NBA Lockout: With Deadline Looming, Players Hope to Make Deal with Owners

The NBPA has officially rejected the NBA's latest CBA proposal, but the players would like to negotiate with the owners one more time prior to Commissioner Stern's Wednesday deadline.

The league had stated that the offer was on the table until the close of business on Wednesday, but with the players rejecting that deal on Tuesday evening, the union is hoping that the two sides can sit down together once again in an effort to hammer home a deal.

After David Stern went on SportsCenter to talk about the proposal on Monday night to put the public pressure on the NBPA to accept the deal on the table, the union successfully spun that same pressure back onto the owners' shoulders with their press conference yesterday.

There's no question that the players have offered more than enough in givebacks to the owners throughout these negotiations. The owners have already won this battle by a whopping 35-point margin, but they're going for a 50-point barn-burner of historic fashion.

NBPA President Derek Fisher was very clear when addressing the media following the players' meeting on Tuesday, and the union is offering to come down on its share of BRI as long as their is a trade-off in the form of system issues which remain on the table.

Think about that for a second. The union, which has already come down significantly from 57 percent of BRI under the previous CBA, is now offering to go even lower on that number.

The focus is now clearly on the "system issues" that have divided the two sides, and Fisher was clear that those have to be had in order to broach the possibility of sewing up a deal.

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There are things in the system that are not up for discussion that we have to have in order to get the season going again.

Without those improvements in the system, we don't see a way of getting a deal done before tomorrow's deadline.

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The system issues that have been consistently referred to throughout this process as one seemingly insurmountable hurdle were laid out on the table yesterday.

Ken Berger of CBS Sports reports that there have been nine teams pushing for a hard-line stance in negotiations, and none of the clubs listed should come as a surprise considering market size and contracts that those teams have handed out in recent seasons.

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According to those people, the teams holding the hardest line in negotiations have been Atlanta, Charlotte, Indiana, Memphis, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Portland and Washington. These nine owners or ownership groups have been trying, with increasing success in recent weeks, to recruit more moderate owners to their cause.

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Michael Jordan (Charlotte) has been identified as a leader among the owners in their stance, and he's become the subject of increasing scrutiny considering his role in the 1998-99 negotiations.

When Jordan was a player, he famously told Abe Pollin that if he couldn't make a profit, he should sell his team.

Upon being asked about Jordan's reported stance in the negotiations, NBPA Executive Director Billy Hunter responded by saying that Jordan should take his own advice if he's unhappy with the current state of his franchise.

The commissioner said that "as of Sunday at 3 A.M." there was no wiggle room left in negotiations from the owners' perspective, but Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports reports that may not exactly be the case.

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As one ownership source told Yahoo! Sports on Monday night, “If there were a couple of tweaks needed around the edges – not fundamental deal points – I believe there could be a deal if everything else is agreed upon. But there needs to be a meeting with David and Billy for anything to happen.”

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And that's the key. There has to be a meeting for anything to get done.

Hunter stated that he expects to sit down with Stern prior to the deadline, but the commissioner was non-committal on that front.

Fisher, Hunter and the union left little to the imagination about their position. The NBPA is willing to go down to a 50-50 BRI split if and only if owners are willing to make some changes to the system.

Some have referred to the players as the greedy party throughout this process, but that really couldn't be further from the truth.

With the pressure mounting on both sides to get a deal done, it's hard to imagine that the two sides won't sit down with one another in an effort to find a resolution.

However, that can happen if and only if logic finally pervades and egos can be successfully put aside in the best interest of both sides, and that's something that we haven't seen happen to date.

There is a deal to be made, and if the owners fail to make the necessary compromises within the system to have an agreement between the league and its players, there is no doubt about where the onus of the blame should be.