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NBA to end lockout; games would start Christmas Day

Early this morning, NBA fans received their first Christmas gift: a tentative agreement to end the 149-day lockout.

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

Mason says Knicks owner wants NBA to play

Knicks guard Roger Mason knows at least one owner who wished the NBA lockout ended with a labor agreement Thursday night: James Dolan.

Mason, vice president of the Players Association, has rubbed shoulders with the Knicks owner countless times this summer and fall in Manhattan hotel board rooms instead of the team's plush practice facility.

"You can look at it and say the majority of owners don't want a deal," Mason told The Post yesterday from his Los Angeles home. "But there are owners eager to get a deal done. At this moment they are overshadowed by a contingent of owners who are trying to get everything they want in a new CBA."

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/knicks/jim_dandy_u61PAJQxQdV85a1bOMaVwJ#ixzz1bld6Hf4p

Josh Howard to host all-star charity basketball game in Dallas

Josh Howard announced that he will host an all-star charity basketball game in Dallas, Texas featuring an all-star cast of professional basketball players. The Josh Howard Celebrity All-Star Basketball Game Presented by Free Move Texas will be held Saturday, Nov. 12, 6 p.m., at the P.C. Cobb Center, at the city’s fair grounds.

Howard, who will play in the all-star game, has enlisted players from 10 cities: Charlotte, Dallas, Milwaukee, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Orleans, Portland, Sacramento, Toronto and Washington, where he played last. He and his Washington Wizards teammates John Wall, Andray Blatche and Nick Young will be joined by 12 other players: Jason Terry (Dallas), LaMarcus Aldridge (Portland), Anthony Randolph (Minnesota), Corey Brewer (Dallas), Damon Jones, Damion James (New Jersey), DeSagana Diop (Charlotte), Isaiah Thomas (Sacramento), Jarrett Jack (New Orleans), Marquis Daniels (Sacramento), Quinton Ross (New Jersey) and Reggie Evans (Toronto).

Tickets for The Josh Howard Celebrity All-Star Basketball Game Presented by Free Move Texas are available at www.JoshHowardFoundation.com,The Fade Shop and Ten Sports Grill. Ticket prices are: $15 in advance, $25 on-site and $50 for floor seats.

Read more: http://www.insidehoops.com/blog/?p=8490#ixzz1blcf2Asd

NBA lockout pits selfish owners against each other

Heat owner Micky Arison owns not one but two of America’s 50 largest yachts, according to a rich-person magazine. He lives on one of them. This isn’t excessive in the world he inhabits. Both yachts combined aren’t as large as the one built by the Russian billionaire owner of the Chelsea soccer team.
Roman Abramovich, who travels with a 40-strong security detail he calls “a private army,” took more than a year to build his 560-foot Eclipse, which is almost-two-football-fields massive and can’t even be docked in most marinas. It is equipped with not one but two helicopter pads and a submarine. Point is, sports owners live in a different world than the rest of us, money and power and yachts another way to keep score, their teams-as-toys orbit so distorted it Eclipses practicality so completely that they don’t even notice when they are building an ego too big to be docked.

What can Mike Brown do for the Lakers?

People laugh when Mike Brown tells them he spends most weekdays in his office at the Lakers' training facility in El Segundo. They wonder what he does there, day after day while the NBA lockout drags on and on, with the 2011-12 season in jeopardy.

"Sometimes I tell people I still go to the office every day and they're, like, `Right, what are you trying to do, get a raise before you even coach a game?"' Brown said, smiling as he related the story the other day.

"Nah, it's fun."

When a small group of reporters asked him similar questions about his workdays, Brown excused himself from the table in an upstairs conference room and went to his office to retrieve a couple of three-ring binders filled with Xs and Os.

http://www.dailynews.com/lakers/ci_19180127

Isiah Thomas working to lure Chris Paul to Knicks

The New York Daily News reported today that former Knicks coach Isiah Thomas, who is now the coach at Florida International, is working to help lure New Orleans Hornets star Chris Paul to the Knicks once his contract expires after the 2012 season.

Derek Fisher: Rift among owners

Before the NBA's owners and players'returned to their respective corners on Thursday -- the owners in Dallas, the players in Las Vegas -- to regroup following Tuesday's negotiating session that ended with the lockout still very much intact, president Derek Fisher sent out an email to his colleagues asking for solidarity.

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

Chris Bosh says Miami Heat season, 'More lows than highs'

Whenever the Miami Heat come together after the NBA lockout, power forward Chris Bosh said Wednesday they still must come together as a team.

Reflecting on both the work stoppage and his team being stopped two victories shy of a championship by the Dallas Mavericks in last season's NBA Finals, Bosh found himself in an introspective mode during an appearance on ESPN Radio's "Mike & Mike in the Morning."

"It was highs and lows; it was more lows than highs," he said of the 2010-11 season, the Heat's first with the collaboration with Bosh, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. "It was tough, because most of the time when we won, it was just a relief. It wasn't really just like, 'Oh my God, I can't believe we did it.' It's like, 'Whew, OK, that's over. Now we've got Round 2.' It was a learning experience."

Bosh said part of the equation might have been expecting too much too soon.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/miami-heat/sfl-miami-heat-chris-bosh-s091511,0,6459501.story

Warriors brass tell fans of bold plans for future

With NBA lockout talks stalling in New York, the Warriors on Wednesday held an old-fashioned revival at Oracle Arena.

In his first meeting with Warriors fans, new coach Mark Jackson started an impromptu chant of "De-fense" among a confused audience, which has rarely heard that word while missing the playoffs 16 of the past 17 seasons.

"Don't stand up and clap when we're a playoff basketball team, because we won't be standing up and clapping as a team," Jackson said. "Our ultimate goal will be to hang a championship banner."

Those kinds of stirring and outrageous statements were the norm as about 3,000 Warriors season-ticket holders listened to a panel discussion with the team's hierarchy, including Jackson, co-owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber and executive board member Jerry West.

The pomp and cir*****stance included free food and parking, opportunities to buy more seats for a season that might never be played, and the finale of the Warrior Girls tryouts - complete with a swimsuit competition.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/14/SP451L4FH0.DTL#ixzz1Y2eyAN00

NBA Lockout: Don�t panic, they are posturing

I am tweeting from afar on today’s lack of progress in NBA labor negotiations, and I am not the least bit surprised that everyone is emerging from the meeting in New York spewing doom and gloom.

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/