Is this the storm before the calm?

Tom Bombadillo · Nov 16, 2011

The NBA goes into the last dangerous stage: Is this the storm before the calm?
Posted by Tim Kawakami

This was David Boies Day for the NBA labor tussle. The super-lawyer popped up on the players’ side yesterday–today, he was the voice of the anti-trust lawsuits filed in the Bay Area and Minnesota. But he also sounded like all negotiation talks, if there are any, now funnel through Boies on the players’ side, and maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Billy Hunter and Derek Fisher sure weren’t getting it done. And David Stern was running such a win streak that it was hard for the owners to cut a deal when they were getting zero resistance from the union/trade association leadership.

My view on Boies is that, in such a late and dramatic situation, he’s like the way playwrights view the unveiling of a knife on stage: If you show the knife, the knife must be used. That’s the role of the knife. And for Boies in this situation. There’s going to be some kind of counter-flow to the Boies interjection, we just don’t know it yet. He could change everything. He could make it all worse. He could get the initiator of a deal. That’s what Act III is all about, and it’s starting now. (Interestingly, there was a surprisingly bloodless reaction from the NBA tonight.)

This would be a good time for everybody involved in the NBA labor struggle to retreat to their respective corners and think about what they’ve just done. Take a few deep breaths. Let the adrenaline wear off. This would be a good time for the owners and players to lower the legal and rhetorical weaponry, just a bit, and fully absorb the consequences of their next fateful actions. The last 48 hours was the fevered build up. The flexing. The figurative parade of tanks. What the NBA—and its remaining fans–needs now is the last parlay, before the massive, irreversible stupidity.

The truth is, with only a few weeks left on the clock to save the season, both sides have used up almost every bargaining device and bit of their margins for error. Sitting here in mid-November, there’s no place else to go except to make a deal… or blow up this season (and maybe future seasons). The harsher truth is that the owners have won almost every concession from the players that they could have hoped for, and still are pushing for more.

The most dangerous truth is that there is a deal to be made, but the now-“disclaimed” union has been too weak to make it and the owners have been too arrogant to propose it.
There really isn’t that much difference between what the owners are offering and what the players almost certainly would settle for. What has it come down to? After caving on nearly every other issue, the players want more flexibility for the highest-payroll teams to sign free agents; the owners say no.

That’s about it. Ever since the players accepted dropping their cut of revenue from 57 percent in the old deal to the 50 percent the owners proposed, the deal has been there.
The players have lost, because they need a season, need the paychecks and have made hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions to prove it. The hard-line owners have won, because they proved they could force commissioner David Stern to threaten the loss of a season, and the players would move to try to prevent that. But there’s so much bombast in the air, and the players are guilty of it, too. They probably should have taken the last deal—the last impediment was pride.

Why should they have to give up everything?

Of course the owners can answer back: If a near-perfect system for small and mid-market owners is possible, why shouldn’t the players be pushed to accept 100 percent of it? The last two days have been a cacophony, one of the worst two-side public meltdowns in recent sports-labor history. On Monday, the union rejected the NBA owners’ supposed last offer and “disclaimed” itself as the players’ bargaining unit, to set up for anti-trust suits against the league. On Tuesday, the players filed multiple lawsuits against the league in federal district court, including one right here in the Bay Area. How nice to be included in all this mess!

You get the sense that union (now “trade association”) head Billy Hunter has had super-lawyer David Boies stashed in the background this whole time, just in case. You understand that there is no other way for the “trade association”—they moved Boies out front to challenge Stern and the owners to deal with this in court, or to start negotiations again.
With the union “disclaimed,” all talks will have to go through Boies; but it’s probably OK to assume that Boies has been on the fringes of the negotiations all along.

It’s the hard-line owners vs. the lawyer who was the U.S. government’s ace when it went after Bill Gates, who defended George Steinbrenner and who was on the NFL’s side in that league’s recent labor strife. Repeat: There is no remaining strategic move after this one. Either the lawsuits prompt the owners into slight concessions, or it provokes them into shutting it all down.

Well, there is a third possibility: The rank-and-file players could hold out for a few weeks, but then surrender and order Hunter (or Boies) to accept whatever deal that’s left on the table.

But it’s risky for the Stern and the owners to bet on that–with Boies staring them down.

It depends on the next move by the owners. Do they want a season or not? It depends on them. Everything does.
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http://blogs.mercurynews.com/kawaka...dangerous-stage-is-the-storm-before-the-calm/

Nice to see the players get some leverage. Boies is a complete monster, not sure If the NBA wants to mess with that when a deal is so close.

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