NBA Deal Gets Put on Hold : Pro basketball: Owners ratify contract, but dissatisfied players balk amid talk of reopening negotiations.

NBA owners unanimously ratified their new labor deal Friday, but player representatives put off their scheduled vote and asked to reopen negotiations.

Simon Gourdine, executive director of the players association, said the vote was delayed to give player representatives time to study the deal, but he conceded sentiment was running against ratification.

“I would not want to characterize it as a ‘no’ vote,” Gourdine said at the players’ meeting in Chicago.

“But to be very fair and honest, we have to look at a couple of aspects of that proposal and see whether we can refashion it in a way that is acceptable in negotiations with the NBA.”

NBA officials, meeting in New York, voted 28-0, earlier Friday to ratify the agreement, with no Miami representative present. Informed later that the players were balking, league officials declined comment.

“We haven’t heard from the union leadership,” Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik said, “and until we do, we feel it is inappropriate to comment.”

The union has been under attack by a group of dissatisfied agents and players, led by David Falk and his clients, Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning. They have renounced the union as their bargaining agent and seek to decertify it.

Friday, union leaders suggested they are no longer fighting the opposition but joining it.

“The threat of decertification is null and void,” said New York Knick forward Charles Smith, a member of the union’s board of directors and one of the players who helped negotiate the deal.

“And if there is going to be a threat of decertification, it’s going to come from representatives of the union.”

A decertified union would be free to bring suit in court and halt all NBA business in the meantime, starting with Wednesday’s draft.

The new deal would impose a wage scale for rookies, cut the draft to one round and raise the salary cap from $16 million to $24 million, all popular moves with players.

However, it also closed all the loopholes in the old “soft” cap, except the one that allows teams to sign their own free agents at any price, and imposed a luxury tax that would reach 100%.

Even management sources agreed that would have created a “hard” cap, making it harder for teams to fit in free agents and curtailing player movement.

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NBA Notes

The expansion Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies will start filling their rosters today at the expansion draft in Secaucus, N.J., where they will select a player from each existing team. Toronto will pick first and may take Chicago Bull guard B.J. Armstrong. Others available include Roy Tarpley and brothers Dominique and Gerald Wilkins.