Lockout Talks Resume at 12ET Today

[Chi-Town Brahma]

NBA Players, Owners continue talks at noon ET Today
Nearly 19 hours past "ultimatum deadline" meetings to continue
By: Marc Stein, ESPN.com​

The NBA and the NBA Players Association negotiated Wednesday for eight hours past the league's stated 5 p.m. ET deadline for a deal and made sufficient-enough progress to schedule another round of talks for Thursday.

Officials on both sides spoke modestly about what was achieved during a session that lasted 12 hours in total and cautioned against getting swept up in the latest wave of optimism around the league that a deal to finally end this 133-day lockout is near.

"There was enough give and take on both sides to merit us both coming back tomorrow," union executive director Billy Hunter said late Wednesday.

The union was hoping for more after Hunter and union president Derek Fisher, for the first time since the lockout began, were authorized Tuesday by player reps from 29 of the league's 30 teams to accept a 50/50 split in annual Basketball Related Income if they could secure concessions from the league on the five or so remaining "system" issues that have kept the sides from striking a deal.

NBA.com reported that an unspecified amount of progress was made on three of those system issues, but that the parties continue to struggle to find compromise on the parameters of a workable mid-level exception and face "a couple of new issues added to [the] mix." The various restrictions and penalties that owners continue to insist on to regulate teams that stray into luxury-tax territory, sources say, are where the sides continue to snag.

Another major hurdle, sources say, is the knowledge shared by both Hunter and NBA commissioner David Stern that the votes to approve any deal they agree to are likely to be closer than ever before in past labor battles, given the rival factions that have formed within both groups during the four-month work stoppage.

"We can't say that there was significant progress made today," Fisher said.

Said Stern: "Nothing was worked out today. ... We're not failing and we're not succeeding. We're just there."

Wednesday's triumph for the union, then, was keeping the talks going well enough to convince Stern to abandon the ultimatum he issued to the players Sunday, which called for the league to immediately revert to a far more restrictive proposal than the deal presented by the league Saturday if there was no accord by Wednesday at 5 p.m.

Stern said the league will revert to the lesser offer, which affords the players just a 47-percent annual share of BRI as well as a hard salary cap and rollbacks of existing contracts, at the end of the current session.

"Whether it ends today or tomorrow," Stern said.

The fact that the sides continued to trade proposals behind closed doors well past the deadline Stern issued Sunday prompted players, team executives and agents all over the NBA -- as seen on more than one occasion last month -- to think that a tentative agreement was near.

Stern and Fisher, however, have assured their constituents that the league will relax some of the proposed restrictions against tax teams, such as its determination to forbid taxpayers from participating in sign-and-trade deals and having access to the full mid-level exception. So they're under pressure to deliver and secure a few concessions with the union dropping to a 50/50 split after players earned 57 percent of BRI in the final year of the previous labor deal.

Stern, meanwhile, has to contend with a group of small-market owners -- led by Charlotte's Michael Jordan -- that doesn't even want to offer 50/50. ESPN.com reported Tuesday that player reps were informed during Tuesday's union meeting in New York that the league currently expects just 17 teams (including the league-owned New Orleans Hornets) to approve the deal as constituted, with 13 teams opposing. It takes only a simple majority (16 teams to 14) to approve a new labor deal, but Stern has maintained all summer that he prefers a stronger majority than that to seal the deal.

Said Hunter: "There are so many issues that haven't been resolved."

Should talks collapse again this week, sources say that players and agents at the forefront of a drive to dissolve the union through decertification will be ready to move forward with plans to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board calling for a decertification vote.

Hunter himself acknowledged in a Tuesday night interview with NBA TV that a fast-moving decertification push-- fronted most notably Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce -- has "close to" 200 players in the process of signing a petition that would trigger a decertification vote. The movement, sources said, has grown to include more than the original seven agents (Mark Bartelstein, Bill Duffy, Dan Fegan, Leon Rose, Jeff Schwartz, Arn Tellem and Henry Thomas) who have been advocating decertification for months.

"I think you'd be surprised how big it's gotten," said one source, who added that "the wheels are in motion" and that signatures are already "coming in pretty quickly."

Decertification is a two-step process that requires 30 percent of the league's workforce -- an estimated 130 players -- to sign the petition calling for a vote. That petition is then forwarded to the NLRB, which would take up to 45 days to ratify the petition and arrange the vote, during which the union and league could continue to negotiate.

Decertification backers believe that the fear of the unknown once the process gets that far, with the labor fight potentially moving into courtrooms and almost certainly dragging out this impasse, would finally move NBA owners off the extreme hard-line negotiating stance they've maintained throughout the four-month lockout and lead to a more palatable offer during that 45-day window. Sources on the ownership side, however, have scoffed at the threat of decertification and likewise believe that the pre-emptive federal lawsuit filed by the NBA during the summer could potentially take the sting out of any potential decertification, although that remains a matter of some debate among legal analysts.

