No deal. But talks resume at 11 a.m. CT today. David Stern said the clock has been stopped in terms of his ultimatum deal, but if negotiations fall apart today, that offer will resurface. As long as they’re talking, there’s always a chance. And not to get crazy with speculation, but last night at 1 a.m. with all the stuff going on at Penn State, it wasn’t exactly the ideal time to make an agreement announcement, if you know what I mean.
Ken Berger of CBSSports.com: “Though union officials disputed the media’s characterization of their economic stance, it was clear after Tuesday’s players’ meeting that the players were open to coming down from their previous offer in which they’d proposed receiving a 51 percent share of basketball-related income (BRI). Union president Derek Fisher had made clear that, in return for that willingness to negotiate further on the economics, it was expected that the league relax its position on several system-related deal points — chiefly dealing with additional penalties for repeat offenders above the luxury tax, a prohibition of sign-and-trade transactions for tax teams, and the size, length and frequency of mid-level signings for tax teams.” Read more…
Kevin Durant and LeBron James are two of the hardest working players in the league. They’re also different, at least to most of us. Durant’s the humble superstar while LeBron is seen as an ego driven super-duper-star.
But the two got together to work out in LeBron’s hometown about a month ago. The game’s two top small forwards, pushing each other through weight training, running on a football field and then in the gym. The Bible says iron sharpens iron and I think that applies to basketball too. You’re only going to get better working out with your top competition.
Someone actually tweeted KD saying that fans don’t want to see him hanging out with LeBron because they’re total opposites. Which is incredibly stupid. First off, the perception of LeBron is completely overblown. It’s not like he’s some evil dictator or something. He’s just a basketball player and truly, he hasn’t done anything all that horrible. There’s absolutely no reason to question KD for working out with LeBron. In fact, I hope it’s something to continues.
Favorite part though: Right at the beginning when KD smells his shirt. “Did I wear this one already? (Sniff.) Nope, we’re good.”
The first two minutes of this one might be a bit too much for those of us not burnt orange inclined. But in the new episode of 35th Hour, KD goes to a Texas game, works on his movie and guess what, plays basketball.
Best part: The Raising Cane’s employees that giggles his way through saying, “That’s Kevin Durant!” And there’s no doubt that KD has the best hype man around in Randy Williams. He makes Turtle look like a complete loser.
Also interesting: For KD’s movie, they removed all his tattoos with makeup. Is that because it’s a kiddie movie? Part of the plot? What’s the deal?
Via the Washington Post: “To present that in the context of ‘take it or leave it,’ in our view, that is not good faith,” Kessler, who also represented the NFL players in their labor dispute with the NFL, said in a telephone interview Monday night. “Instead of treating the players like partners, they’re treating them like plantation workers.” In a phone call Tuesday, Stern blamed Kessler for the stalled talks and said he deserved to be “called to task” for the remark. “Kessler’s agenda is always to inflame and not to make a deal,” Stern said, “even if it means injecting race and thereby insulting his own clients. . . . He has been the single most divisive force in our negotiations and it doesn’t surprise me he would rant and not talk about specifics. Kessler’s conduct is routinely despicable.”
Ken Berger of CBSSports.com: “Who in Portland is going to ask Paul Allen — one of the richest men in the world and a silent assassin in the labor talks — whether he personally is going to replace the event revenues that are supposed to fund the bond debt that partially funded the Rose Garden? And while Spurs owner Peter Holt wasn’t mentioned on my sources’ list of hard-liners, as the chairman of the owners’ labor relation committee his fingerprints will be all over this death-knell proposal if it gets delivered to the players Wednesday night. Will anyone in the state of Texas, which has three NBA teams that would be idled by a season-long lockout, ask Holt to explain why the 84-percent taxpayer funded AT&T Center will be without its signature tenant and primary source of revenue?” Read more…
The NBPA and its player reps, as well as just players that wanted to be there, 43 total, met Tuesday in New York for a little more than three hours to discuss a myriad of issues including voting on the NBA’s proposed deal as well as presumably, decertification. Though Billy Hunter said there was “very little” discussion on the latter.
And the message was clear: The deal the NBA proposed is still unacceptable. But it’s not too far off and could be something the players could work with if they got another bargaining session.
