Last month, NBA commissioner David Stern and Billy Hunter, the Executive Director of the NBA Players Association, as well as players representative Derek Fisher, agreed to have three meetings in August to negotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, thus ending the lockout and preserving the 2011-12 season. That’s it – three meetings. Out of one entire month, with the season scheduled to start in 4 months. The first took place on August 1, and according to Stern, one of those meetings was supposed to take place on Wednesday. Guess what happened.
Stern claims that the players union canceled the meeting, while they, of course, disagree.
“The NBA refused to have a staff meeting [Thursday],” a union official said. “Billy Hunter has been with the [National Labor Relations Board] the entire week, including Thursday, and the NBPA was told that Stern would be completely unavailable to meet for the next two weeks.” (Yahoo! Sports)
That’s right – David Stern is on vacation. That’s why we could only have 3 meetings this month, because the commish – who is either the highest or lowest paid among the major professional sports leagues – needs some time off. And now we have to wonder, with the Wednesday meeting “canceled” and the league’s refusal to reschedule that meeting to yesterday, does that mean there is only one negotiating meeting left this month? Stern doesn’t seem to care, really.
According to the Boston Globe, despite being pissy and taking shots at the players after their August 1 meeting, Stern believes that they’re going to cave soon. They just have to.
“I would say that we have very smart players who recognize that this system is very good to them,” he said. “You’ve got 13 players on a roster averaging $5 million apiece, that’s $65 million and what the owners have said is, ’we’re going to try very hard as we reset this thing to keep you as close to that number as we can.’
“The NFL, which is usually profitable as opposed to the NBA, which isn’t, got the double-digit [revenue] reductions from their players. Our players will understand that when the rhetoric stops and they will understand that the owners are trying to do the right thing and our players always try to do the right thing.”
Hey, does anyone remember back in the beginning of the year when Stern was raving about how well the NBA was doing? And now he’s openly admitting that his league is in the crapper, with 22 teams reporting losses, bowing before the NFL gods. At some point someone should figure out why the NBA is in such bad shape. Maybe Stern can tackle that when he gets back from vacation.
