National Basketball Association | SAN ANTONIO SPURS TICKETS

NEW YORK — With the first two weeks of NBA regular-season games likely to be canceled come Monday, speculation continues to build about players heading overseas, including two of the Spurs’ “Big Three.”

It appears likely that as soon as the cancellations become official, All-Star point guard Tony Parker will sign with Asvel, the team in Lyon-Villeurbanne, France, in which he has an ownership stake.

An Internet report out of Italy on Tuesday indicated Spurs All-Star guard Manu Ginobili, who played several seasons in Bologna, Italy, had agreed to sign with Italian League power Virtus Bologna if Lakers star Kobe Bryant turned down a lucrative deal Virtus has offered him.

Ginobili’s agent, Herb Rudoy, on Tuesday emphatically refuted that report, writing in a text message, “Not true!” when asked if Ginobili had made any such agreement.

Bryant, who attended Tuesday’s negotiating session in New York between the NBA’s owners and players, was non-committal about his offer from Virtus Bologna. The negotiating impasse that likely will wipe out the first two weeks of the regular season frees him to play there, but doesn’t necessarily mean he will.

“I don’t think there’s anything stopping it or pushing on it,” he said. “I think it’s its own separate structure. The developments that it has to what’s going on here is that I have time to be able to play overseas. In terms of what’s holding up the deal is the same as any other deal.”

LAS VEGAS — The shot, launched somewhere from the vicinity of half court, ripped through the net just after the halftime horn sounded, and an entire bench went wild.

Three players in red jerseys hooted and hollered and cheered at the apparent 11th-hour bucket. On the floor, five other crimson-clad players exchanged high fives.

Then, an official put an end to the low-grade pandemonium.

Signaling the Hail Mary had been released too late to count, the referee waved off the basket. Several players protested. One, Cleveland point guard Mo Williams, jokingly pointed to an invisible JumboTron above, beseeching the official to consult the replay.

The punch line: In the tiny Impact Basketball gymnasium, where a collection of NBA players have gathered to while away the league’s labor impasse with organized pickup games, there were no replays, or video screens or any other trappings of a real live professional basketball game.

There weren’t even enough fans — just a couple dozen on this particular Wednesday afternoon — to constitute a crowd.

“This isn’t the NBA,” says Joe Abunassar, the Las Vegas-based trainer who dreamed up what has come to be informally known as “The Lockout League.” “But this is as close as these players are going to get for now.”

As the NBA’s summer of discontent stretches toward fall, jobless players have found a haphazard basketball oasis at Abunassar’s facility a stone’s throw from the famed Las Vegas strip.

By the time the two-week Impact Competitive Basketball series ends Friday, organizers say at least 75 NBA players will have participated, many of them Abunassar clients. Included on that list are Spurs guard James Anderson and rookie small forward Kawhi Leonard, the 15th pick in the June draft.

“Any time you can get a lot of guys like this together and get some good run in, it’s helpful,” Anderson said.

For players, the draw of Abunassar’s event was simple: Unlike the various pro-am leagues around the country, the Lockout League is open only to NBA players.

“There’s no other place they can go to play against 35, 50 NBA guys on a daily basis,” Abunassar said.

A former college assistant whose list of training clients has included All-Stars such as Chauncey Billups and Kevin Garnett, Abunassar didn’t set out to become a key figure in the NBA’s ongoing labor imbroglio.

It just sort of worked out that way.

What is happening this month at the Impact facility in Vegas is simply a supersized version of what happens there every day. Players train in the morning, then play 5-on-5 games in the afternoon.

The NBA lockout just provided Abunassar with a deeper talent pool from which to fill out his post-lunch rosters.

“It’s the same concept we’ve been doing for 15 years,” he said. “Now we’ve just invited more people and made it kind of an event.”

In the court of public opinion, it’s difficult to say which side of the NBA’s labor dispute benefits most from the Lockout League.

Players can point to high turnout as evidence they just want to play, even if they have to pay their own way to Vegas to do so.

“We love playing the game,” said Washington guard John Wall, last season’s Rookie of the Year runner-up and one of the headliners at Impact. “It’s tough during the lockout, but we’re just trying to get better and work on our game.”

Owners, meanwhile, can point to the league’s lack of accoutrements as a testament to their irreplaceable role in the NBA experience.

If the lockout really does lay waste to the NBA as we know it, basketball’s post-apocalyptic world, as presented at Impact, looks like this: No coaches, no public address announcer and, most chilling of all, referees in short pants.

And forget TV revenue. The games are not televised, though organizers are soliciting sponsorships in hopes of eventually streaming some of them online.

The Impact facility itself seems an unlikely location for a bootleg basketball league. For a speakeasy, it remains heavy on the kitsch. Smaller than a high school bandbox, the gym is the centerpiece of a multi-use Funplex that includes batting cages, a rock-climbing wall and a Go-Kart track.

It’s difficult to imagine, say, Kobe Bryant spending a season here.

For the players at Impact, however, the Lockout League was never about the size of the crowd or the quirkiness of the venue.

“Typically, this time of year we’re with our respective teams, getting ready for training camp,” said former Spurs guard Roger Mason Jr., recently of the Knicks. “You’re playing 5-on-5. You’re getting competitive games in. We have to replace that somehow.”

At times, the games at Impact might devolve into ragged, defensively challenged affairs better suited to the local blacktop. Occasionally, players have cranked the intensity up to NBA levels.

On one such occasion, T.J. Ford and Dahntay Jones, teammates in both Indiana and Vegas, left the floor after a 125-124 loss bickering over a failed last-second play. It was as if the miscue had just cost the Pacers a playoff game.

“Guys out here have pride,” said Mason, who was on the victorious team that day. “You always want to win.”

With his Lockout League, Abunassar figures he already has won. His motivation was never about gate receipts — he says any revenue the event generates beyond operating costs will be donated to charity.

His goal was simply to provide fertile ground for basketball to flourish, or at least not wither completely, while the NBA remains on hiatus. That mission accomplished, Abunassar says he plans to hold monthly Lockout Leagues until the work stoppage is over, and might resurrect the idea next offseason even without a labor dispute.

If nothing else, Abunassar’s league has answered the question: What would happen if you stripped away all the bells and whistles of an NBA game — dance teams, JumboTrons and yes, coaches, crowds and paychecks — and simply played basketball for the purity of it?

At least one man is pleased with the answer.

“It’s gone better than I ever could have expected,” Abunassar said. “We’ve had so many guys show up. They’re happy. We’re happy. It’s been good.”

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