NEW YORK?So that?s it?the negotiations on a new collective-bargaining agreement that could end the NBA lockout can now be best summed up as a ticking time bomb, set to detonate on Wednesday.
That, at least, is how the league and representatives of its union portrayed the situation early Sunday morning.
In an effort to resuscitate the league?s five-month-old labor impasse, representatives from the NBA players association and the owners met for almost nine hours here starting on Saturday, under the eye of federal mediator George Cohen.
And though Cohen made attempts to bridge the gaps between the two sides with compromises, by the end of the night, the talks had devolved into a personal head-butting session?commissioner David Stern, it seems, has found himself a hard-headed foe in union lawyer Jeffrey Kessler.
Stern calmly outlined six areas of compromise suggested by Cohen, saying the league would co-opt five of them?including a 49-51 percent ?band? of basketball-related income, and deals on luxury-tax related issues?and present them to the union as a formal proposal.
But Stern then said that the union would have until Wednesday to accept the offer, and if it did not, the league would revert to an earlier and much less palatable CBA that would feature 47 percent of BRI going to the players, with a ?flex? salary cap that the union has already dismissed as being, essentially, a hard cap.
Stern said he was confident that, after holding an earlier meeting among his owners?who are said to be fractured?he felt he could get such a deal passed, along with a new revenue sharing agreement.
?We had, in the language of diplomacy, a frank and open dialogue in the owners? meeting,? Stern said. ?When you have 30 people, you get different points of view, but they were, I believe, very supportive of the committee and its efforts to bring back a deal that would be presented at the same time as a revenue sharing proposal.?
Stern said it was Kessler who turned down the deal. That got Kessler?s dander up about the true nature of the league?s offer.
?We would never get to 51 percent, in our wildest, most unimaginable, favorable projections. And we might squeeze out 50.2. OK? The proposal that this is a robust deal at 51 is a fraud. They came in here with a pre-arranged plan to try to strong-arm the players. They knew today, they were going to stick to 50, essentially, 50.2, they were going to make no movement on the system and then they were going to say, ?My way or the 47 percent highway.? OK??
Now, of course, the options on both sides become very limited?in the short term, at least.
This process has become a game of chicken, and the owners are hoping they can make the union blink by setting a Wednesday deadline, with the promise of a worse deal to come.
The players, though, are hoping that the threat of decertification of the union will be enough to get the league to budge off its position. Already, dozens of players have been on a conference call with an antitrust lawyer to learn about what decertification will mean. Union president Derek Fisher said that decertification would be an option, and already, agents around the league have planted the decertification seed in the minds of players.
In the end, it?s as real a possibility as ever that the season will be lost.
That doesn?t necessarily mean that everything will explode on Wednesday, even if the union turns down the league?s offer and goes ahead with the initial steps in the process of decertification.
Both Stern and Fisher said there would be no further discussions on the issues at hand, with Stern implying that the next offer would be a, ?take-it-or-take-something-much-worse? situation. But we?ve seen these post-meeting tough stances soften repeatedly throughout this process.
The fact is, though the rhetoric is tough, the sides have almost come together on BRI. Kessler himself said the league?s offer on BRI was 50.2-49.8, and also said that the union was offering a 51-49 split, with one percent going to retired players. We?re getting pretty close on that front.
What is hanging up the process is how teams that are over the luxury tax threshold are treated.
The league?and Stern said that Cohen floated this as a ?what-if? concept?wants to have taxpayers taken out of the market for sign-and-trades, wants to reduce taxpayers to a, ?mini? mid-level exception (worth two years starting $2.5 million total, as opposed to four years at $5 million) and wants to penalize heavily ?repeat? taxpayer teams, those who are in the tax threshold three out of five years.
The union had a problem with all of those issues, fearing that the league would essentially take the biggest spending teams out of the market for free agents each summer.
The sides are butting heads on those issues, especially Kessler and Stern. The rhetoric is getting thicker. BRI isn?t the biggest concern here, and neither are the bulk of other system issues.
The treatment of taxpayers is the big holdup, and the two sides must now decide just how far they?ll go to fight for their viewpoint. Stern has laid out a deadline. The clock, certainly, is ticking.
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