Moderators: Rich Rane, NyCeEvO
Stone wrote:What happens if the lockout continues and the season is not played... How would next years draft work? Would it go down in the same order as last year with us getting the number three pick?
Knicks' Stoudemire says NBA lockout will end 'sooner than later'
By MARC BERMAN
Last Updated: 8:07 AM, September 8, 2011
Posted: 1:17 AM, September 8, 2011
Ailing Amar'e Stoudemire said he would be ready to roll if training camp began today and feels the camp's opening is not as far off as people think.
While Stoudemire spoke to kids in Harlem as part of the Department of Youth Program, the NBA and Players Association held a six-hour meeting further downtown and will be at it again today finally with indications of progress.
Stoudemire said the lockout will end "sooner than later." He has arranged a mid-October informal training camp for his mates in Bradenton, Fla., but now isn't sure they'll need it. Training camps are scheduled for Oct. 2.
"I'm hearing good things about the lockout, that we'd be starting sooner than later," Stoudemire said. "So that [Florida camp] would be offset. I'm not sure the change [in negotiating stance], but I do feel better about the fact we may start sooner than later. That's a positive for us."
Stoudemire is in constant communication with Knicks guard Roger Mason Jr., who is on the negotiating committee.
Mason tweeted yesterday, "Looking like a season. How u." The tweet got major play until Mason deleted it and claimed his Twitter account was hacked. However, speculation is he sent it as a private message and hit the wrong button.
Asked if he's talked to Mason, Stoudemire said, "We've been talking all summer about when it's a great time to start training to ramp it up, what's the word on the street about resolving this thing, when's the season going to start. He's been keeping me in the loop."
Emerging from labor talks, players' association president Derek Fisher and commissioner David Stern said there's time to save the full season.
"We agreed that we're going to sit here for as many days as we can to see if we're going to be able to make progress," Stern said. "We have three weeks."
Stoudemire, who pulled a back muscle during the Boston series and was rendered impotent, said his back "feels great" and would "definitely" be ready to play now. Like Carmelo Anthony (elbow), he has rested much of summer because of the back. He's ready to step up workouts Monday "I feel great," Stoudemire said. "Been resting all summer. That's been my main priority and I feel great."
Asked if he was nervous earlier in the summer about his back, Stoudemire said, "It was definitely a time it was sore and I didn' t know how long it would take to recover from that type of injury."
If the lockout is ongoing in mid-October, Stoudemire expects the entire Knicks team to show up to the IMG Academy for informal training camp.
Stoudemire said last week's addition of top assistant Mike Woodson to run the defense was a good step.
"I think it's great," Stoudemire said. "We talked about improving defensively. The addition of Mike will be positive for us.
Hush-hush labor meeting means there might be progress
By Ken Berger
CBSSports.com Senior Writer
NEW YORK -- A month from now, when the NBA either will be killing a portion of the 2011-12 season or basking in the glow of training camps, we'll be able to look back on Sept. 7 as a significant date one way or another.
Either the strange, secretive vibe that permeated the lobby of a midtown hotel -- another new venue for the talks, not divulged to reporters -- was created to camouflage progress or was little more than a false positive on the litmus test for hope.
Since I'm on record -- and in the minority -- predicting that the lockout would be resolved without collateral damage to the regular-season schedule, I offer the reasons to interpret Wednesday's strange bargaining session as hopeful. And maybe even very much so.
• Both league officials and those from the National Basketball Players Association expressed surprise that reporters were able to determine the location of the high-level bargaining session, which the parties had vowed not to divulge. To my personal knowledge, neither did. The reason for the secrecy? Both sides believe public rhetoric could be damaging to the bargaining work that is beginning to progress, if by no other evidence than the fact that the league and players will meet again Thursday -- the first back-to-back sessions of the lockout -- and possibly Friday, too. For there to be concern about damaging the process, there would have to be something worth damaging. As to the assembled scribes' ability to sniff out the one hotel among hundreds and hundreds on the island of Manhattan where the meeting was taking place ... well, what do they think we do?
