The National Basketball Players Association

Tiago headed to Spain; Manu being wooed

Spurs center Tiago Splitter is headed overseas because of the NBA lockout and guard Manu Ginobili is being recruited like a blue chip prep prospect.

One season removed from being Most Valuable Player of the Spanish ACB League, the website of ACB team Valencia BC reported Wednesday that Splitter has agreed to join the team. His contract will have an out clause allowing his return to the Spurs should the lockout end in time for the 2011-12 NBA season to commence.

Although Ginobili has said he would not consider playing overseas until the entire NBA season is canceled, his agent said he received offers from European teams on a daily basis.

“Noting is imminent,” Herb Rudoy, Ginobili’s Chicago-based agent reported via text message, “although we field inquiries from European teams every day.”

Ginobili offered Splitter congratulations for his signing in Valencia via a Twitter posting on Wednesday.

Splitter averaged 4.9 points and 3.5 rebounds in 61 games as a Spurs rookie. At the FIBA Americas tournament in Argentina in September he helped Brazil capture the silver medal and a berth in the 2012 Olympic tournament.

He will join 2009 Spurs draftee Nando de Colo on the Valencia roster.

Splitter will be the fifth Spurs player venturing overseas during the lockout, now 140 days old and embroiled in litigation after the disbanding of the players union on Monday. Three-time All-Star point guard Tony Parker is the most prominent Spur playing in Europe, leading ASVEL Lyon-Villeurbanne in France. Parker is part-owner of the team.

Forward DeJuan Blair signed with Krasnye Krylya, in Samara, Russia, but was released by the team in mid-October.

Also playing overseas are swing man Danny Green, playing in Slovenia, and point guard Chris Quinn, playing for Khimki Moscow.

Attorneys who now represent the trade association that has replaced the National Basketball Players Association in dealings with the NBA on Tuesday field an antitrust suit against the league in the Northern District of California. A second, similar suit was filed in the Minnesota District.

Player representatives from 27 of the 30 NBA teams met Monday in New York and voted unanimously to reject a proposal from the league for a new collective bargaining agreement. They then voted to disclaim interest in bargaining, disbanding as a union and become a trade association.

Mike Monroe: Debt to Duncan colors NBA impasse

On opening night of the 2007-08 Spurs season, the club formally acknowledged what already had been reported: Two-time Most Valuable Player Tim Duncan had agreed to extend his contract for two more seasons.

Part of the deal: Duncan agreed to take a $3.5 million pay cut in the first season of the extension, presumably so the Spurs could be players in the rich free agent summer of 2010.

Back then, club owner Peter Holt gushed about Duncan’s selfless dedication to the franchise.

“This is Tim and the way he does things and the way he always has been,” Holt said. “He told me a long time ago, after David (Robinson) retired, that he wanted to go out the same way: Go out a winner and stay in San Antonio. Tim Duncan is very much in the same mold as David.”

But he is no one’s carbon copy.

Today, on a day that was to have concluded at the ATT Center with the first game of the Spurs’ 2011-12 season, Robinson finds himself alongside Holt in a Spurs ownership group aligned with the other NBA owners. As a group, the owners are intent on ensuring profitability by threatening the players with cancellation of more games as a lockout imposed on July 1 continues into its fifth month.

Duncan remains a loyal member of the National Basketball Players Association, which has dwindling options as its solidarity frays and its leadership fractures.

We can only wonder what the great power forward must be thinking this morning about that $3.5 million pay cut he took that ultimately enabled the Spurs to acquire Richard Jefferson and his bloated contract.

Isn’t that deal one of the exhibits the players should present to the world when they assert that the owners are asking the union to protect them from their own folly?

And wasn’t it Duncan’s greatness — his 21-point, 20-rebound, 10-assist, eight-block title-clinching Game 6 in 2003 that ranks as one of the greatest in Finals history — that sent Robinson off to retirement with a second championship ring and a lasting memory before he bought a piece of the Spurs?

Holt seems to understand the debt he and Robinson and other Spurs owners owe to Duncan. Chairman of the owners’ labor relations committee, he said as much to reporters after negotiations blew apart on Oct. 20.

In refuting the notion the Spurs proved it possible for a team to thrive financially and win championships in a relatively small market, Holt said the Spurs had lost money in 2009-10 and 2010-11 and would have run in red ink sooner if not for good fortune in the draft.