Billy Hunter put it bluntly: “They’re still of the mind-set that they’re not going to accept a bad deal.” Read more…
Kevin Durant at the PDX charity game on the owner’s position: “It’s sickening,” said Durant, who is coming off of his rookie deal and set to earn $13.6 million in 2011-2012. “It’s sickening. Us players have sacrificed, gave up money, doing what we have to do. Now it’s on the owners. At this point it’s starting to get bad. We’ve done our thing. They’re trying to pressure us, back us into a corner and take a deal that’s not fair to us.”
ESPN.com ranked the five top juniors and it was pretty Thunder-centric: “Henry Abbott, ESPN.com: Serge Ibaka. Being that big, mobile and active is breathtaking, and international play over the summer suggests he has developed a reliable jumper, too. No joke: If he can protect the rim like a madman, and punish you for leaving him on offense, he’ll be one of the West’s most important playoff big men for years to come.” Read more…
Surely you’ve seen the 5-on-5 series on ESPN.com. Well, it’s branching out (and by out, I mean down) to the TrueHoop Network. Three questions, three answers. Pretty simple.
It’s a hot little discussion around every team: If you could cut one player, no questions asked, who would it be? The Thunder are in a unique position in that they don’t exactly NEED to axe a player off their salary cap, but still, how would the proposed amnesty clause fit in with OKC?
1. Who should the Thunder use the amnesty clause on? A. Nate Robinson B. Thabo Sefolosha C. Someone else D. Nobody
Royce Young, Daily Thunder: D. There’s really no sense in waiving Nate Robinson because his $4.5 million contract is more valuable as a trade piece than using it to cut into OKC’s cap space. No reason to cut Thabo because despite the frustrations that come with him, he’s still a good player to have on the roster and he’s not all that expensive. So be patient and don’t do anything just for the sake of it. You know, the Sam Presti Way. Read more…
Ken Berger of CBSSports.com with a seriously brilliant column: “But what happened instead? The players and union officials took the bait that Stern had so cleverly planted on the end of a hook early Sunday. Instead, a defeated Fisher acknowledged the inevitable and Kessler, the union’s flame-throwing attorney, launched a roomful of red meat onto the table for the hard-line agents and star players who are fed up with this charade to devour on their path to the mutually assured destruction of union decertification. And if the season gets blown up in the aftermath of these ultimatums, threats and tantrums, it will be the players’ doing. This didn’t have to be. And it still doesn’t.”
Henry Abbott of TrueHoop: “Kessler explains the reasoning for the mechanism is because no union wants to let employers address workers directly. You don’t want your opponents to have direct access to your constituents. The fully informed committee has an obligation to keep bad deals from the rank and file, who have entrusted the process to them. This protects players from accepting an offer that might sound good to them, but would, in the judgment of those who have analyzed it most thoroughly, actually be bad news. So if the players are to accept the NBA’s offer, they will do so over the objection of their representatives.” Read more…
When David Stern sat down to give a press conference at 12:45 central time Saturday night, I really had no idea what to expect. More of the same? Tempered optimism? Disheartening negativity? A duet with Adam Silver singing the bass part on “Reunited”?
Probably the last thing I expected was for Stern to sit down and basically explain the league’s entire proposal to the players and then add that if they don’t take that deal by Wednesday, the next proposal will be infinitely worse.
Yow.
Stern said it wasn’t an ultimatum. But that’s exactly what it is. Take it or leave it, players. And if you leave it, be ready to put your money where your mouth is. Because the season will be in serious jeopardy.
The federal mediator put out six proposals, or “what-ifs”, for the two sides to consider. According to Stern, the league has adopted five of those. One of those being a solution to the torturous disagreement on Basketball Related Income. The NBA’s proposal includes a “band” that would pay the players up to 51 percent if projected revenues are met and as low as 49 if they are not. And if revenues exceed projections, the players would get 57 percent of the overflow. So if the league’s projection — which is 4.5 percent growth — is something like $4.5 billion for next season (or whatever) and the league brings in $5 billion, the players would get 57 percent of that extra $500 million. Or at least that’s the way I understood. It was very confusing you see.
But why lay it all out there and issue this deadline? Because Stern’s brilliant, that’s why. Read more…
The NBA and NBPA are set to meet Saturday but as Henry Abbott of TrueHoop writes, the union better be ready to deal or the NBA’s offer might just get worse: “Which is why some owners are agitating not just for the NBA to reconsider walking the offer down from 50 percent, but also reintroducing what the league calls a “flex cap,” which the union calls an over-my-dead-body “hard cap.” If the NBA’s next offer is anything like that, things will get incredibly ugly. In other words, while the league and the union are busily not making a deal, they could be busy destroying one.”
