NBA lockout threatens entire season

The final word of the first hours of the lockout belonged to the great manipulator of the basketball masses. Once again, David Stern beat Billy Hunter on the way out the door Thursday. In his manufactured, grim disposition, the NBA’s commissioner proclaimed the union had made an 11th-hour counter proposal that would call for the average salary to rise $2 million over the length of the agreement.

It was a contorting of the numbers, but details don’t matter in this dispute. The public’s never going to side with the players, and that’s been as constant a fact of a quarter-century on the job as the emperor’s temper and his belief that the commissioner’s chair brings the privileges of a dictatorship.

This time, the owners have delivered Stern an unmistakable marching order: Break these players; crush them once and for all.

The union walked into the meeting with Stern on Thursday at the Berkshire Omni Hotel on the Manhattan’s eastside, and offered $600 million in givebacks over a six-year deal, a league source told Yahoo! Sports. And yet before Stern left the hotel, he had called a news conference and turned those concessions into a money grab from the players. Hunter had left the building, and left behind his chance to spin the story.

So the NBA leveled the lockout at midnight on Thursday, and there’s a real chance the NBA is gone for a full year now. This has the makings of the NHL’s labor war of 2004-05, where the cost of instituting a hard salary cap cost the sport a complete season. The union elders don’t want to give into that, nor do the agents who could be rendered far less relevant in an NBA world where there’s no middle class of players. Stars will get paid, and everyone else will fight for the scraps left under a hard cap.

“The key for this comes from, say, Sept. 1 to Sept. 15,” says a source involved in the talks. “The owners have always been willing to blow off July and August, but once they cancel the first part of the season, that’s when we find out if they have the stomach to go the distance.”

For now, Hunter has the support of the players, but the agents could eventually erode it. Mostly, the agents don’t see a way out here. They don’t see a chance for Hunter to negotiate them out of harm’s way. “I honestly have no idea what our strategy is here,” one prominent agent said this week. “Do we have one?”
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Butler’s Nored is driven by defense

Ronald Nored is Butler’s Iron Man, a defensive specialist whose play might not draw headlines, but has sparked the school’s students to pay tribute to him in an innovative fashion.

Nored had surgery after last season’s national championship game loss to Duke to repair stress fractures in both knees. He had metal rods implanted in his legs. The procedure was a success, helping stabilize the knees, though he still deals with pain.

Those crazy kids in Indianapolis thought it would be cool to create a robot, the Ron 5, to honor their bionic, lockdown leader. The gimmick, started midway through this season, is gaining steam. There’s even a Ron 5 Robot Twitter account with 635 followers.

“The robot’s funny,” Nored said Sunday as reporters swarmed his locker. “I follow it. But to be clear, it’s not me.”

The real thing is much better.

Nored’s unique, mechanical defensive stance was the mother of invention. Now it’s up to him, coach Brad Stevens and his teammates to devise a strategy that will limit the effectiveness of Connecticut scoring sensation Kemba Walker in Monday night’s national championship game at Reliant Stadium.

“In the next few hours I’m going to break down [Walker’s] tendencies, maybe look at stats of ways that he’s not as good at going,” Nored said. “I’m going to do my best to try and force him that way and relay that to everyone else.

“He’s been to a Final Four before. He’s played on all the big stages and made all the big shots you could ever want to make. He’s going to be pretty tough.”

Nored certainly won’t be called upon alone to stop Walker, who is averaging 25 points in tournament play. But the 6-foot junior guard’s effort could be a key in deciding whether the Bulldogs become the first team from a non-power conference to win the national title since the 1990 UNLV Runnin’ Rebels and the highest-seeded team, a No. 8, to claim the crown since Villanova won as a No. 8 seed in 1985.

Effort is not something Stevens worries about when it comes to Nored.

“He’s an outstanding defender,” the coach said. “He really cares about it. Everybody in basketball growing up, and as they got to be good players, creates an identity. His identity is as a defender. Those guys are pretty rare.”
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