“Fortunately, a fellow named Tim Duncan showed up and David Robinson before that, and we won some championships,” Holt said. “We were able to go deep into the playoffs. It helped cover our losses. If we had not had that situation, we would have been losing money even before these last two years in this last CBA.”

Now Duncan will pay dearly — about $211,000 per game — with each one that isn’t played in what could be the final season of his brilliant career.

Duncan was just entering his second season when the owners locked out the players in 1998, not yet of a stature to play an important role in collective bargaining. Then, it was left to Michael Jordan to intercede in collective bargaining talks. His Airness famously told Washington Bullets owner Abe Pollin that if he could not afford to run an NBA team, he should sell it.

This is not to suggest Duncan should confront Holt the same way, but wouldn’t his presence add a rich texture to the fabric of the union’s stance? And perhaps he might be just the right union member to make the same suggestion to Jordan, now owner of the Bobcats, that Jordan offered to Pollin.

After all, it’s when selling a franchise that the owners truly cash in, with no obligation to split those proceeds with anyone.

mikemonroe@express-news.net

Mike Monroe: No summit in sight in NBA mess

On Tuesday morning, Matt Bonner rose early at his home in Concord, N.H., and drove an hour to the base of 4,000-foot Mount Tecumseh.

After parking, the Spurs forward ran 2½ miles to the mountain’s summit, an elevation gain of roughly 2,000 feet.

As he neared the top, his lungs burning from temperatures in the 20s, he found a dusting of snow on the ground.

“It was pretty cool,” he said a few hours later. “Getting up there was worth the pain.”

As he ran, Bonner tried to focus on the conditioning that will help him when the Spurs’ season begins, but the NBA’s lockout dominated his thoughts. As vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, Bonner has seen the futility of negotiations aimed at reaching a new collective bargaining agreement with the league’s owners.

It has been an uphill climb with no summit in sight.

The talks blew up on Thursday. Cancellation of another chunk of games is expected any day. Bonner doesn’t know when the two sides will meet again but hopes it will be sooner than later.

Rumors have surfaced that there have been informal conversations since the finger-pointing news conferences that followed Thursday’s sudden end to negotiations that had been led for three days by mediator George Cohen.

Team executives on Tuesday took part in a video conference call and kicked around revenue-sharing ideas, hardly the sort of development likely to jump-start the process.

You can’t get to a deal without talking, and Bonner wonders why the process continually stalls.

“I keep thinking we’re going to get a deal eventually, and now we’re into what should be the (pre)season,” he said. “If there is a deal to be made, let’s make it. What the hell is the problem?”

The problem seems to be that the owners want a lopsided win on the split of revenue before even discussing changes in the money distribution system, in part because they underestimate player resolve.

“If you’re expecting the players to collapse, I don’t see that as probable at all,” Bonner said. “Social media has helped us stick together and stay on the same page. There’s other leagues. A lot of guys will play elsewhere.

“They should not expect the guys to cave, and that’s what scares me the most. Plus, everyone got their escrow check back. That helps us, too.”

Indeed, the league recently had to refund to each player the 8 percent of salary it withheld from 2010-11 paychecks under the escrow system in the old deal when the players’ revenue share fell short of 57 percent.

Tim Duncan’s check: Roughly $1.6 million.

Bonner heard the unsubstantiated rumor, proffered on Twitter after Thursday’s blowup, that Spurs owner Peter Holt told the players they hadn’t yet endured enough pain. Re-tweeted so often that it took on a life of its own, the quote was attributed only to an unnamed source but gained traction for a few hours, a veritable lifetime in cyberspace.

“I never heard Peter say anything like that,” Bonner said. “Peter’s a really good guy, and he never loses his cool, and he’s always respectful.”

The Spurs are often cited as proof a small-market team can thrive if managed well, but it was no rumor that Holt refuted the contention last week. The Spurs managing general partner, who is chairman of the owners’ labor relations committee, used the post-blowup news conference to say his franchise lost money each of the last two seasons.

Then he asserted the Spurs would have joined the list of money losers earlier without some luck.

“We just got there a little later because, fortunately, a fellow named Tim Duncan showed up and David Robinson before that, and we won some championships,” Holt said. “So we were able to go deep into the playoffs.”

Holt has been lumped among hawkish owners intent on a lopsided win in the talks, but it is hard to imagine he favors canceling the season, given that his luck with Duncan is near its end.

The uphill climb needs to resume, and soon.

mikemonroe@express-news.net