One final, 15-hour marathon negotiating session brought together the final elements of a new collective bargaining agreement that fans have been yearning for since owners locked out the players July 1.

The deal will allow the league to begin its season on Christmas Day, with the season’s first tipoff to take place at Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks will play the Celtics at noon.

That game is part of a cross-country tripleheader that will include
Miami at Dallas in an NBA Finals rematch before MVP Derrick Rose and
Chicago close the day by facing off against Kobe Bryant and the Los
Angeles Lakers.

“Well, we’ve reached a tentative understanding that is subject to a
variety of approvals and very complex machinations, but we’re optimistic
that will all come to pass, and that the NBA season will begin on Dec.
25,” Stern said at a press conference that began at 3:40 a.m. Saturday.

“We’re very pleased to come this far. There is still a lot of work to be
done. There’s a lot of places with a lot of committees and player
groups and the like, but we’re optimistic that it will hold, and we’ll
have ourselves an NBA season.”

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/knicks/nba_players_reach_agreement_to_end_Rti4s0xUfOSvjIULGxNGqK#ixzz1epBBsGks

The email, first printed by SI.com, challenges the faction of player agents who wish to decertify and it also hints that there may be some division growing between the league’s 29 owners.

"The most recent meetings in New York were effective," Fisher wrote. "What you have been told by your agents, representatives and the media is probably speculative and inaccurate."What actually happened in those meetings was discussion,
brainstorming and a sharing of options by both sides. The turning point
this past Tuesday was not a disagreement between the players and the
owners. It was actually a fundamental divide between the owners
internally. They could not agree with each other on specific points of
the deal and therefore it caused conflict within the league and its
owners."Sources confirm to ESPN The Magazine’s Chris Broussard that there were disagreements among owners. Owners
and players initially found reason for optimism during Tuesday’s
meetings. Commissioner David Stern and Peter Holt, the head of the
owners’ executive committee, felt that the players’ proposal to take 52
or 53 percent of basketball-related income, compared to 57 under the
previous agreement, was basically fair, sources said.Owners were
seriously considering coming off of their demand for a salary freeze and
would allow players’ future earnings to be tied into the league’s
revenue growth, a critical point for players. The owners also were
willing to allow the players to maintain their current salaries, without
rollbacks, sources said.But when the owners left the players to
meet among themselves for around three hours, Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert
and Phoenix’s Robert Sarver expressed their dissatisfaction with many of
the points, sources said. The sources said that the Knicks’ James Dolan
and the Lakers’ Jerry Buss were visibly annoyed by the hardline demands
of Gilbert and Sarver.http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/6973675/nba-lockout-derek-fisher-los-angeles-lakers-emails-players-says-owners-rift

That is what always happens when the owners’ and players’ full
bargaining committees get together. It is a total dog-and-pony show, and
anyone who expected the sides to emerge today with a sense of optimism
was fooling themselves.

This dispute will get settled when there are a lot fewer people in the room. David Stern and Billy Hunter can reach a suitable middle ground by meeting by themselves for a couple hours, which was what happened back in 1999 when that lockout was settled.

Why would the owners want to budge now, just two days before the Board of Governors meets in Dallas? That meeting will serve to inform all the owners how strong their negotiating position is or isn’t, and they’ll emerge with a plan for moving toward a settlement now that they know what additional concessions the players are willing to make.

September 13 is not, and was never going to be, a movement day for the owners.

http://sheridanhoops.com/2011/09/13/nba-lockout-dont-panic-they-are-posturing/

Shaquille O’Neal once yelled out in the middle of a pre-season game for
Lakers owner Jerry Buss to "pay me." Skeptical of O’Neal’s injury
history and his $30-million-a-year asking price, Buss traded him in
2004. The immediate aftermath entailed Shaq taking swipes at Buss’
playboy lifestyle.

That’s all water under the bridge at this point. Once O’Neal announced
his retirement June 1 after a storied yet underachieving 19-year career,
Buss released a statement thanking Shaq for his contributions to the
Lakers’ three-peat (2000-2002). The Lakers also announced they would
retire his No. 34 jersey at an undetermined time. And as O’Neal told
radio/TV personality Dan Patrick on Tuesday morning, Buss has called
Shaq directly about his number retirement.

The same couldn’t be said about former Lakers Coach Phil Jackson. Though Shaq told Patrick that Jackson was the best coach he ever played for, Jackson apparently didn’t answer Shaq’s phone call when he was in Los Angeles earlier this year.

Nonetheless, it appears old age, retirement and some revisionist history has allowed Shaq to view his Lakers run through rose-colored glasses. He’s argued that the well-do*****ented feud with Kobe Bryant was strictly a motivational ploy. Shaq’s compliment toward Jackson contradicts his claim in 2006 when he boasted that Pat Riley was his best coach. And of course, Buss and O’Neal are now on speaking terms.

