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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