Ken Berger, previously optimistic and even-handed, tore the owners a new one in his new column:
http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/1577 ... -who-caresI'm mad at everybody right now, but do you know who I'm angrier at? The owners. Why? Because I believe Billy Hunter and Derek Fisher when they say it was an ultimatum from the owners that shattered these talks Thursday night. Let me explain why.
After 24½ hours of seemingly productive mediation over two days, strange things happened Thursday. The heavy lifting that had been progressing over the previous two days was over the system issues upon which a turning point in the talks seemingly hinged. This is what we had been told when all hell broke loose on 63rd Street outside the Lowell Hotel on Oct. 10 -- that it wasn't about the money anymore, it was about the system.
And you know what it's about in sports when they tell you it's not about the money? You guessed it: It's about the money.
In fact, I had told you the next day not to fall for the banana in the tailpipe -- that this mumbo-jumbo about the system was just something to distract everyone for a while until the discussions inevitably came back to the split of BRI. And sure enough, back-schmack they went on Thursday, with league negotiators drawing a line in the sand at a 50-50 split of BRI and trying to sell it as a new proposal.
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But Fisher and Hunter said it was the owners who presented the ultimatum: 50-50, take it or leave it. Those words came out of Chris Paul's mouth during the players' news conference, and Hunter said they essentially came out of Holt's mouth -- and while I wasn't in the room to prove it, the message was clear.
There are hard-liners among the owners who refuse to give the players a dime more than 50 percent, and some harder-liners who were reluctant to go even that far. But you know what? There are hard-liners on the union side, too -- agents and super agents and clusters of seven agents who didn't want to go a dime below 53 percent. I know of at least one powerful agent who never thought the players should have offered anything below 57 percent -- the share they received under the previous six-year deal.
The difference? Fisher and Hunter have successfully excluded those hard-liners from the bargaining process, all the way up to Thursday, when sources told CBSSports.com that some agents were still working the phones and telling their clients to "hold firm" and reject any deal below 53 percent. Hunter and Fisher ignored them and offered to go lower on Thursday -- to 52.5 percent if revenues came in as projected and as low as 50 percent if they came in lower.
The league has not only been unable to keep hard-line owners from influencing the negotiations, they couldn't even keep them out of the room Thursday. The new participant was Trail Blazers owner Paul Allen, who came as a messenger from the Board of Governors meetings that concluded earlier in the day, Hunter said.
So essentially the players offered a band going from 50 to 52.5, which is a pretty big compromise. I sure haven't seen the same kind of movement on the owners' side.
