Tag: Dallas

Ex-Spur, union leader Mason says lost NBA season is ‘absolutely’ possible

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

LAS VEGAS — Late last week, thanks to a tweet both misplaced and misconstrued, Roger Mason Jr. became the inadvertent face of hope in the NBA players union’s ongoing labor battle with league owners.

By Wednesday afternoon, hope had seemed to vanish from Mason’s vocabulary.

Calling the good vibes that led up to Tuesday’s stalled bargaining session with owners “a false sense of optimism,” Mason — vice president of the players union and a former Spurs guard — said there was “absolutely” a possibility the entire 2011-12 season will be erased by the lockout.

“I’m an optimistic person at heart,” Mason said after a game in the Impact Competitive Basketball Series in Las Vegas. “But what would make me think we’d have a season?”

Today, Mason and other union bigwigs — including executive director Billy Hunter and president Derek Fisher — will deliver a similarly dreary forecast to an estimated 80 players set to gather here for a labor briefing that some believe could devolve into full-scale revolt.

On the surface, Mason’s pessimism appears at odds with a post that briefly appeared on his Twitter account last week, which read in part: “Looking like a season.” Many observers took the tweet to be a leak that significant progress had been made in closed-door negotiating sessions.

Initially, Mason claimed his account had been hacked. Wednesday, he said the tweet had been accidentally posted by one of his representatives without his knowledge.

Chillingly, Mason says the post was not a sign of optimism at all. It came, he said, in answer to the question: “How long is the lockout going to last?”

After union leaders left the bargaining table Tuesday in New York with the owners still clinging to the idea of a hard salary cap, Mason’s answer to that question hasn’t changed.

“Right now, it’s looking like we’re going to miss training camp and some preseason games,” Mason said. “Unless some things change, we could lose the season. There’s no reason for me to think otherwise.”

With nervousness growing among players about Hunter’s job performance, and with a powerful cartel of agents saber-rattling to decertify the union, Mason is bracing for a meeting with fellow players today that could become contentious.

At about the same time, owners will hold a Board of Governors briefing in Dallas, with a group that includes the Spurs’ Peter Holt, head of the NBA’s labor committee.

Reiterating the union was still steadfast against decertification, a so-called “nuclear option” that would drag out in court, Mason issued a call for harmony among players.

“We just need to be on the same page,” Mason said. “We don’t need a contingent of agents pushing for one thing and the union pushing for another. Anytime there’s turmoil on one side of the negotiation, it hurts you. I’m sure (owners) would love to have dissension among us.”

Sides in NBA labor dispute tout unity

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

LAS VEGAS — National Basketball Players Association president Derek Fisher and executive director Billy Hunter took the podium in a hotel meeting room here Thursday, backed by 33 other players wearing matching gray T-shirts emblazoned in gold with one word:

“STAND.”

Though the players’ kumbaya moment was scripted and largely symbolic, their message was unmistakable. There would be no union mutiny in Sin City. At least not today.

“There is not the fracture and the separation amongst our group that in some ways has been reported,” said Fisher, the Los Angeles Lakers guard. “We just want to continue to reiterate that point.”

Hunter, in Las Vegas along with Fisher to update players on the latest round of collective bargaining talks with NBA owners, arrived in the desert under fire as the lockout hit the 11-week mark.

With a collection of heavy-hitting agents pushing for union decertification, a move that would take negotiating power out of Hunter’s hands and shift the process to the long slog of the legal system, there was a sense Thursday’s meeting might have turned contentious.

Based on accounts of eyewitnesses in the room for a confab Fisher called “colorful and engaging,” it did not.

About 40 players attended the informational meeting, the first the first among NBPA membership since talks broke down Tuesday over the owners’ insistence on a hard salary cap. Most of those players were already in Las Vegas to participate in the Impact Competitive Basketball series, an informal pick-up league.

Second-year guard James Anderson was the only Spurs player to attend the briefing.

“I’m just waiting it out, preparing myself for when it ends,” Anderson said. “I’m trying to focus on working on getting better. Whenever it ends, I’ll be ready for it.”

Though player turnout Thursday represented about 10 percent of union membership, the buzzwords of the day were “togetherness” and “solidarity.”

“If the owners were waiting for some break in the ranks, that’s been put to bed,” Hunter said.

That’s not to say the dicey subject of decertification did not come up.

DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL’s players association two months removed from the end of that league’s lockout, addressed the NBPA as an invited guest of Fisher.

Part of Smith’s message, according to Hunter: Though NFL players did vote for decertification, the tactic was not a “silver bullet” for ending the NBA’s impasse.

Hunter refused to take the decertification off the table Thursday, but will wait until after a National Labor Relations Board ruling on the union’s complaint against the NBA, which he expects sometime before the end of the month.

“Any decisions made in the future will be made by the players standing behind me and their colleagues,” Hunter said in a not-so-veiled shot at pro-decertification agents.

As the players went to dramatic lengths to show solidarity in Las Vegas, the NBA Board of Governors — a group that included Spurs owner Peter Holt, head of the league’s labor committee — convened in Dallas to determine their next course of action.

League officials emerged trumpeting the owners’ own sense of unity.

In a letter sent to players before Thursday’s meeting and first made public by SI.com, Fisher blamed the breakdown in the latest spate of talks on “a fundamental divide between the owners internally.”

Twelve hundred miles away in Dallas, NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver bristled at that characterization.

“There is absolute agreement,” Silver said, “and it’s a complete fiction coming from somewhere that there isn’t.”

