NBA Lockout: What This Week's Talks Tell Us About When the Season Will Start

Starting on Monday afternoon, mediator extraordinaire George Cohen met with both sides of the lockout—both David Stern and the owners and Billy Hunter and the NBPA.

That was the calm before the storm of meetings that would come over the next three days.

Tuesday started off brilliantly. The sides met for more than 16 hours, and although there was no word on whether there was progress or not, you had to imagine that there was at least something to speak of. It seems like it would be difficult to put a group of people in a room for 16 hours and have them not come out with at least some form of progress.

Then, like a gift from above, Cohen ordered a gag order on anyone involved in the talks. Nobody said anything to the media after day one, which seems like it would be a bad thing to someone like me who has to write about the damn thing, but really them not saying a word was best for progress.

It seems like the biggest problem over the course of the initial meetings before Cohen was involved was the players and owners giving different stories to the media, getting mad at each other through the media and then dragging their feet to schedule a new meeting.

Hell, after the Tuesday meetings I even sent out a text to my usual group of people to whom I rant and rave about the lockout to express my optimism for the likelihood of a deal. I nearly even gave a patented GuaranSheed that a deal would get done by the end of next week.

Then talks restarted Wednesday morning, and we saw the same story.

George Cohen then addressed the hoard of reporters waiting for the meetings to end. Nothing came from his statement but his reasserting the need for confidentiality at that time.

After over 24 hours of meetings in over a span of two days, plus the individual meetings with each side on Monday, Cohen earned himself a drink.

Then Thursday happened. Up until this point we had heard the usual slips from "sources" from guys in the know that progress had been made, but the gap between each side was just too big. It seemed like this was a perfect thing to say by the owners to keep pressure on the players, letting them know that they still wanted more.

The talks ended abruptly on Thursday after the issue of the revenue split came back up, and following the trend of the last few weeks, owners took a stand, insisting that they wouldn't take anything more than a 50-50 split. This time leading the charge was Blazers owner Paul Allen, who simply went silent when Billy Hunter suggested they focus on system issues before settling the revenue split.

Talks ended. The owners gave their story about what happened, which went down the same storyline as usual. Some progress had been made, but there was too much distance between the two sides. Nothing else could have been done that day.

Derek Fisher then addressed the media, and with one simple sentence, he told us we would be in for a bumpy few weeks in terms of any potential progress relating to the lockout, saying "I want to make it clear that you guys were lied to earlier."

I didn't have to hear anything else. It didn't matter that it was the owners who broke off the talks, it didn't matter that there had actually been progress with an agreement on a new mid-level exception among other things—we were done right there.

The news that came later that no new meetings were scheduled at that time was the most obvious thing to come out of the lockout in the past week.

My honest opinion at this point is that David Stern and the owners have overplayed their hand, which was seemingly impossible to do at one point. They have a full house to the players' pair, but they have tried to pass it off as a royal flush.

I truly believe that Stern was not only prepared to miss games if negotiations didn't yield a new agreement in time for the start of the season, but he was hoping to.

Stern saw how valuable missed paychecks were as leverage to the owners in 1999, and if he were forced to go to that point again, then he was planning on "running up the score" on the players.

That's why it took both sides so long to start meeting; that's why Stern was so quick to cancel the first two weeks of the season; that's why it took this long to have the 16-hour long "let's lock ourselves in a room for the better part of a day to make it look like we're concerned" meeting; and that's why Stern gave his "concerns" about the very real possibility of not having basketball on Christmas Day.

Operating under the current system with the 30-team league that Stern has put together would be more than difficult, and as we can see, it has lost the league money. Because of that, it seems as if Stern is trying to get as much as he can out of the players in an attempt to keep the league as is for as long as possible.

On top of that, the product on the court is as good as it has been in a long time, so maybe a lockout isn't going to hurt the league as much as it did in 1999, just so long as it doesn't turn into a cancellation of the season.

The players obviously feel scorned at this point and will be unwilling to budge much from their 53 percent stance on the BRI out of spite, which will probably end with more meetings like we saw on Thursday.

I can see the lockout heading past November and well into December at this point. The earliest I can see this all working itself out after Thursday's debacle would be mid-December, with games starting around the first of the year. Any later than that and we could be in trouble.

It's crazy how I can go from nearly busting out a GuaranSheed for a deal to get done to wallowing in disdain over the likelihood of a quick deal getting done in just three days.