In less than a week, the status of the 2011-12 NBA season will officially be on the clock.
By Bebeto Matthews, AP
National Basketball Players Association President Derek Fisher, left, listens as the union's executive director, Billy Hunter, speaks during a news conference Thursday in New York.
By Bebeto Matthews, AP
National Basketball Players Association President Derek Fisher, left, listens as the union's executive director, Billy Hunter, speaks during a news conference Thursday in New York.
Players and owners must come to an agreement on a collective bargaining agreement by Thursday to prevent a work stoppage.
Owners will convene in Dallas on Tuesday to discuss their options, which could include authorizing a lockout. Both sides will meet together Wednesday or Thursday, hours before the expiration date.
Negotiations have stalled because the sides are far apart on the salary cap, which was a "soft" $58 million for the 2010-11 season. Fifty-seven percent of basketball-related income is designated for players' salaries.
Owners want to reduce that to about 50% to help control expenses and institute a firmer cap system that won't have various exceptions that allow teams to exceed it. The league claims 22 of its 30 teams lost money last season. The NBA champion Dallas Mavericks had a payroll of more than $90 million.
Players declined to present a new economic proposal to owners Friday. Owners had hoped for another proposal from the union, but players felt they had gone far enough after offering a $500 million reduction in salaries over five years early last week, a move NBA Commissioner David Stern termed "modest."
"Why did we not make one? Because we felt that the one that we made previously was sufficient," union executive director Billy Hunter said.
Owners, who also are exploring an expanded form of revenue sharing, have backed off their insistence on non-guaranteed contracts and moved from a hard cap with no exceptions to a flex cap that would allow some. Players rejected that, too.
"There's still such a large gap, we feel that any move for us is real dollars we'd be giving back from where we currently stand, as opposed to where our owners have proposed numbers that in our estimation don't exist right now," union President Derek Fisher of the Los Angeles Lakers said. "They're asking us to go to a place where they want."
Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver, the NBA's lead negotiator, said it would be "premature to talk about where we're going to find ourselves next week."
Hunter said there was enough good dialogue between owners and players that any lockout action might be unnecessary.
"The nature of the discussion today was such that they may find it difficult to pull the trigger," Hunter said. "Even though we didn't make any progress, maybe they felt that the energy and the attitude in the room was such that it might necessitate further discussion."
Stern remains optimistic both sides can come to an agreement after a banner 2010-11 season.
"The one thing we don't want is a lockout," he said. "We have told the players that."
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