On one side, you have a group of renegade players threatening decertification of the union ? threatening to blow up any chance of this season if the owners don?t give in. The owners don?t want to lose a full season and they feared decertification enough to file a pre-emptive lawsuit to block it.
On the other side are some owners telling David Stern he didn?t have the right to offer a 50/50 deal and that that BRI split number should be walked back. Those owners would like to throw the ?flex cap? idea back on the table, a suggestion the union called a ?hard cap? said it would never accept.
Both of those sides get their stories leaked into media reports so that the other side can be sure to hear it.
What all that means is the hardliners on both sides (however you choose to define them) are trying to keep their leaders from doing the logical thing on Saturday when labor talks restart ? compromising, meeting in the middle and getting on with the season.
And so long as those hardliners are the ones making the decisions, there will be no end to the lockout. There will be no NBA games.
The threat of decertification is the last, best card the players have to play. To in essence do away with the union and sue the league on anti-trust grounds is a powerful card and about the only thing the players can do the owners might fear because the courts are unpredictable and if the union wins the damages would be stiff.
The players should have done it ? in July. Like the NFL players union, it should have decertified the second the lockout was imposed. At the time the union thought that could slow negotiations, but the reality is the two sides didn?t really start negotiating until September anyway.
But right now the threat is muted, unless there are a majority of players who would be willing to blow up the entire season. I?m not really sure here are. My guess is if you put to a vote of the full 400 plus NBA players either decertification or taking the owners 50/50 offer, the players would cave. By a wide margin.
The owners have not been bargaining in good faith throughout this process. They have had the leverage and used it to radically overhaul the system.
But in doing so they have given the players little, and that?s why we are still here. Derek Fisher and Billy Hunter need a path out of this, something they can sell to their constituents that is not a total defeat. They need the owners to give a little to make this end and the owners ? and particularly David Stern ? have not. The owners are up 40 points with the clock winding down and will not call off the full-court-press.
Stern and Hunter could get a deal done Saturday, a deal both sides could live with. A deal that would mean games before Christmas. It?s right there for the taking.
If their hardliners will back off and let them.
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