NBA.com's Article on Labor talks shaken out of doldrums by players' presence

Here is the NBA.com's Article on Labor talks shaken out of doldrums by players' presence:

Labor talks shaken out of doldrums by players' presence

In San Antonio, when coach Gregg Popovich would be purple with rage during a practice or a film session, they called it "going Serbian." It was part real and part theatre, designed to wake the Spurs out of whatever doldrums they were going through. Pop didn't do it every week or every month; when you're a coach, you can only pull such things a few times a season. But he made his point and his players understood it was time to pick things up.

That's why it was important for the NBA's star players to show up for Friday's negotiating session in New York with the owners. No, they did not "scare" the owners, in a physical sense or otherwise. The deal is the same; the owners are going to get most of what they want from the union because they have the leverage and the players do not.

But Dwyane Wade's confrontation with David Stern last Friday, combined with the strength of LeBron James in the room with his fellow players and Paul Pierce challenging the owners' math, stirred the pot, rattled the cages and got everyone's attention. And it cleared the air and the stage for the last, best chance to avoid cancelling a signficant amount of regular season games. (The likelihood that at least some -- maybe 10, maybe 20 -- are going to go away is significant.)

Stern has always maintained that, if roles were switched, he could do Billy Hunter's job, and Hunter could do his job. They are not friends, but they have been across negotiating tables from one another for 13 years now, and they know what the other guy needs to make a deal. And that's what this comes down to now, giving the other guy something he can sell to his people.

Stern cannot sell the same soft cap that has been in place for a quarter-century; his owners have made it plain that they'll kill a season before going back to that system. Hunter can't sell a 46 percent player cut of Basketball Related Income; when he's already agreed to give back more than $160 million in salaries from current levels, giving the owners another $300 million or so is a non-starter.

The last chance has always been in the hands of Stern and Hunter, just as it was in 2005, when Stern went to the owners and raised hell at the 11th hour, getting the owners to take their "supertax" proposal -- these things never go away; they're just tabled until the next time -- off the table, and give Hunter the opening he needed to get his guys to swallow a 19-year-old age minimum for the Draft.

Hunter said then, "I guess the two of us needed to ratchet up the rhetoric and we decided it was time to back away from the abyss and decide if we could really do a deal."

Or, as Stern put it: "half of it went our way, half of it went their way, and the central economics really remain the same. We knew that that's what we had to get to. I think that the question about what happened in the last week, I think Russ (Granik, then deputy commissioner) at my press conference got the owners to thinking that maybe we were crazy enough to do it. Billy's press conference got the players thinking the same thing, and so we both got encouraged to sit down and try to avoid the Apocolypse that we were each describing."

There is another one of those on the horizon. The rest of the preseason will go poof, maybe as early as Tuesday, if there isn't a breakthrough in the next two days of negotiations. And nuking the start of the regular season isn't far behind; there just isn't any more time.

At minimum, a month is likely required from the time both sides shake hands across the conference table to the opening tipoff; a week to write and ratify the deal, a week for some form of free agency, a week of training camp and a week of preseason games. Maybe you could squeeze all that into three weeks. Maybe.

Where can Stern and Hunter reach one another? I've argued for months (to no avail, obviously) that a 50-50 split of BRI has to be the settling point between the two sides. That would represent almost $300 million in reduced spending for owners -- precisely the amount of money the league claims it lost this past season. Stern cannot ask Hunter to give more; it's a humongous bite of the apple, hard enough for the players to swallow.

Stern has already gotten the owners to capitulate on their desires to take away guaranteed contracts, and the owners' latest proposal, with its current version of the supertax, would nonetheless preserve a softer cap than the owners initially desired. Can Stern do more? Can he get the owners up to 50 percent on BRI? Is there any more money he can get from the Busses and Dolans of the league for revenue sharing, and can he get them to couple it to the CBA discussions? Can he preserve the existing cap exceptions in some form, or will the hawks who've been pushing him make it impossible?

