Everybody wanted to see the NBA owners and players open up negotiations again — if there is any hope of NBA games on Christmas a deal is going to be need to be reached by the start of next week. Whether a judge ordered it or if someone just picked up the phone, it didn’t matter.
And they are talking again, according to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo. Here are his tweets.NBA and players resumed talks on Tuesday to try and end the lockout before the cancellation of Christmas games, two sources told Y! Sports.
Talks were expected to continue today, sources said, and one league source tells Y!: “We should know more by later this evening.”
Derek Fisher isn’t a part of the talks now, sources say.
Technically these are “settlement negotiations” to end the players’ anti-trust lawsuits, so the talks are between the league and the attorneys for the players, as well as Billy Hunter (part of the NBA’s legal team). Fisher is currently president of a trade union not authorized to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement, so he has no seat at the table.
How the negotiations go may depend on what the sides see as the starting point. If the owners are still using the last offer David Stern made to the players — a 50/50 split of revenues and a soft cap with a stiff luxury tax — the sides may not be far apart. If Stern is at his “reset” offer of 47/53 revenue split with basically a hard cap, they are doomed. What’s more, union officials have suggested their best offer may have come off the table as well. We’ll see.
But at least they are talking. We are back to that.