportunity to perhaps grab Andrew Luck with Peyton Manning sidelined. 
  • The Houston Chronicle’s Jonathan Feigen notes that small-market franchises like the Spurs have been successful in the modern-day NBA — despite Stern’s claims that a new contract will .
  • The Bismarck Tribune’s Lou Babiarz notes that the Spurs are among six NBA franchises .
  • Kimberly Nordyke of the Hollywood Reporter.com reports that among NBA players during the lockout.
  • The New York Times’ Howard Beck notes that the to claim their 2007 NBA title.
  • The Charlotte Observer’s Rick Bonnell explains whyin a new economic era.
  • Dave Shireley of Deadspin.com , describing them as “well-coached, vaguely exotic, still pretty good, but too old to do any real damage.”  (Warning: The title of the story probably isn’t suitable for work, but it’s still an interesting analogy.)
  • The purist side of Phil Jackson never accepted what he termed as the in the lockout-shortened 1999 season, the Orange County Register’s Kevin Ding reports.  
  • Deadspin.com’s Owen Good enjoyed  playing the Spurs in the .  

Lockout cutting it close

NEW YORK — David Stern insisted Saturday the media takes him more seriously than he takes himself, but this was just one of the semantic tricks he uses to avoid easy answers to hard questions.

The NBA commissioner wanted to avoid specifics when asked if progress in lengthy collective bargaining talks had been significant enough to know if the regular season might begin on time.

“If we didn’t think there was any hope,” he said, “we wouldn’t be scheduling the meetings, but that is the best I would say right now.”

You have to be close enough to see the pained look on Stern’s face to know the real answer isn’t between the lines, but right there in his eyes.

Here’s the truth from a weekend of talks Stern said would carry enormous consequences: There is a better chance the entire 2011-12 season will be canceled than there is that anyone will see a regular season game on Nov. 1.

The league seems to be edging closer to the most inept moment in its history, which is what canceling the entire season would represent.

If the owners who are OK with losing the season — Phoenix’s Robert Sarver, Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert and Boston’s Wyc Grousbeck among them — believe fans deprived of games they love will forgive a lost year, you have to wonder how they ever managed to make enough money to buy their teams.

In a rocky economy, alienating customers by withholding a product they love would be lunacy.

Eventually, fans would return in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and probably in San Antonio. In other markets, generally smaller and middle ones — places such as Sacramento, Indiana, Charlotte, New Orleans, Utah, Detroit, Milwaukee and Memphis — it would be years before there would be forgiveness in the form of robust attendance.

The real issue for small- and middle-market owners is competitiveness. They don’t believe they can compete for a championship with the Jerry Busses unless the salary cap system allows them a chance to keep their stars. There are ways to accomplish this while retaining a soft enough cap to satisfy the union.

The players’ No. 1 concern is guaranteed contracts. A true hard cap would put 75 to 80 percent of players on yearly deals, which is why union executive director Billy Hunter calls a hard cap a “blood issue.”

Meanwhile, Sarver, who once spent the bulk of a Spurs-Suns game imitating a chicken from his courtside seat to mock Gregg Popovich’s decision to sit a sore-legged Manu Ginobili, has emerged as the hardest of the hard-liners on the labor relations committee. The players over the weekend reportedly were dumbfounded when he described how his wife had begged him to bring home the mid-level salary cap exception in a designer bag.

It’s going to take an owner with a boatload of courage to stand up to shut-it-down hawks such as Sarver and remind what is at stake, which is the very popularity of the league.

Spurs owner Peter Holt, who chairs the owners’ labor relations committee, is no chicken. Awarded a Silver Star for valor in the Vietnam War, it may be time for Holt to take control of the committee and demand its members recognize the tens of millions in givebacks the players already have put on the table.

After all, Holt’s team has remained competitive in a small market because it has been one of the league’s smartest in managing the soft cap.

Also, the fact the Spurs paid no luxury tax but still lost several million dollars in a 2010-11 season in which they won 61 games gives Holt a platform to demonstrate to the players that the plea for some form of systemic change is no semantic trick from Stern.

mikemonroe@express-news.net

Hunter tells players to prepare to miss half a season

So much for that optimism that the players and owners were getting closer to a settlement that would end the lockout.

After Tuesday’s meetings with owners, NBPA executive director Billy Hunter advised players to prepare to miss at least half the upcoming season.

NBPA president Derek Fisher was just as bleak in his assessment.

“We can’t come out of here thinking that training camps and preseason are going to start on time at this point,” Fisher after the meeting.

NBA commissioner David Stern said it was a day without much progress. The biggest obstacle continues to be the players’ resistance to a hard cap.

The next step for the owners will be their board of governors meeting Thursday in Dallas. Expect some kind of announcement at that time where training camp and preseason games will be postponed.

As expected, there seems to be a division of opinion between owners on the need for a hard cap. The challenge of getting all of them to sign off on a deal might be as hard for Stern to pull off as dealing with the players.

And after reports of Tuesday’s meeting, it doesn’t appear that will be very easy, either.