That's why I asked Stern on Friday if, even if they weren't there yet, he could see what the framework of a deal would look like. He demurred, saying, "I leave that to the bloggers."

Heavy rocks, indeed, to push up the hill this late. But Stern and Hunter both have great incentive to hammer this out between themselves and their small groups -- deputy commissioner Adam Silver and Spurs owner Peter Holt on Stern's side, union president Derek Fisher and attorneys Jeffrey Kessler and Ron Klempner with Hunter's back. Otherwise, this thing could get pulled in a million different directions.

The Commish and deputy commish went out of their way the last few days to praise the star players for showing up Friday, and the cynic in me can't help but think they know the stars being in New York means that the stars aren't sitting somewhere with their agents, contemplating decertification.

James, for example, is represented by Leon Rose, one of the agents that is part of the pro-decertification group. Pierce is repped by Jeff Schwartz, another pro-decertification guy. If those influential players literally have Hunter and Derek Fisher's back, the chances of finding 230-plus other players that would vote to blow up the union decrease significantly. (And the stars may keep coming out: a source said Sunday night that Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett and Amar'e Stoudemire have been invited to New York for Tuesday's meeting, and that Wade, Ray Allen and Carmelo Anthony, who were among the players in attendance on Friday, have been asked to come back.)

But Hunter didn't shy from the elephant in the middle of the room. According to a source with knowledge of the discussions, Hunter put it point blank to James, Wade and the other stars in the room on Friday during a players-only session: Do you guys want to decertify? Let me know where you stand. And the players said no.

The decertifcation strategy, seemingly inevitable a couple of weeks ago, seems to have cooled a little. The major pro-decertification agents -- Arn Tellem, Bill Duffy, Schwartz, Rose, Mark Bartlestein -- still think that's a strategy worth pursuing. But there aren't that many other agents who seem sold on the idea.

Several high-profile agents contacted by NBA.com over the past two weeks have indicated opposition to the decertification strategy. Collectively, they represent more than 75 players -- not as many as the more than 180 that Tellem, Rose, Duffy, Bartlestein and Schwartz either represent directly or indirectly, but a significant slice nonetheless.

Among the concerns of these agents:

1) The effect of decertifying on the season.

Many believe if the union opts to decertify, the whole season will be lost.

"We could have a discussion about whether we should have done it in May. That would be an interesting discussion," said one agent -- who, like the others, would not speak for attribution. "But if we do it now, there's no season."

2) The motives of the pro-decertification agents.

There is suspicion among their brethren.

"That's for their gain, not for their players' gain," one agent said.

Asked another: "If we decertify, are they doing so to replace Billy, or are they doing it as a negotiating tactic, like the NFL? And if they're trying to replace Billy, who will they replace him with?"

3) The effect of decertification on the union's pending case with the National Labor Relations Board against the NBA.

The union has accused the league of not negotiating in good faith, just as the league has done in a lawsuit filed against the union in a New York court. If the NLRB were to agree with the players, it could end the lockout. The NBPA believes that case will be adjudicated within the next couple of weeks, and until then, it obviously cannot talk about decertifying; one of the main accusations against the union in the league's lawsuit is that the NBPA has "threatened" to decertify on numerous occasions.

"The NLRB is a tactic," another agent said. "But it also says, 'We exhausted all possibilities to get a deal done.' "

The pro-decertification agents, though, have to get only 30 percent of the league's players to sign a petition asking for an "involuntary" decertification vote, and they represent more than 30 percent of the NBA's players. If they can bring their guys in, they can ultimately force a vote, and then they'd need 50 percent plus one. Yet for all of the supposed threats over the years, the NBPA has never actually decertified. It is still virgin territory.

But decertification sits out there, just outside the union's territorial waters, its backers still circling, waiting for the moment. If Stern and Hunter don't want to face a second front on which they'll have to fight, putting their futures in the hands of judges they don't know and appelate courts they can't trust, they better end the war. Now.