In case you were out living a life of leisure, here's what you missed in sports on Tuesday.
Well, that was fun. After nearly 150 days of lawsuits, mediations, intramural flag football games with Kevin Durant, exhibition basketball games in Rucker Park with Kevin Durant, exhibition basketball games in Oklahoma City with Kevin Durant, and late-night settlement talks without Kevin Durant, we finally got a deal that will end the NBA lockout and get the season started on Christmas Day. Yes, the lockout cost us 240 regular season games, but we all knew it could have been much worse.
With the worst behind us, let’s talk a little bit about what happened, why it happened, and what it means.
“People get to keep their jobs — that’s all I was concerned about,” Don Young said on Saturday morning, standing a few feet away from a small, illuminated case that held one of Pete Maravich’s socks. Don’s a design engineer for Cablevision in the Bronx. He came up to Springfield to maybe be reminded that in the not-so-distant past, the game seemed to have a conscience. Don is relieved at the NBA labor settlement because now his daughter, a dancer for the Nets, won’t have to move back home.
But, wearing a heavy-lidded expression that speaks of little tolerance for the closed-door strategies of the corporate stratosphere, he is clearly not about to thank the league for its largesse in opening the arena doors in cities blighted for two months by deserted bars and idled beer vendors. There’s been too much collateral damage already.
And now: a collective “You’ve got to be kidding me.” For weeks, whenever we saw Billy Hunter and David Stern -- respectively, National Basketball Players Association executive director and NBA commissioner -- they were in suits, the suit being, of course, the attire of business, and business being, for 149 days, what both sides of the NBA lockout said they meant. That the lockout lasted as long as it did proved they meant otherwise; and, anyway, on Hunter, a suit always asked, “Where’s my Pineau des Charentes?” Mostly, he and Stern wore suits because what else would they have worn to such high-stakes, high-profile negotiations?
Well, on Saturday, at close to 4 a.m., after a reported 15 hours of hammering out a deal that would end the lockout, we discovered exactly what else. Hunter and Stern sat at the center of a long conference table at a midtown Manhattan law firm. They weren’t in suits. They wore just about the last thing you’d expect from two people who have been as entrenched as they claimed to have been. Both men sat at that table wearing a piece of clothing that totally belied the incompetence and complacency and intransigence on both sides of the lockout, the heartlessness, cluelessness, ruthlessness, and indifference to the sport itself. They wore the tasteful opposite of boardroom business, and they did so in a move that, under the circumstances, can be understood as an act of desperate cynicism, a calculated plea for gratitude, sympathy, and hugs.
At 3:40 a.m., Billy Hunter and David Stern ended the NBA lockout in sweaters.
I love basketball and couldn't be more thrilled that we are having a NBA season.
WITH. THAT. SAID.
I was starting to get weirdly excited about the shenanigans that NBA players were about to get involved in. I love seeing these guys act like themselves (teenage boys who have the house to themselves for the weekend, know their parents’ credit card number, have the keys to the Volvo, and are well versed in the workings of the liquor cabinet and the freeze-pop drawer), and this lockout was about to bring out the best/worst in all of them. Every single one.
A few weeks ago, at the height of my belief that a season was out of the question, I started to make a list of things I was pumped for in the upcoming locked-out months. There are 25 things. Yep. Thirteen, and then 12 more.
On Monday, the NBA labor negotiations completely imploded. Billy Hunter and Derek Fisher, with seemingly half of the NBA at their side, declared their intentions to disband the union and file an antitrust lawsuit against the league. In response, NBA commissioner David Stern appeared on SportsCenter and said, "They seem hell-bent on self-destruction, and it's very sad."
The rhetoric now moves from meetings in hotels to courtrooms. But what did Monday's action actually mean? We asked Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College who has worked with the players' union in the past, to try to explain it all.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here. But don't abandon your reading glasses. This is terrible; the labor dispute between the NBA and its players is now moving out of the negotiating room and into the court room.
Grantland has been covering the NBA lockout pretty much since the site launched. So we've put together a collection of selected works of the site's lockout coverage. Check out the links below:
So this week was filled with more lengthy NBA lockout meetings, but no deal was reached. Next week, player representatives will go over the league’s latest revised offer. In case you’ve forgotten, here a handy timeline that helps explain how we’ve arrived at the umpteenth crucial crossroads in these negotiations.
