Tag: In the News

NBA 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

Phil Jackson still hammering Spurs about 1999 ‘asterisk’ season

Spurs Nation has held a special grudge against Phil Jackson for a long time.

It’s not just because he always seemed to end up playing the Spurs in a competitive playoff series with the Lakers.

Most Spurs fans have never forgiven Jackson for branding the Spurs first title team in 1999 as an “asterisk” team because they won the championship after playing in a truncated 50-game schedule after tghea lockout.

Now with the league in the midst of the same kind of work stoppage, Jackson is talking about the Spurs first championship again. He’s remembering that season in a way that he believes would be bad for the league after the lockout ends.

Jackson told the Chicago-based Waddle and Silvy Show about his and how different that 1999 season was from a normal one.

And yes, Spurs Nation, he has another not-so-subtle tweak about that championship season. (Hat tip: Sports Radio Interviews.com/Project Spurs.com)

“You want to have a season that is comparable to what it is like to play a season of basketball,” Jackson said. ” The year they patched together [1998-99 season] when they played 50 games they lost more than a third of the season and then they rushed to play those games into a magnified schedule and it questioned the teams that were really going to have a chance to win it like Indiana and Utah.

“New York finished 8th that year and obviously an up-and-coming San Antonio team, which turned out to be quite a great team, but those were the teams that ended up in the finals. When teams would play 18-19 games in the last month of the season it broke down some of the older steady teams because of that impact of a heavy schedule.

“I always kind of term that as an asterisk season out of this fun at poking fun at San Antonio. In reality it changes the complexity of how you play the game and what you make your team up with. You have to have young players and you have to have healthy players to win. So they want to have a representative season and we have some terrific teams in the NBA right now and there are some teams that are very, very good. It should be interesting to see how a lot of them come out and a lot of teams don’t want to lose that opportunity.”

A shortened season will pose some unique challenges for Gregg Popovich and the Spurs this season. They are much older than that 1999 team, so a shortened season would be favorable in that sense. But cramming multiple games into too short of a period with a lot of back-to-back games could be catastrophic for an older team.

It will be interesting to see. But whoever emerges as the champion will have to battle the same stigma the Spurs have faced since that first title because of playing a less-than-complete season.

Players receive last NBA proposal

By Mike Monroe
mikemonroe@express-news.net

NEW YORK – After another 10-and-a-half hours of talks on the 133rd day of the NBA lockout, a revised proposal from the league to its players’ union brought a halt to negotiations so the players have time to consider a proposal that appears to be the last, best hope for an agreement that would save a relatively full NBA season.

Commissioner David Stern said if the union agrees to the proposal offered them Thursday a 72-game season would begin on Dec. 15.

Should the union reject the proposal, Stern said the “reset” proposal that has been hanging over the negotiations all week – an offer that will be much worse than that which the league offered Thursday – will become the league’s position.

That offer, Stern said, will be at a 47 percent share of basketball related income for the players and will include a much harder salary cap.

The executive board of the National Basketball Players Association has summoned the player representatives from all 30 teams to return to New York, hopefully by Monday, for a meeting to decide what to do about the proposal that Stern said has gone as far as the league can go in meeting the players’ demands.

“There comes a time when you have to be through negotiating,” Stern said, “and we are.”

Union president Derek Fisher, the Lakers guard, gave no indication what he thought the player representatives would decide.

“(The revised proposal) does not meet us entirely on the system issues we felt were extremely important to close this deal out,” Fisher said, “so at this point we’ve decided to take a step back.

“We’ll go back as an executive committee, as a board, confer with our player reps and some additional players over the next few days and then we’ll make decisions about what our next steps will be at that point.

“Obviously, we’d like to continue to negotiate and find a way to get a deal done, but right now it’s not that time.”

If Fisher is hoping rejection of the proposal by the player representatives will produce more talks, Stern made it clear it won’t happen.

There are ancillary issues – union executive director Billy Hunter identified age limit for draftees and disciplinary issues among these – that will have to be negotiated even if the union accepts the league’s revised offer, but Stern stressed that the owners have gone as far as they will go on the “A list” issues that have consumed the last week.

Asked if the league’s offer was indeed a “last, best” proposal, Stern didn’t equivocate.

“We took pains, out of respect to the efforts of everybody, not to characterize it precisely that way, but if this offer is not accepted then we will revert to our 47 percent proposal.”

Hunter said the player representatives will determine the union’s next move.

“There has been movement by the NBA,” he said. “Obviously, not enough. The question is how will those reps respond when we sit down with them next week. We want to get them in here next week, hopefully Monday, Tuesday at the latest.

“Now let’s decide what we are going to do: Engage the NBA again or what are our other options.”

The player representatives could decide to put the proposal to a vote of the entire membership of the union, but at least one executive committee member, the Spurs’ Matt Bonner, would oppose such a move.

Bonner, who prefers that the union’s board ask the league to continue negotiating, said he would vote against a proposal to submit the league’s proposal to the full membership.

One of the union’s other options could be a disclaimer of interest in continuing as the bargaining entity for the players or the movement, already underway by some players, to decertify the union by a vote of all players. Either action would clear the way for an anti-trust lawsuit by the players against the league.

Disclaimer of interest would allow for an immediate filing; decertification is a much longer process that would allow negotiations to continue in the interim.

The owners were represented Thursday by the same five men who were in the room Wednesday: Stern, deputy commissioner Adam Silver, Spurs owner Peter Holt, and attorneys Dan Rube and Rick Buchanan. The NBPA team on Thursday grew, Bonner, Chris Paul, Theo Ratliff, Keyon Dooling, and Roger Mason of the union’s executive committee joining Fisher, Hunter, outside attorney Jeffrey Kessler and economist Kevin Murphy.