Cavs owner Gilbert denies labor charges in his own way

You couldn’t make up someone like Dan Gilbert. No matter what font you used.

We told you yesterday of a report that Cavaliers owner Gilbert and Suns owner Robert Sarver torpedoed progress at the labor negotiations Tuesday between the owners and players. That report comes from a trusted source in Dave McMenamin of ESPN. That said, we also told you to take it with a grain of salt because there are a lot of people interested in defining the owners as divided when they may not be. Also, David Stern denied that is how the talks went down.

Which brings us to Gilbert’s tweet Thursday night.

Some of these NBA ‘bloggissists’ flat-out make stuff up and then try to dupe readers into believing their fiction is real. Sad & pathetic.

I don’t know what ‘bloggissists’ are exactly, but in this case I’ll defend them.

First, as noted above this report came from an ESPN reporter who before that worked for NBA.com. McMenamin is a lot of things — including honorable — so I have no doubt that reliable sources gave him that story. Now, do his sources have an agenda? Yes, anytime you read something from an anonymous source that source has an agenda. Otherwise they wouldn’t be leaking it anonymously.

As for ‘bloggissists’ and the rest of the Web picking the story up — yes, we did. First because it passed the smell test — after how Gilbert reacted in the post-LeBron era it is not hard to see him as a hardliner who is vindictive and intent on busting the union. It is not hard to see him as someone wanting to make the players feel some pain out of these negotiations. That is not a massive leap of faith.

But we expect that you readers of this blog to have a shred of common sense. We pass along the reports like this and we note in our version some words of caution about believing it. After that, it’s up to the reader to decide what “the truth” is (as if there is one simple truth, which is another myth for another time).

You as the public gets to make choices about what you choose to read and believe — which is a much better situation than a few decades back when the media got to play gatekeeper on the information that got to you. Now you get to play gatekeeper, but that means you need to be educated and think about where stories come from and why.

You can decide for yourself if Gilbert and Sarver crushed a deal, or if they raised the points of other small market owners in that meeting and the union leaked the story just trying to bolster its case in the court of public opinion. You are the gatekeeper now.