Nearly every one of these NBA labor negotiations ends the same way. Press conference areas are set up, usually in adjacent rooms, and NBA commissioner David Stern and deputy commissioner Adam Silver and NBPA executive director Billy Hunter and Derek Fisher discuss the fruitlessness of that particular session. Those conversations with the media sometimes diverge. The sides can be specific or vague. They can project optimism, pessimism, hope, frustration, progress, or regression. But so far, they never include the one thing everyone in the room is hoping for: a joint conference — and a deal.
When the talks don’t go well, there are warnings of “extreme consequences,” accusations of being “snookered,” or the cancellation of more games. When it appears as though inroads have been made, however, the opposite occurs. Such was the situation early Thursday morning, when the league and union ultimately revealed nothing to the gathered reporters after another marathon session, other than that they would meet again in the morning.
“We're not failing and we're not succeeding,” Stern said. “We're just there.”
“There was enough give and take on both sides to merit us both coming back tomorrow,” Hunter said.
He seemed fatigued, yet still upbeat, after Wednesday’s session. I know, because I found myself sharing an elevator — and later a car ride — with him.
Grantland's Jonathan Abrams is staking out Friday's NBA lockout meeting, and he's e-mailing us updates throughout the day. Can someone send Jonathan Abrams a pizza or something? He's probably in for a long day.
From: Abrams
Sent: Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 6:05 PM
Subject: Adios
It could have been much worse and much better. Worse, in that I was prepared to stay here through the night and watch as my e-mails grew more delirious and frustrated. Better, in that I thought the lockout could be solved today.
Instead of a handshake deal, Hunter said the union had been "snookered" into believing an agreement could be struck today. If I take nothing else away, snookered is now one of my top 5 favorite verbs.
All in all, it was only about eight hours of awkwardly staring at everyone who walked into the hotel and wondering if it was Mark Cuban.
But that is the life of a stakeout reporter: wait, optimism, wait, pessimism, rinse, repeat.
Please tip your reporters, who have delivered you such emotion since the first meeting. They deserve it.
From: Abrams
Sent: Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 5:41 PM
Subject: E-mail #whatever
These talks ended in the most predictable way. All of the optimism stemmed from just skirting the bigger issue: the actual split. When they got to it, neither side budged and now more games will be lost. Hunter and Derek Fisher already spoke to media, while a kind Mo Evans held up a tape recorder for a boxed-out reporter.
Stern and Adam Silver are warming up. The swarm of media is now by the elevators, blah, blah, blah. Why are you not getting ready for Game 7 anyways?
From: Abrams
Sent: Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 5:03 PM
Subject: E-mail 11
And the two sides are sadly and officially done for the day. Media has swarmed the lobby with cameras in hands, only to be moved twice by hotel security -- somewhere to where the paying folk can't see or feed the herd.
Some are sad that talks broke during the daylight. Kept hearing an entirely different clientele comes to this venue later in the evening.
From: Abrams
Sent: Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 4:47 PM
Subject: E-mail 10
The talks appear to be over for the day before 5 p.m., which a) means there is no deal today b) points out the hopelessness of getting too up or down unless there is an actual deal done and c) means that I should have taken the under on when Stern will talk. Reporters are scrambling to cover everything: elevators, exits and hallways. I am still hesitant to give up my prime location. It could be a set up.
From: Abrams
Sent: Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 4:22 PM
Subject: E-mail 9
There is a $1 pool that most of the reporters throw in on. The aim is to guess what time NBA Commissioner David Stern speaks to the media. The low wager tonight is 9:17 p.m. The latest one is for 2:24 a.m. I placed mine at 10:17 p.m., guessing that there are too many factors that have to fall in place for a deal to happen tonight.
From: Abrams
Sent: Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 4:00 PM
Subject: E-mail 8
I made a pact with Brian Mahoney on arrival here. We share a table and vowed to watch over one another’s computers and more importantly, power outlets. Mahoney, the capable basketball writer for the Associated Press, has been gone for an extended period of time. I will now auction off both for a bag of Doritos.