But that’s a good thing. Even if Shaq’s fighting with Bryant, Jackson and Buss partly led to the Lakers prematurely breaking up a potential dynasty, they should at least look back with fondness on what O’Neal accomplished here. It’s certainly warranted enough to earn a spot on the Staples Center rafters.

http://lakersblog.latimes.com/lakersblog/2011/09/jerry-buss-reportedly-called-shaquille-oneal-directly-about-number-retirement.html

Well, yes, it would. But it also could well start with plenty of unfamiliar faces on the floor. That’s because a big part of the NBA “game presentation” as David Stern likes to call it is, at present, also without a contract for next season.

That would be the 60 NBA referees.

In a ‘here we go again,’ situation, the referees’ CBA with the league expired eight days ago (on Sept. 1.) While the league says the two sides are still talking – there has been nothing for public consumption from the referees’ side for months – there is no deal and another lockout is possible.

If you are scratching your head over this one, here’s why: we went through this two years ago with the officials. Their contract expired on Sept. 1, 2009. They continued to negotiate into mid-September. On Sept. 18, the league announced it was locking out the referees and replacement officials were used for the exhibition season.

The progress — if it can be called that, at least in terms of the pace and frequency of talks — comes at a time when sources say the spirit of the negotiations has evolved to a place where both sides are focused on trying to reach a compromise rather than obsessing over leverage and bargaining victories. So, too, will the size of the negotiations evolve, with constituents on both sides needing to join the process for it to have a chance to move forward from here.

"We think it’s getting to be an important time and it’s a good idea to have larger group meetings," commissioner David Stern said. "I don’t really know that it’s positive or negative. I just think it’s time to bring the parties into the room who are ultimately going to be responsible for either making a deal or deciding that there shouldn’t be a deal."

Stern said there was nothing formal to present to the rest of the owners’ labor committee; only chairman Peter Holt of the Spurs has attended the past three sessions.

"Not yet," said Stern, who added that the escalation of talks is "more because of the calendar" than a narrowing of the gap between the two sides.

Both sides stuck to their agreed upon gag order as far as characterizing the discussions or divulging details. Deputy commissioner Adam Silver took issue with president Derek Fisher’s recent assertion that no new proposals have been made by either side, but that seemed to be a question of semantics rather than a rift. Silver said the two sides have exchanged "proposals, ideas, concepts, numbers" and "we continue to" in an effort to reach a deal.

http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/15548337/labor-talks-enter-phase-that-could-determine-next-seasons-fate

The league wouldn’t reveal if the board officially authorized locking
out the players once the clock strikes midnight Thursday, the end of the
collective bargaining agreement that’s been in place since 2005, but it
doesn’t matter. As commissioner David Stern has warned already, such a
vote is a mere formality and can be conducted by any means at any time.

The first lockout authorization via text message may be mere hours away.

Holt’s committee will meet with the negotiating committee of the National Basketball Player’s Association on Thursday, but no last-minute breakthrough is expected.

Here’s the truly bad news: Once the lockout begins, the standoff is going to get nastier.

According to NBA executives familiar with the league’s strategies, once the lockout is in place, the owners will push for a hard salary cap of $45 million, the elimination of guaranteed contracts and ask that the players swallow a 33 percent salary cut.

The concessions made in recent weeks, including the “flex cap” of $62 million and a guarantee of $2 billion in annual player payroll, will be off the table.

If this seems certain to guarantee the loss of the entire 2011-12 season, it is because there are owners who think it is necessary for the long-term viability of the league.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/spursnation/2011/06/29/mike-monroe-it-only-gets-harder-for-owners-players/

Following a five-hour Board of Governors meeting at the same hotel that
the league used as its Dallas headquarters during the NBA Finals earlier
this month, Stern and deputy commissioner Adam Silver said that the
league’s owners have not formally voted to authorize a lockout to start
immediately if there is no new labor agreement before Thursday’s
midnight deadline.

"There’s always time to make a deal," Stern insisted.

Yet one source close to the negotiations told ESPN.com that "it’s a sign" indicative of the wide gap between the sides that no talks were scheduled for Wednesday, leaving only Thursday’s deadline-day bargaining session in New York as the last hope to strike an agreement before the deadline.

Billy Hunter told the Sports Business Journal on Tuesday that the deadline can be extended "if both sides demonstrate a willingness," but Hunter expects the worst if the divide between the parties doesn’t get any narrower during their Thursday sitdown at the bargaining table in Manhattan.

"If no progress is being made by the two sides," Hunter told the Sports Business Journal, "then the NBA will impose a lockout."

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=6713803