With the players seemingly willing to give on the split of basketball-related income, reportedly prepared to reduce their share to 53 percent or less from the current 57 percent, there is optimism among union leadership that the framework of a deal might be close.

The sticking point now appears to be the mechanism by which the players’ money is to be delivered.

Owners are bent on a hard salary cap to replace the current soft cap, though some — such as Phoenix’s Robert Sarver and Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert — are believed to be more vehement on the issue than others.

“Some people might say they want a hard cap with this wrinkle and someone says I want a hard cap with that wrinkle,” NBA commissioner David Stern said. “But I would say there is unanimity in favoring a hard cap, period.”

Fisher said he believes fewer than half of the NBA’s 30 owners were so stridently in favor of a hard salary cap that they would kill an entire season to get it. He reiterated Thursday any proposal that included a hard salary cap would be a non-starter for the players.

“We expressed a desire to make a fair level of concessions to get this deal done,” Fisher said. “We’ve been met with resistance. We’re going to continue to make the effort, but we’re not going to continue to concede.”

With training camps slated to start as early as Oct. 3, time is running out. On a day of solidarity, both sides were united in that belief.

“The clock is ticking, but it hasn’t struck midnight yet,” Stern said. “We have time to do what has to be done, and we’d like to do it.”

Opening of camps, season in danger

By Brian Mahoney
Associated Press

NEW YORK — The long looks on players’ faces and the anger in Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver’s voice made it obvious: There was no progress Tuesday in talks to end the NBA lockout.

And with less than three weeks until training camps, the latest setback may be a tough one.

“I think coming out of today, obviously because of the calendar, we can’t come out of here feeling as though training camps and the season is going to start on time at this point,” players’ association president Derek Fisher of the Lakers said.

Still divided over the salary cap structure, owners and players decided to pass on talking again Wednesday, and no further meetings are scheduled at this point.

“Well, we did not have a great day, I think it’s fair to say that,” Commissioner David Stern said. “On the other hand, we did say that it is our collective task to decide what we want on the one hand on each side, and two, what each side needs if we choose to work ourselves in such a way as to have the season start on time. That’s still our goal.”

Training camps have been expected to open Oct. 3 and the regular season’s opening night is scheduled for Nov. 1.

“We’re a bit pessimistic and discouraged at one, the ability to start on time, and we’re not so sure that there may not be further damages or delay trying to get the season started,” union executive director Billy Hunter said. “The owners are not inclined at this stage to move off the position where they’ve anchored themselves.”

Stern and Silver countered that the union insisted the current soft cap system remain exactly as it is before they would agree to discuss anything else.

“Frankly, we’re having trouble understanding why the label of a hard cap is what’s breaking apart these negotiations right now, and that’s what we discussed for a long time as a committee and then discussed together with the players,” said Silver, his voice rising as he spoke.

After three meetings among small groups in the last two weeks, full bargaining committees returned to the table Tuesday. They could also have met Wednesday, but Stern said it was best the two sides step away and meet with their own membership groups on Thursday.

Though owners are seeking an overhaul of the league’s financial system after saying they lost $300 million last season and hundreds of millions more in each year of the previous collective bargaining agreement, the salary cap appears to have emerged as the biggest obstacle to a new deal.

The current system allows teams to exceed the ceiling through the use of various exceptions if they are willing to pay a luxury tax, giving big-market teams such as the Lakers — who can take on added payroll — an advantage over the little guys.

But Hunter said a hard cap is “highly untenable,” referring to it as a “blood issue” to the players. He added the players were prepared to make a “significant” financial move, but they would only agree to give on dollars if they got a win on the system.

“For us, if we give on one, we have to have the other. It can’t be just a total capitulation,” he said.

The league said players wanted owners to guarantee they would concede on the cap as a condition of talking about anything further, but Stern said “all of the owners were completely unified in the view that we needed a system that at the end of the day allowed 30 teams to compete.”

Added Silver: “That should be the goal of both the owners and the players in this negotiation, not to come in and say that that’s off the table, and we won’t discuss it and it’s a precondition of us making an economic move.”

The recent meetings had been cordial, sparking hopes that progress was being made. Instead, Fisher and Hunter sat in the middle of a row of players who looked dejected, and now may have to wonder if they need to look harder at finding a job overseas.

A sign of how the day went: Owners spent the majority of about five hours behind closed doors caucusing among themselves.

“We can’t find a place with the league and our owners where we can reach a deal sooner rather than later,” Fisher said.

Besides the cap, the other main issue remains the division of revenues. Players were guaranteed 57 percent under the old deal and had offered to lower that to 54.3 percent before owners locked them out on July 1. They say the league’s proposal would have them a percentage in the 40s, and Hunter said if the owners are serious about a hard cap, he’ll give it to them if players get 65 percent.

Owners are scheduled to meet Thursday in Dallas, and Stern again said there won’t be any decisions to cancel training camps at that session. But that would have to come sometime later this month without a deal. The opening of camps was postponed on Sept. 24 during the 1998 lockout, which reduced the season to 50 games.

The union will update players Thursday in Las Vegas, and Fisher said he will tell them that “the way it looks right now we may not start on time.” He stressed that players are still committed to the process and “not walking away from the table,” but Hunter repeated that they “have instructed us that they’re prepared to sit out” rather than accept owners’ current proposals.

Progress should come eventually over finances. Settling the cap issue could take longer.

“We know how to negotiate over dollars when the time comes, but they so conditioned any discussion on our acceptance of the status quo, which sees a team like the Lakers with well over $100 million in payroll and Sacramento at 45,” Stern said. “That’s not an acceptable alternative for us. That can’t be the outcome that we agree to.”