NBA, Players Resume Talks, but Nothing Is Accomplished

After a little lull--try all summer--the NBA and the players are meeting again, although actual negotiations seem too much to expect.

The sides met Thursday for five hours in New York, only their second formal gathering since the league locked the players out July 1. In the first meeting, the NBA officials walked out.

However, all they did this time was go over old ground. Commissioner David Stern says the players only wanted to hear the league’s old offer, which includes an absolute or “hard” salary cap that they have pledged to fight.

The players will make counterproposals at another meeting Tuesday, three weeks before the scheduled start of the season Nov. 3.

“Discussions that we continue to have are amiable on a personal level,” Stern said, “[but] leaving the personalities out of it, just on the agendas that we have to get moving on, there was nothing in this meeting that moved that along.”

The NBA has canceled its exhibition season and could cancel the start of the season as early as next week, which would only confirm what is becoming more and more obvious.

“[A full season] is looking less and less likely every day, although we’re trying to hold on to every day that we can,” Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik said. “But it will really take some major, major breakthrough and that doesn’t seem likely to happen.”

Officials on both sides deny it publicly, but insiders fear there will be no meaningful negotiations until John Feerick rules on the union’s arbitration case, which asserts 220 players on guaranteed contracts must be paid, even if the NBA shuts down.

Feerick has suggested that he may not rule until Oct. 19--15 days from the start of the season As union director Billy Hunter said, entering the meeting, “We’re prepared to address their concerns, we really are. But I’m not going to bid against myself. They have taken an intransigent position in which they are not prepared to respond to anything other than what they are demanding.”

The only players present were Patrick Ewing and Herb Williams of the New York Knicks and Dikembe Mutombo of the Atlanta Hawks, which was a change from the last formal bargaining session Aug. 6 when more than a dozen players attended and the owners stormed out upon hearing the players’ latest offer.

Said Ewing, the union president, seizing on the positive: “Well, nobody walked out.”