ESPN.com reported Tuesday that the union did not conduct a formal vote of the players assembled in the room, opting instead for an informal "everyone agrees" consensus that authorized Hunter and Fisher to accept a 50/50 BRI split as long as the league makes some concessions on some of the remaining system issues. But sources briefed on the owners' thinking insisted Wednesday that Stern only has the latitude to make minor tweaks of "B-list" issues that would likely change the overall scope of the deal marginally.

The offer Stern made Sunday attached to Wednesday's 5 p.m. deadline called for players to receive between 49 percent and 51 percent of annual BRI. Union officials contend that it would be nearly impossible for the league to generate sufficient revenue in any given season for the players to earn more than 50.2 percent, but Hunter and Fisher now have the go-ahead for the first time all summer to go that low on BRI if the owners will agree to relax some of those limits they want to impose on teams that stray into luxury-tax territory, which the union is fighting because it believes they will severely restrict player movement.

The negotiating teams in Wednesday's marathon session, which began at 1 p.m. in Manhattan and ended at 1 a.m. ET Thursday, were small by design on both sides. Stern was joined on the league's bargaining team by deputy commissioner Adam Silver, San Antonio's Peter Holt representing the owners and lawyers Rich Buchanan and Dan Rube; Hunter and Fisher were joined by Fisher's fellow board members Maurice Evans and Roger Mason, NBPA lawyer Ron Klempner, outside counsel Jeffrey Kessler and outside economist Kevin Murphy. Kessler joined Wednesday's talks only after issuing a public apology in the wake of an interview Kessler granted late Monday to The Washington Post, in which he said that NBA owners treat players like "plantation workers."

"The comments I made in The Washington Post took place in an interview late Monday night after a very long day," Kessler said in a statement. "Looking back, the words I used were inappropriate. I did not intend to offend. I was merely passionately advocating for the players.

"I intend to call commissioner Stern and offer my apologies for the remarks. It's very important that there be no distractions now and that the parties try to make a deal to save the season."

Union officials were privately furious with Kessler's comments, which prompted Stern to describe the veteran negotiator's conduct in sessions with the NBA as "routinely despicable."

Thoughts?

 

[Chi-Town Brahma]

NBA MOVES CLOSER TO DEAL
By: Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports
3:31am ET​

NEW YORK – After several days of NBA ultimatums and threats, owners and players made significant progress toward a collective bargaining agreement that would end the lockout, league sources told Yahoo! Sports.

With the Players Association agreeable to a 50-50 split of revenue, the sides also made progress on three of the five system issues that union officials said needed to be resolved to complete a deal, sources said. The players are determined to keep system issues which allow them freedom to move to luxury-tax teams, among other issues involving the tax and escrow systems.

After more than 12 hours of negotiations, the two sides broke early Thursday morning and will resume talks at noon ET.

“We can get there in the next day or two,” one high-ranking league official briefed on the talks said. “But it’s still a volatile process, and egos can still get in the way. …But there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful.”

NBA commissioner David Stern had vowed to “reset” the owners’ proposal to a worse offer if a deal wasn’t reached by 5 p.m. ET Wednesday, but the deadline passed early in the negotiating session without action.

“The clock is stopped,” Stern said after the talks ended at 1 a.m. ET Thursday. “And we’re trying to see if there’s a reason why we can get something to go back to our respective sides with.”

Stern has some ability to negotiate through the deal points of the system issues, but he also has a group of owners largely split over how much they need to cede to the players on system issues. The owners have watched the union give back in unprecedented ways, and there’s a significant faction that thinks Stern can get a deal done without yielding much more to the players.

If the talks break down in the next 24-48 hours, agents are prepared to move rapidly toward decertification of the union or a variation of it, disclaimer of interest.

After player team representatives strongly pushed union executive director Billy Hunter and president Derek Fisher at a Tuesday meeting about securing favorable agreements on the several system issues, the union’s leadership will still likely have to sell the rank-and-file on a largely scaled-back model of the players’ wish list if they want to get a deal done by the end of the week.

So many of the system issues are linked, making it a high-wire act of give-and-take to get them ironed out.

Players Association and league officials arranged the negotiating session one day after the union’s player team representatives reiterated they would reject the owners’ latest offer. The player representatives who attended Tuesday’s meeting in New York were largely taken aback by the details of the proposal the owners wanted them to accept, agents who debriefed the players later said.

“It was much worse than I think most of them were led to believe – whether they were misinformed or whatever the case – but the discussion some were going to have about possibly taking that final offer left the room fast,” one agent said.

Stern was given the authority to make minor system alterations to the owners’ offer, ownership sources told Yahoo! Sports. Nevertheless, several hardline owners would prefer the NBA to submit the threatened proposal that gives them a 53 percent share of the revenue, a hard salary cap and rollbacks on current NBA contracts.

As one ownership source said: “There’s not enough of [the hardline owners]. Most are not thrilled with the current deal but would take it. But as time goes on and more losses pile up, a majority will need more than the 50-50 deal.”

“We’re going to meet again [Thursday] to give our best effort,” Fisher said, “but we don’t know if it will be enough.”

Here is a Yahoo article also for anyone interested.