• Among the small circle of figures speaking publicly on the talks, all have adopted the talking point first espoused by commissioner David Stern back in June -- that nothing has been agreed on until everything has been agreed on. To the optimistic mind, this would suggest that some things have been agreed on and nobody's saying so. When queried on whether the Aug. 31 meeting and this week's sudden flurry of talks indicate momentum, NBPA president Derek Fisher admitted, "I guess that would be a fair assumption. But like I said, until we get this deal done, it's tough to try to characterize it or put a read on what means what in terms of on a daily basis."
Until we get this deal done? That shift away from emphasizing the distance between the parties and the efforts to "get this deal done" would seem to indicate that there is a deal to get done. Fisher, whose speech patterns are at once precise and difficult to interpret, also spoke of getting the deal done as though it were a matter of when, not if.
"For our players and for the team owners -- and probably most importantly out of respect for the people that support our game, our fans -- it's just not appropriate to continue to discuss things openly and publicly based on specific deal points," Fisher said. "It really is best to keep those things internal. That's what these meetings are for. That's why we've all been either voted or chosen to be in the positions we're in and those discussions should stay in that forum. And once the deal is done, of course the specifics will come out. We'll all know what the agreement is and then we'll build from there. But from this point forward, it's really important to focus on just the deal and not the semantics and the rhetoric."
• Unless, of course, you're sending a direct message or text intended for a private audience to thousands of followers publicly on Twitter. This appears to have been what happened to Roger Mason of the Knicks, a member of the players' executive committee. Mason, who did not attend the bargaining session Wednesday, tweeted shortly thereafter, "Looking like a season. how u." After getting bombarded with inquiries about the tweet, Mason promptly deleted it and claimed his account had been hacked. Looking back a month from now, Mason either will go down as the latest public figure victimized by evil, indiscriminate Twitter hackers, or the one who broke the story that the lockout was all but over. How u? We'll see.
• New parties were on hand Wednesday whose presence could indicate a progression of the talks to nitty-gritty areas. On hand for the league was deputy general counsel Dan Rube, the league office's foremost expert on salary cap mechanics and player contracts. Could his presence have indicated an emphasis on specific system issues the owners and players are trying to resolve? Stern brushed off the notion of reading any such thing into Rube's appearance, but his role in the process is what it is. For the union, rejoining the talks were outside counsel Jeffrey Kessler -- who played the role of Mariano Rivera in closing the deal for the NFL and its players union -- and economist Kevin Murphy, whose input would be needed to decipher predictions of revenue growth in the out years of a new CBA.
• Finally, take the dry, terse and yet playfully jovial demeanor of Stern, who did nearly all the talking for the league Wednesday and said the least of anyone. It was Stern who first dropped the talking point about there being no deal on anything until there was a deal on everything, and on Wednesday, he seemed to wear that credo and his self-imposed muzzle with pride.
"I've agreed to neither portray optimism nor pessimism, just to tell you I can't say anything," Stern said. "And that's what I'm doing. ... We know we have a real problem to solve and there's nothing personal about it. It's going to be about problem solving. If we can, we can. If we can't, we can't. But we've agreed not to talk about it."
Stern did publicly disclose for the first time a deadline for when a deal needs to be achieved to avoid canceling training camps and preseason games: Sept. 28, if you take Stern at his carefully crafted, lawyerly word.
"We have three weeks," he said, when asked if there was enough time to reach an agreement before such collateral damage. Training camps are scheduled to open the first week of October.
"Time is running down, not necessarily out," Fisher said. "But I think we all know in the room that if we continue to work at it, we can possibly find a way to get a deal done."
Reason for optimism or a false positive on the litmus test of hope? We're still weeks away from knowing. Neither Stern nor Hunter, who've ridden in this rodeo before, was willing to say how far down the road to compromise they were. And indeed, no one knows better than they do that it's too early to make predictions either way.
But if nothing else, the talks to save the NBA season have left rhetoric and animosity in the past and focused on the compromise that both sides know must come eventually -- with the damage all depending on the timing.
"That's why we're here," Fisher said. "That's what we have to get to. That's the process we're committed to. We won't see that until the deal is done."