Tag: executive director

Mike Monroe: Players should swallow pride, but won’t

When the National Basketball Players Association’s representatives meet in Manhattan on Monday or Tuesday — hey, no need for urgency — their choices are simple: accept a deal most of them hate and play a 72-game season starting in mid-December; or reject it, decertify and know cancellation of the entire season is a virtual certainty.

Don’t be surprised when the player reps choose Doomsday.

Player sentiment was running hot against approval the day after they received the last, best offer the NBA says it will make.

There was this tweet Friday from Spurs swingman Danny Green: “The email I just received on this update got me HOT … we would be fools to take this deal.”

It took only a few minutes for Green’s disdain to get multiple retweets from other players, including this from his former Spurs teammate, George Hill: “Yeahhhhhh.”

Here’s the truth about the revised offer the NBA made to its players Thursday night in Manhattan: It’s a huge economic giveback the players should hate.

Commissioner David Stern knows this and so does Billy Hunter, the union’s executive director.

This is true, too: The players will be fools if they do reject it, no matter how bad a deal it is for them.

If they think the pattern that marked the course of the 1998-99 lockout is bound to repeat itself, that there is a deal to be struck in January, on terms they like better, they are miscalculating the new dynamic inside the tiny club of those who own the 30 teams. When Michael Jordan is identified as the hardest of the hard-line owners, be assured obstinacy rules the day when the full board of governors chooses a course.

Stern isn’t bluffing this time. Rejection of this deal means the next bargaining session — midtown Manhattan next July, anyone? — will ?begin with an offer from the league that will slice another ?3 percent from the players’ share of basketball related? income and impose a “flex” ?salary cap that’s really just a ? hard cap that can be imposed incrementally.

Gone will be the salary cap exceptions the players hold most dear. Ditto guaranteed contracts.

Ask any NHL player that lost the entire 2004-05 season after negotiations that followed an arc eerily similar to these NBA talks, and they will tell their basketball compatriots a principled stand isn’t worth the wasted fortitude.

No fair-minded fan questions the reasons for player anger. How difficult must it be for a player as competitive as union president Derek Fisher to stomach deputy commissioner Adam Silver lecturing about how much more competitive the league will be under the system the owners propose?

“We believe we will be proven right over time that this new model … will create a better league,” Silver said Thursday, campaigning for union acceptance. “It will create one where fans in more markets will be able to hope that their teams can compete for championships, that fans can believe that a well-managed team, regardless of market size, regardless of how deep the owners’ pockets are, will be in a position to compete for a championship, and that more players will be in a position to compete for rings as well.”

Every player knows Silver is a brilliant lawyer but hardly a basketball expert. When he talks about what is best for competitive basketball, it’s a bit like Kris Humphries lecturing on the secrets of marital longevity.

Phil Jackson, Fisher’s now-retired coach, advises that anger is the enemy of instruction. It is also the enemy of common sense.

On Monday or Tuesday, what’s best for the players is the common-sense realization that they are out of good options.

It is the very competitiveness of players, which Silver doesn’t comprehend, that likely means the league is headed for basketball Doomsday.

mikemonroe@express-news.net

Mike Monroe: NBA season died with courtroom move

Forget the 2011-12 NBA season.

Please.

If you think the lawsuits filed Tuesday by the trade association formerly known as the NBPA is going to soften the stance of hard-line owners, someone needs to break the bad news to you about the tooth fairy. The owners’ goal, all along, has been to crush the union and remind the players that they are merely employees.

Blame who you choose, but get over that quickly, too. It will just make you angry and depressed.

Some Spurs fans couldn’t sleep Monday night because they were so upset about the likelihood they won’t see their heroes for a full season. They also were worried about the effect the missed season might have on the team.

Renowned attorney David Boies, representing plaintiff players, including Spurs draftee Kawhi Leonard, announced the filings and said settlement talks can begin at any time and “might be a pathway” to agreement.

I can begin a column tomorrow that might be a pathway to a Pulitzer prize.

Does moving the battle to the courtroom give fans reason to believe there will be NBA games this season? Only if they enjoy serial disappointment.

If the owners and players want to get serious about ending the lockout, they must focus more sharply on the true fallout from this fiasco: How a lost season will forever change the dynamic between the league and fans; between the teams and fans; and between the players and fans.

We know it is changing because fans haven’t been silent as billionaire owners insisted on imposing their will and millionaire players lined up, like lemmings, to follow their leaders as they leaped into a sea of lost paychecks.

Outrage in South Texas is understandable. The Spurs are the only major league sports franchise in town, so San Antonians feel an especially strong bond. They know Tim Duncan is the greatest player in club history, the only one on all four Spurs title teams and the greatest power forward in history. They know he is in the final season of his contract and will be 36 in April. They know the lockout threatens a sad end to his career.

Tyler Remmert, 24, is a Spurs season ticket holder. But he says he won’t be going back to the ATT Center as long as Peter Holt owns the team, David Stern remains NBA commissioner and Billy Hunter is executive director of whatever it is the players union might call itself if, and when, it re-forms.

