League Making the Tough Call Beginning Without Referees : Negotiations: Despite player complaints about replacements, season will open amid work stoppage.

Gosh, a work stoppage after all!

After a nerve-racking summer of negotiations with dissatisfied players in which Commissioner David Stern said he doubted there would be a season, the NBA is hours away from opening it without its referees.

The officials have been locked out through the exhibition season and “replacements,” working in crews of two instead of the standard three, are set to take their place. The league concedes that it may not be able to train enough men to form three-man crews until the All-Star game in February.

Several stars, among them David Robinson and Patrick Ewing, have ignored the threat of fines to plead that the regulars be brought back. NBA coaches and officials, although adhering to the league line in public, are privately dismayed.

The replacements, mostly from the Continental Basketball Assn., with a few college referees, have had their hands full. Five players have been suspended from their opening games for transgressions in exhibition play. In the last three exhibition seasons, no players were suspended.

Moreover, the lockout faces a legal challenge in Ontario where a new Toronto entry begins play. Provincial law bars the use of replacements during a work stoppage. A court hearing is set for Wednesday. If the court finds for the officials, the NBA will have to bring back the referees for games in Toronto, move the games or cancel them.

The impasse is a garden-variety dispute over pay. The referees say they earn less than their counterparts in baseball or hockey.

The NBA says they make more than hockey officials and the league’s current offer will get them even with baseball umpires next year.

There have been only two negotiating sessions. And now Jeff Mishkin, the NBA counsel acting as point man, is in Toronto preparing for the hearing and the sides are communicating chiefly by fax and press release.

Said the union’s counsel, Fred Slaughter, “What is happening here, it’s getting uglier and uglier as days go by and it’s too bad. My need is to do a deal. The NBA’s deal is to dictate: You do it our way.”

Slaughter was offered a chance to open the season under a no- strike, no-lockout pledge, as the players did a year ago. He notes, however, that in the players’ case, no deal was struck during the season and the league locked them out as soon as it ended.

The referees had to wait until a players’ contract was signed before the league could start negotiations. There was one fruitless session between the NBA and its officials before Stern declared another lockout.

“There’s no question in anyone’s mind, we understood we couldn’t get to the table until the players’ deal was done,” Slaughter said. “We understood the possibility there wouldn’t be a season.

“We sat back and waited and we got to the table Sept. 21. On Sept. 29, we’re locked out. We don’t think we deserved it but that’s the NBA pattern, locking people out.”

The union poses another question: Why set a hard line against referees whose salaries and benefits, according to the union, make up 0.5% of the NBA’s $1.3-billion revenue?

“This just doesn’t make dollars-and-cents sense,” says union head Mike Mathis. “They’re going to jeopardize their players and the integrity of the game for five-tenths of 1%? That’s what makes me think it’s something else. They’re trying to break our union or they’re beating up on the little guy. Maybe they’re embarrassed by what happened last summer and need to win one.”

Says Rod Thorn: “All I want to tell you is, I’ve been a general manager, I’ve been a coach and now I work for the league and I wish our benefits were as good as what those guys are getting.”