NEW YORK (AP) — As NBA players and
owners wait to see who will blink first, fans are stuck staring at a blank
calendar.
NBA Commissioner David Stern canceled
the rest of the November games Friday, saying there will not be a full NBA
season "under any circumstances."
The move came about after labor
negotiations broke down again when both sides refused to budge on how to split
the league's revenues, the same issue that derailed talks last week.
Now, a full month of NBA games have
been canceled, and Stern said there's no way of getting them back.
"We held out that joint hope
together, but in light of the breakdown of talks, there will not be a full NBA
season under any circumstances," he said.
"It's not practical, possible or
prudent to have a full season now," added Stern, who previously canceled
the first two weeks of the season.
And he repeated his warnings that the
proposals might now get even harsher as the league tries to make up the
hundreds of millions of dollars that will be lost as the lockout drags on.
"We're going to have to
recalculate how bad the damage is," Stern said. "The next offer will
reflect the extraordinary losses that are piling up now."
Just a day earlier, Stern had said he
would consider it a failure if the sides didn't reach a deal in the next few
days and vowed they would take "one heck of a shot" to get it done.
Instead, negotiations broke off again
over the division of basketball-related income, just as they did last Thursday.
Union executive director Billy Hunter said the league again insisted it had to
be split 50-50, while Stern said Hunter just walked out and left rather than
discuss going below 52 percent.
Owners are insistent on a 50-50
split, while players last formally proposed they get 52.5 percent, leaving them
about $100 million apart annually. Players were guaranteed 57 percent in the
previous collective bargaining agreement.
"Derek (Fisher) and I made it
clear that we could not take the 50-50 deal to our membership. Not with all the
concessions that we granted," Hunter said. "We said we got to have
some dollars."
Instead, they'll now be out roughly
$350 million, the losses Hunter previously projected for each month the players
were locked out. He believed a full season could be played if a deal were made
this weekend, but Stern emphatically ruled out any hope of that now.
"These are not punitive
announcements; these are calendar generated announcements," Stern said.
No further talks have been scheduled.
There was a sense of optimism
entering the day after progress was made on salary cap issues during about 24
hours of talks over the previous two days. Then the sides brought the revenue
split back into the discussion Friday and promptly got stuck on both issues.
Stern said the NBA owners were
"willing" to go to 50 percent. But he said Hunter was unwilling to
"go a penny below 52," that he had been getting many calls from
agents and then closed up his book and walked out of the room.
Hunter said the league initially
moved its target down to 47 percent during Friday's six-hour session, then
returned to its previous proposal of 50 percent of revenues.
"We made a lot of concessions,
but unfortunately at this time it's not enough, and we're not prepared or
unable at this time to move any further," Hunter said.
Union president Fisher said it was
difficult to say why talks broke down, or when they would start up again.
"We're here, we've always been
here, but today just wasn't the day to try and finish this out," he said.
There was some good news.
Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver said
there was essentially a "tentative agreement" on most system issues,
with Stern rattling off some of them: Owners agreed to keep the midlevel
exception starting at $5 million a year; and contract lengths would be five
years for players staying with their teams and four when leaving for another.
"And then we hit a wall,"
Stern said.
The small groups that were meeting
the previous two days grew a bit Friday. Union vice presidents Chris Paul —
wearing a Yankees cap for his trip to New York — and Theo Ratliff joined the
talks, and economist Kevin Murphy returned after he was unavailable Thursday.
Mavericks owner Mark Cuban stayed for the session after taking part Thursday.
Fisher said there were still too many
restrictions in the owners' proposal. Players want to keep a system similar to
the old one, and fear owners' ideas would limit player movement and the choices
available to them in free agency.
And though they might be inclined to
give up one if they received more concessions on the other, players make it
sound as if they are the ones doing all the giving back.
The old cap system allowed teams to
exceed it through the use of a number of exceptions, many of which the league
wants to tweak or even eliminate. Hunter has called a hard cap a "blood
issue" to players, and though the league has backed off its initial
proposal calling for one, players think the changes owners want would work like
one.
"We've told them that we don't
want a hard cap. We don't want a hard cap any kind of way, either an obvious
hard cap or a hard cap that may not be as obvious to most people but we know it
works like a hard cap," Hunter said. "And so you get there, and then
all of a sudden they say, 'Well, we also have to have our number.' And you say,
'Well wait a minute, you're not negotiating in good faith.'"
But if players think what's being
proposed is a hard cap, here's another warning: Silver won't rule out the
league seeking one again.
"Our response is then let's have
a hard cap, which is what we wanted," he said.
"We don't think it's a hard cap.
... We've all been wasting our time if they believe this is a hard cap. We've
been spending literally hundreds of hours negotiating the specifics of a
system, where they're now saying is the equivalent of a hard cap. We've been
clear from the beginning from a league standpoint we would prefer a hard
cap."
When players offered to reduce their
guarantee from 57 percent to 53 percent, Hunter said that would have
transferred about $1.1 billion to owners over six years. Now, at 52.5, he said
that would grow to more than $1.5 billion.
But even a 50-50 split would be too
high for some hardline owners, because it would reduce only $280 million of the
$300 million they said they lost last season. Owners initially proposed a BRI
split that players said would have had them around 40 percent.
Though they will miss a paycheck on
Nov. 15, Hunter said each player would have received a minimum of $100,000 from
the escrow money that was returned to them to make up the difference after
salaries fell short of the guaranteed 57 percent of revenues last season.
The real losses, though, could be
felt by arena staff and other people who work in fields connected to the game.
Stern apologized to them in making the announcement.
But Jeff Lee, a 37-year-old cafe
owner and Warriors season-ticketholder in the East Bay, said he isn't
discouraged about Friday's setback.
"I'm pretty certain that the
season's going to start sooner or later," Lee said. "I know when the
season starts it's going to be well worth the wait."
AP Sports Writer Janie McCauley in
Oakland, Calif. contributed to this report.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