On a trading card, at least. Panini American, who does not make sandwiches, believe it or not, is an Italian card company that purchased Donruss a few years ago.
The NBA’s got an exclusive deal with them for trading cards, so the company decided to take advantage of the buzz around KD’s flag football performance in Stillwater. The Redskins need a quarterback — I mean, John Beck and Rex Grossman? — and we all saw KD toss four touchdown passes and run for another two. So why not?
Another question: How much would a KD Redskins card go for? Via Panini’s website:
And just to take our little project one more logical step, we asked Beckett Media Senior Market Analyst Rob Springs to speculate on the secondary-market value such Durant cards might have. His estimate: Between $150 and $200.
Site news: You may have noticed but I’m trying a new commenting system out. It’s not all that crazy, but it has one excellent feature: real-time commenting. Meaning no more refreshing to see if someone responded to you about how Eric Maynor should start. You don’t have to re-register or anything, but you can register a LiveFyre account to sync your Facebook profile or Twitter to it. Any feedback is great.
OKC dropped to 0-2 with a 95-93 loss in Phoenix, pretend computer says: “The Thunder fell to 0-2 with another tough loss on the road in yet another nail-biter on an evening jam-packed with them. Vince Carter, who was not bought out of his contract in our magical universe, scored with 2:19 to play to bring the Suns within 93-92. Then no one scored for 1:32. In fact, Oklahoma City didn’t score after the 2:41 mark. Finally, Carter hit a three with 47 seconds to play, putting Phoenix up by two. Russell Westbrook missed for Oklahoma City. Phoenix got the ball back and ran down the clock until Channing Frye was hit with an offensive foul with 11 seconds remaining. With one final chance, all the Thunder could muster was a desperation shot by Serge Ibaka at the buzzer. After going 8-of-27 in the opener, Westbrook shot 5-of-15 from the floor. Carter led Phoenix with 19 points and hit four three-pointers. In reality, there is no way Carter will play for the Suns this season–whenever it begins–but on Wednesday, fans of the virtual Suns were glad he was still around.” Read more…
The NBA started a Twitter account recently — @NBA_Labor — in an effort to combat what they deem as misinformation about the current labor negotiations. The account only has tweeted four times — once to Henry Abbott of TrueHoop, once to Nate Jones (who is KD’s social media guru), once to The Sporting News and once to Nazr Mohammed and Charlie Villanueva.
Mohammed, who has been a very strong and opinionated voice for the players during this labor issue, didn’t really like what he called “harassment” coming at him from the league over this.
So what happened? Basically, the NBA Labor feed was trying to correct something Charlie Villanueva tweeted about the lockout (something about the real BRI being 46 or 47 percent after expenses), but included Mohammed in it and then the NBA’s account, which has some three million followers, retweeted it. For what reason? I don’t know. But as Tom Ziller said, that proved to be a mistake.
Don’t mess with Nazr. In the paint, or on Twitter.
Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports set fire to labor talks: “This union is threatening to implode, the push and pull of people wanting to cut a deal and those willing to keep warring over the final percentage points. Within the NBPA, the frustration with Hunter is this: Hunter knows where the deal will be made, but he’s engaged in a smear campaign to frame Fisher as a sellout to the league. For Hunter, the end game is simple: Divide and conquer, and ultimately try keep his own job beyond this labor agreement. This is a lousy deal for the players, and Hunter wants the blame everywhere else. Yes, this has created doubts about Fisher, but it’s hurt Hunter far more. Once, he had the stars on his side, and that’s rapidly dissipating.”
Ken Berger of CBSSports.com: “Sadly, a person close to Hunter said Tuesday the union chief remains “pretty dug in,” and it’s clear who’s giving the marching orders not to go a penny below 52 percent. Look no further than the infamous letter that seven high-powered agents sent to their clients on Oct. 3, strongly urging the players not to make any further concessions beyond 52 percent of BRI.” Read more…
No deal. But talks resume at 11 a.m. CT today. David Stern said the clock has been stopped in terms of his ultimatum deal, but if negotiations fall apart today, that offer will resurface. As long as they’re talking, there’s always a chance. And not to get crazy with speculation, but last night at 1 a.m. with all the stuff going on at Penn State, it wasn’t exactly the ideal time to make an agreement announcement, if you know what I mean.
