Despite threat, NBA players refuse to cave

Derek Fisher said he doesn't see a way for a deal to get done before the Wednesday deadline if owners don't make more compromises. (AP)

NEW YORK — The NBA players’ union has called David Stern’s bluff — and it’s done so with a smile.

Facing a take-it-or-leave-it deadline amid rumors of reserved conference rooms for negotiations on Wednesday and the possible cancellation of games through Christmas (a rumor the league denied), union officials met here Tuesday and made it clear they wouldn’t accept owners’ latest offer. They also made it clear they’re not too worried about Stern’s 5 p.m. Wednesday deadline, when the commissioner will supposedly pull the current offer and replace it with a harsher one.

The union put on a united face Tuesday, saying it barely discussed the possibility of decertifying and hinting that it will almost certainly meet with owners Wednesday in a last-ditch effort to make a deal. When Bill Clinton, who was in town to promote his new book, Back to Work (the irony!), strode through the hotel lobby after the press conference, the players were practically giddy. “You’re with the players’ union now!” vice president Mo Williams shouted. “He’s with us!”

(UPDATE: Players and owners are reportedly set to meet at 1 p.m. Wednesday in a last-ditch effort to reach a deal.)

The players essentially kept things status quo, which is newsworthy considering the clock ticking on Stern’s ultimatum. They emerged from the room with a clear message: We have volunteered to take 51 percent of the league’s $4 billion in basketball-related income (BRI) instead of the 57 percent we used to get, and we would even go down to 50-50, but we will not bend any more on the structure of the salary cap and luxury tax.

“Without improvements in the system,” union president Derek Fisher said, “we don’t see a way of getting a deal done between now and the end of business tomorrow.”

The question now is: Will the league give on those system issues if the players take a 50-50 split of BRI? And if they don’t, will the players cave?

The players and union officials I talked to after the press conference all focused on the cap and tax issues. They said they will fight the league’s current set of proposals that would make it harder for teams that pay the luxury tax in one season to spend money during the next one. The league wants to ban such teams from using the full mid-level exception, replacing it with a mini mid-level worth half as much ($2.5 million) and available only every other year. It wants to punish teams that pay the tax more than twice in any five-year span with higher tax rates the third time such teams cross the tax line. It wants to prohibit tax teams from acquiring players via sign-and-trade deals.

“All of that is taking a bit of freedom away from guys,” Williams told SI.com. “It impacts a lot of us — over 50 percent of the league.”

It may seem silly that players are going to war over these system issues because as a whole they will be guaranteed a set percentage of the league’s BRI. Why do the players care about these esoteric cap and tax rules if they are getting the same amount of money overall regardless?

As has been made clear before, the players justifiably fear a harder cap and tax system would squeeze salaries for their middle class. Removing tax teams from the mid-level market takes away high-paying jobs and robs free agents of a key source of leverage. And union officials are adamant that limitations on sign-and-trade transactions and the proposed ban on extend-and-trade deals — like the one that sent Carmelo Anthony to the Knicks — remove more flexibility and leverage from the system. Those things may not affect a majority of players, but they impact enough for the union to fight as long as it can.

“We expect the league to stick to its guns,” Al Horford told SI.com in regard to Stern’s threat to pull the current offer. “But we need a few things to change in their proposal.”

Horford said the players spent the most time talking about the mid-level exception, but that they were also concerned about the owners’ proposal to place more of each player’s paycheck in an escrow fund. The league has used the escrow fund since 1998 to make sure players get only the percentage of revenue to which they are entitled — nothing more or less. If player salaries add up to more than that set percentage, the owners keep as much of the escrow as necessary; if player salaries don’t reach the guaranteed level, the owners return the escrow.

The escrow system does carry one risk for owners: If they negotiate such fat contracts for players that even the escrow does not cover the full amount, the owners have to pay the difference out of their own pockets.

The owners want to change that in this deal by essentially guaranteeing the escrow will cover any overpayment, union officials and players told SI.com last Thursday. They want to place 10 percent of each player’s check in escrow, up from 8 percent last season. If the escrow money is still not enough — if the owners have basically agreed to pay the players too much in any given season — they want to rectify it the following season by keeping more of the escrow than they’d normally be entitled, players and union officials said.

Horford, Williams and Keyon Dooling, a member of the union’s executive committee, each said the escrow fund was a major topic during the union’s meeting.

Some other nuggets:

• Restricted free agency has returned as a hot topic late in the game, per two sources close to to talks. The union wants players coming off their rookie deals to be eligible for larger raises and larger qualifying offers — the minimum amount teams must offer to keep the right to match any competing offer. The league has rejected these proposals, though it has indicated flexibility on restricted free agency in general.

• The two sides are still apart on the small but important issue of broadening the salary-matching requirement for trades. Under the old rules, a team over the cap could take back only 125 percent (plus $100,000) of the salary it sent out in a trade, so that the salaries would nearly have to match. The union has proposed bumping that gap all the way to 200 percent for teams below the luxury tax line, while the league has offered to go to 150 percent — with a bright line rule that the total salary difference in any trade cannot exceed $5 million, per a source close to the talks.

Teams in luxury tax territory would face the 125 percent limitation under proposals from both sides.

• It’s safe to say tensions between Stern and Jeffrey Kessler, the union’s lead outside counsel and a veteran of these labor wars, are at their highest level ever. Kessler today told the Washington Post that Stern is treating his players like ”planation workers” — the same loaded language Bryant Gumbel used recently to describe Stern — and the commissioner fired back by calling Kessler’s conduct “despicable.”