The NBA lockout discussion has moved from BRI to CSI. Instead of negotiating the finer points of basketball-related income in a labor agreement that would have paved the way for the start of the NBA season, the breakdown in talks has both the league and the players working feverishly to find evidence to use against one another in court.
Recent actions by both NBA commissioner David Stern and the National Basketball Players Association have been touted as legal ploys meant to portray the other as not bargaining in good faith.
As soon as the NBPA decided to reject the league’s latest proposal and dissolve Monday, Stern argued it was a “tactic” meant to open the door for players to file an antitrust lawsuit against the league.
“At a bargaining session in February 2010, Jeffrey Kessler, counsel for the union, threatened that the players would abandon the collective bargaining process,” an NBA-issued statement from Stern said. It was an attempt to show that the players never intended to compromise, which the league also asserted in a pre-emptive suit of its own filed to the National Labor Relations Board.
But it was Stern who said early Friday, “There comes a time when you have to be through with negotiations, and we are.”
Stern wrote to the players to tell them they would face a more punitive proposal if the owners’ offer wasn’t accepted and stood his ground in interviews, establishing an ultimatum — which new player-side attorney David Boies told reporters Tuesday gave the union no choice but to consider the collective bargaining process over. NBPA executive director Billy Hunter also called the NBA’s latest proposal “regressive,” the opposite of what good-faith bargaining should produce.
And instead of 2010, the players reached back in their lawsuit to 2007 to show how long Stern had been threatening a lockout in order to exact the owners’ demands.
Both sides have shown they excel at pointing out the other’s flaws, possibly leaving only a judge to decide which is the lesser evil. Either way, there has been enough spilled DNA to make for a lengthy clean-up, and the list of victims affected by the crime grows longer by the day.
– Craig Stouffer