He has a message that merits consideration because it combines both the passion of Spurs fans and their sense of betrayal.

“When the NBA comes back in 2012 or 2013 or whenever this petty squabbling wears out its own PR machine, I don’t know that I will look at a Spurs game the same way,” Remmert wrote in an e-mail. “The next time the Spurs take the court, I don’t think I’ll be able to remove from my nose the awful stench of money, of the millions of dollars, and nothing more, that this game means to all parties involved in the lockout.

“I won’t stand for it. This is not the game I love.

“This is my plea to Tim Duncan: don’t come back. Walk away from this game, because I don’t want to think of you as one of those quibbling over millions as if they were table scraps while honest, hardworking people are out of a job for a year or more. Take the dignity you earned as the greatest power forward of all time and walk away. This league doesn’t deserve you any more.”

Duncan came to last season’s training camp trim and pronounced his intent to play “until the wheels fall off.” Presumably, this meant he would consider playing beyond season’s end, maybe another year or two.

After a season on the sidelines that will seem an eternity, would anyone blame Duncan for walking away?

Canceled season is looming closer

NEW YORK — Faced with a deal it could not accept and a negotiating process that had reached a dead end, the National Basketball Players Association elected to disband Monday afternoon, thrusting the NBA into chaos.

The prospect of reviving the 2011-12 season now rests with the courts.

Billy Hunter, executive director of the now-defunct NBPA, made the announcement just before 1 p.m. CST, after a four-hour meeting of union officials and player representatives from all 30 teams.

A letter informing the NBA of the union’s decision was sent before Hunter took the podium.

“The players just felt that they had given enough, that the NBA was not willing or prepared to continue to negotiate,” Hunter said, with more than 40 players packed behind him in a small hotel conference room. “Things were not going to get better.”

The union’s decision comes four days after commissioner David Stern issued an ultimatum to the union to accept the league’s current proposal or have it replaced with an inferior deal.

Stern reiterated over the weekend that the NBA was done negotiating.

Few teams in the NBA have more to lose from cancellation of the season than the Spurs.

Coming off a 61-win season that was followed by a shocking first-round playoff loss to the eighth-seeded Memphis Grizzlies, they understand that the glory days of an aging roster are dwindling.

Two-time Most Valuable Player Tim Duncan, now 35, is in the final season of his contract. Though he has stated his intent to play as long as he remains a significant contributor, losing the season could affect his thinking.

All-Star guard Manu Ginobili, 34, is under contract for only two more seasons. He has acknowledged that retirement will be an option after 2012-13.

The club hoped a shortened NBA season might convince 36-year-old forward-center Antonio McDyess to put off his announced retirement plans.

There is little chance he would return for a season in which he would turn 38.

On several occasions during the lockout, Stern has expressed regret about the effect it has had on players like Duncan. He reiterated the sentiment Monday, even as he criticized the union’s decision to disclaim interest.

“Players whose last year was this season will have their careers potentially end on this basis,” he said, “and it’s just a negotiating tactic, and it’s all that it is.”

In disbanding, the NBPA will now become a trade association. It will represent the players’ interests, but for the purposes of bargaining, the players are now considered individuals.

The decision to end the union effectively renders moot a separate effort by agents and players to force decertification of the union. An antitrust lawyer representing that group was set to deliver more than 200 player signatures to the National Labor Relations Board to start the clock on that process. Decertifying — effectively overthrowing union leadership from the outside — would have taken at least six weeks and would have required a majority vote by the full membership.

By disclaiming interest, the union ceases operations, opening the door to an immediate antitrust lawsuit.

The NBA is expected to challenge the disclaimer as a sham that was perpetuated only to create leverage at the bargaining table. The league made that accusation in August, when it filed a pre-emptive lawsuit accusing union leaders of threatening to disclaim as a negotiating tactic.

Stern hammered that point again in a statement issued Monday afternoon.

“At a bargaining session in February 2010, Jeffrey Kessler, counsel for the union, threatened that the players would abandon the collective bargaining process and start an antitrust lawsuit against our teams if they did not get a bargaining resolution that was acceptable to them,” Stern said.

In an interview with ESPN, Stern said the NBA was entering a “nuclear winter.”

He also said the league’s latest offer was not an ultimatum but a revised proposal.

“When you negotiate for 21/2 years and finally get to where the parties are … that’s not an ultimatum. That’s a proposal that’s ready to be voted up or down,” Stern said. “They seem hell-bent on self-destruction, and it’s very sad.

“There will ultimately be a new collective bargaining agreement,” Stern said in his statement, “but the 2011-12 season is now in jeopardy.”

Without a union, the players are now free to sue the NBA under antitrust laws and challenge the legality of the lockout. Hunter said a lawsuit would be filed within two days.

Staff Writer Mike Monroe and the New York Times contributed to this report.