Tag: San Antonio Spurs

Spurs’ Parker expects an NBA season

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

Fresh off a star turn for France at last month’s EuroBasket tournament, Spurs point guard Tony Parker spent Saturday afternoon in a rented gym in Alamo Heights, conducting what he hopes will be the first of many eponymous basketball clinics to come.

Some 1,800 miles away at roughly the same time, inside a luxury hotel in midtown Manhattan, NBA owners and players were locked in a collective bargaining meeting that will in large part determine Parker’s next move.

Training camp in South Texas? Or the south of France?

Should the news coming out of New York be bad, and the lockout prolonged, Parker says he’s prepared to open the season playing for ASVEL, the French professional team he co-owns.

“If the sense is we’re going to start in two weeks, I’m not going to go over there,” Parker said. “If they tell me we’re not going to start until January then, yeah, I might go play.”

Parker plans to make a decision next week after the NBA labor situation becomes clearer. Spurs teammate Manu Ginobili, who is weighing an offer in Italy, is believed to be on a similar timetable.

Had the NBA labor dispute not postponed the start of camps indefinitely, the Spurs would have held media day this afternoon, with practices set to begin Monday.

Like other players, the 29-year-old Parker has his eyes on the Big Apple for what has been cast as a make-or-break weekend of bargaining sessions. Ignoring the gloom and doom that has hallmarked negotiations so far, Parker said he expects to be on an NBA court at some point in 2011-12.

“Everybody’s hopeful,” Parker said. “I think we’ll have a season.”

Asked if he thought the impasse would be solved in time to stage a full 82-game season, which would likely mean having the framework of a deal in place by the middle of next week, Parker sounded less sure.

“I hope so,” Parker said. “I don’t think we’ll cancel the season.”

It was a long and strange summer for the Spurs’ three-time All-Star in a lot of ways, and not all of them bad.

Last month, he led the French national team to a runner-up finish at Eurobasket in Lithuania, securing a berth in the 2012 London Olympics for Les Bleus — the country’s first since 2000.

It was a heady moment not lost on Parker, whose basketball résumé includes three NBA championships, one Finals MVP, three All-Star appearances and an All-NBA Third Team selection but, until now, no Olympic berth.

“I’ve been chasing that for like 10 years,” Parker said. “It was my last thing.”

His success in Lithuania has Parker itching to get back on the court with the Spurs, especially with the sour taste of the team’s first-round playoff ouster to Memphis still lingering.

How soon that can happen remains up to David Stern and Billy Hunter.

If doomsday occurs, and the entire season is scuttled, it would be quite a blow to a Spurs team that still relies heavily on aging stars Tim Duncan (35) and Ginobili (34).

Duncan is entering the final season of his contract, and there has been speculation a fully erased 2011-12 campaign might also mean the end of the 13-time All-Star’s career.

Parker, who says he’s talked to Duncan recently and plans to work out with him Monday, isn’t buying that.

“I see myself playing at least two or three more seasons with Timmy,” Parker said.

Whether Parker opens his next season here or abroad remains to be seen.

Should Parker opt to play in France, it might actually cost him money. As ASVEL’s co-owner, he would have to pay to insure his own NBA contract.

“I would do it,” Parker said. “I think it will be good for French basketball, especially after what we did this summer. Everybody’s so excited about basketball right now.”

NBA talks turn tense, to be continued

By Mike Monroe
mikemonroe@express-news.net

NEW YORK — It’s crunch time in the talks aimed at ending the NBA lockout, and some of basketball’s most prominent closers showed up to take their shots at bringing the two sides closer to a deal.

On Friday, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Chris Paul, Elton Brand, Ben Gordon, Andre Iguodala and Baron Davis, along with union president Derek Fisher and the players’ association executive board conferred with all but two members of the NBA’s labor relations committee, which is headed by Spurs owner Peter Holt.

After five hours of talks that included moments of tension and rancor, the superstars had made no tangible difference in a labor dispute that has entered its third month.

They had, however, shown the owners they would stand up for themselves and their union leadership.

According to a sourced report by NBA.com’s David Aldridge, Wade stood up to NBA commissioner David Stern during a side meeting that did not involve all members of both groups. Angered that Stern had been pointing at him, Wade ordered Stern to stop, saying, “I’m not your child.”