Meanwhile, we're about six hours into the meeting.
In our never-ending quest to figure out why the 2011-12 NBA season might get canceled immediately after one of the best seasons in league history, we finally landed Billy Hunter, executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, on the BS Report for an hour-long interview about the lockout, last week’s furious flurry of negotiations, why those negotiations fell through, where those negotiations are headed, and, basically, whether we’re screwed or not. We talked about his relationship with David Stern, whether Billy feels like he beat Stern on the past two labor deals, if he believes the owners wanted to blow up this season all along, if he feels like the players have any leverage whatsoever right now, whether any ambitious big-picture solutions are being discussed, how committed the players are to sticking together, and what salaries could potentially look like this decade. We also talked about the dynamics in the room during the last round of negotiations, which owners were hotter to settle than others, and how the process works once there’s a creative idea in place that needs to be fleshed out.
My takeaway from the hour: Billy seems convinced that his players are absolutely sticking together (that’s his “leverage,” so to speak); he feels like the league is in a much better place than it’s pretending to be; he’s more than happy to work with the more thoughtful owners on ambitious big-picture solutions; he believes the owners’ side has a built-in advantage with the media and how events are spun; and he’s much more confident about the ebbs and flows of this process than I expected. If you notice, he compares it to how 1999 played out when everything broke at the 12th hour — it seems like he’s expecting that to happen here. Or maybe he’s just being overly optimistic. It certainly didn’t seem like things had blown up completely, or that there wasn’t room for them to keep talking. He seemed enthusiastic about Mark Cuban’s plan to create a better economic model — dubbed “The Game-changer” by Cuban, it eliminates the salary cap completely — and admitted that they had some quality brainstorming before some of the smaller-market owners derailed that momentum. Why didn’t this brainstorming happen this summer instead of last week? Hunter seemed to feel like the owners didn’t have any real urgency until last week. (You could easily say the same for the players.) Either way, this podcast downgraded me from “100 percent pessimistic about the season being saved” to “75 percent pessimistic about the season being saved.” Just know that 75 percent still sucks. Let's make a deal already.
So! Awesome news, NBA fans! According to reports on Twitter, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association has said: "We've advised (players) they may have to sit out half the season before we get a deal." Cool. We were not looking to repeat the absolute magic that was the NBA 2010-11 season. Definitely wanted to put that in a time capsule and marinate on it for a while.
Well, if you're looking for a balm to soothe you, we can offer you this music video from rapper O'Grime (you've no doubt knocked his "Illuminati Swag" all summer). It's a tribute to Lithuanian rookie Jonas Valanciunas.
Between this and YouTube videos of Kevin Durant dropping 3s on dudes at pickup games and the possibilities of a horror-comedy (horredy?) screenplay coming out of Adam Morrison's move to Serbia, maybe we'll all get through this together.
Read more of The Triangle, Grantland's sports blog.
Contact us at triangle@grantland.com
As part of our coverage of the NBA lockout, Grantland's Jonathan Abrams spoke with Detroit Pistons guard Ben Gordon about playing overseas, Billy Hunter, and his offseason so far.
Remember the NBA? That was great! Now all we have to pay attention to is the lockout. To make sense of it all, we've brought in Ethan Trex for a feature we're calling Lockout Watch.
Earlier this week, National Basketball Players Association executive director Billy Hunter said he expects the entire upcoming season to be canceled thanks to the labor situation. At first glance, such a gloomy statement seems like dire news for NBA fans. Is it finally time to panic? Not yet. On closer inspection, Hunter’s comments don’t really tell us anything about the likelihood of the league's return.
Remember the NBA? That was great! Now all we have to pay attention to is the lockout. To make sense of it all, we've brought in Ethan Trex for a feature we're calling Lockout Watch.
We’ve been waiting for over a month now for the triumphant return of David Stern’s lockout beard from the NBA’s 1998-99 labor impasse. Still nothing. Not even a lockout five o’clock shadow. At least we got some exciting legal news Tuesday when the league launched a two-pronged offensive against the players. By filing a lawsuit in federal court and a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, the league hopes to have thwarted the players’ next move before the union has even taken it. Sound confusing and convoluted? It is.