Stern and union executive director Billy Hunter conferred, and after an apology was issued to Wade, the talks resumed.

Fisher clearly appreciated such support.

“Some of our guys standing here right now have been questioned in terms of their commitment to this process, to the players’ association and to the game,” he said, the stars and executive board members standing behind him at a news conference. “Their presence here today .?.?. says a lot. These guys have always been here with us in spirit. They’ve always been here with us in terms of the cause. They’ve been with us in concerns and recommendations.”

Ultimately, when Friday’s meeting ended, the two sides were no closer to a deal than when the day began. But after the day’s tension, an agreement to continue the process today, with hints the talks could continue all weekend, was deemed a good sign.

“At least we’re meeting tomorrow,” said Spurs forward Matt Bonner, a union vice president and member of the negotiating committee. “That’s a silver lining. Just as Derek said, we want to get a deal done and we’re going to keep working at it and try to get there. No progress, per se, was made today, but nobody stormed out and refused to talk.”

Nevertheless, against a backdrop that this weekend’s meetings carried what Stern called “enormous consequences,” Friday’s session seemed anti-climactic.

Fisher, the Lakers point guard, said the talks had been “engaging” and called the participation of the prominent players very meaningful, but admitted no progress had been made toward an agreement that might end the lockout imposed by the owners the moment the old collective bargaining agreement expired on July 1.

“We discussed a lot of different ideas — concepts, system issues, economics, a little bit of everything,” he said. “We did not come out of here with a deal today. We will be back tomorrow at 10 a.m. to continue to discuss.

“Overall, we felt like this … was not a waste of time.”

Deputy commissioner Adam Silver acknowledged there was little likelihood a deal could be reached by the end of the weekend — “I think just the number of hours in the day, I’m not sure if we can complete a deal this weekend,” he said — but Stern insisted failure to do so this weekend would not mean the entire 2011-12 season might be canceled.

“Whatever the eventuality is, the idea that we would at an early stage cancel the season is … ludicrous,” he said.

No lockout workouts yet for Spurs, but they could be coming

The opening of NBA training camps has been officially postponed, another casualty of the league’s ongoing labor dispute, but that doesn’t mean Spurs players won’t be working out together in San Antonio sometime in the near future.

No formal get-together has been formally organized yet, but with the lockout poised to eat up the first half of October and maybe more, Spurs forward Matt Bonner says he expects at least a handful of players will convene for voluntary camp-style practices at some point.

“Up until now, we’ve been hopeful we’d get (the lockout) solved before they cancelled anything,” said Bonner, a vice president of the players union. “As things have become more real, we’ll probably talk about getting something organized.”

It’s difficult to predict how well-attended such sessions might be.

Few Spurs players live in San Antonio full-time during the offseason — Tim Duncan being the most prominent exception — making large-scale workouts difficult  to organize this point.

In addition, up until recently four players — Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, Tiago Splitter and rookie Cory Joseph — have been indisposed playing with their respective national teams in Olympic qualifying tournaments.

Complicating matters going forward, some players’ overseas obligations could mute participation at any future player-run workouts. DeJuan Blair (Russia) and Danny Green (Slovenia) have already committed to spending the lockout abroad. Parker, Splitter and Ginobili are also mulling offers to play overseas should the lockout continue.

Player-run workouts became en vogue during the NFL lockout, with players from numerous teams arranging mini-camps at local colleges or high school. Many members of the Dallas Cowboys, for instance, worked out at Southlake Carroll High School.

Among NBA teams, players from the Orlando Magic, Oklahoma City Thunder, Indiana Pacers and Golden State Warriors have pieced together lockout mini-camps this summer. Players in Cleveland are talking about doing the same.

The Spurs have yet to formulate team-wide workouts, though earlier this offseason, second-year guard James Anderson did organize workouts for a collection of young players, including Green, Gary Neal and Da’Sean Butler.

“It was mostly conditioning, a lot of individual workouts, getting up a lot of shots — a little bit of everything we could do with us four or five,” Anderson said. “We didn’t really have enough to play pickup. We were a little short on that end. But just getting together and getting some team chemistry between us was good.”

With Green in Europe and Neal enjoying the early glow of new fatherhood, even that group would be hard-pressed to reunite now. The longer the lockout persists, however, the more vital such workouts become.

Who knows? It might be fun for Spurs players to practice without Gregg Popovich yelling at them.