No deal, but progress warrants more talks

David Stern's 5 p.m. ultimatum passed without a peep as players and owners negotiated into the early hours of Thursday. (AP)

NEW YORK — First the bad news: There is still no deal to save the 2011-12 NBA season. After meeting for 12 hours, into early Thursday, players and owners are still divided on several key system issues, made little to no progress on some of them (including luxury-tax penalties) and just haven’t been able to mix everything up into a deal both parties can accept, according to their public statements and a source close to the matter.

All the parts move together, and the league has not bent far enough on the system parts — the cap and tax rules that govern how much teams can spend — for the union to feel comfortable committing (publicly, at least) to a 50-50 split of the league’s nearly $4 billion in basketball-related income.

There remain doubts in some corners about commissioner David Stern’s ability to sell a deal with the current general parameters to a majority of the league’s owners, according to SI.com’s Sam Amick.

A separate source close to the union insisted Wednesday that it could gather enough signatures — at least 130, or 30 percent of players — to file for decertification within 24 hours. Players are ready to go if things go badly. This is fragile progress, and statements like this from Stern are not encouraging:

“We’re not failing and we’re not succeeding. We’re just there.”

But now the good news: Things have not reached a new breaking point yet. Stern’s 5 p.m. ultimatum passed without a peep, giving the impression players successfully called his bluff and forcing the commissioner to explain (rather awkwardly) that the ultimatum would only kick in when “this session” ends. “Whether it ends today or tomorrow, that’s when our offer reverts” to the much harsher one that includes a hard salary cap and  53-47 revenue split in the owners’ favor, Stern told reporters. “But we weren’t, in the middle of a discussion, going to say, ‘It’s 5 o’clock, it’s all over,’” Stern said. “We’re trying to demonstrate our good faith.”

And the two sides did make progress on a few of the half-dozen system issues dividing them, according to Yahoo!’s Adrian Wojarnowski and NBA.com’s David Aldridge. The league has softened its proposal to take the full mid-level exception from teams that pay the luxury tax and replace it with a miniature mid-level worth half as much, according to one source familiar with the matter. The union has fought against measures that would, in its view, make the luxury tax operate like a hard salary cap and remove the league’s biggest spenders from the free-agent market. The union has argued such measures would redistribute salary away from middle-class veterans and toward superstars, stifle freedom of movement and do little to create competitive balance among teams.

The mid-level exception is a crucial battleground, and the two sides aren’t close to an agreement there despite the league’s move to bat around a variety of potential compromises on Wednesday, per a source. But at least they are talking, and there is incremental progress — enough progress to at least justify another meeting Thursday at noon, according to Stern, union president Derek Fisher and union executive director Billy Hunter. Fisher even allowed that the two sides would try to “finish this out” on Thursday, though it’s dangerous to read too much into sleepy comments delivered after 12 hours of talking and number-crunching. (Stern apparently made his own such tantalizing comment while he chatted with Kevin Murphy, the union’s outside economist, as everyone scattered from the hotel.)

But, really, this is status quo more than anything else. The two sides still remain at odds over the luxury tax, with the union objecting especially to extra-tough penalties for teams that pay the tax three or more times in any five-year span. They are still fighting over the length of the CBA itself, with the league pushing for a 10-year deal (with a possible opt-out for the union after Year 7) and the union fighting for an opt out after Year 6, said a source. That battle is related to the timing of the league’s next national television deal, which kicks in after the 2015-16 season and should be far more lucrative than the current one. The pie will get bigger then and the union wants an immediate chance — via opting out of a collective bargaining agreement that will be a step back for it — to fight for a bigger slice of that pie.

There is progress, but it is fragile, with the hard-line owners looming behind Stern and the potential for decertification to undercut the union and its leadership. If you believe in either of those threats — and it’s unclear whether either side is really troubled by them at this point — then making a deal soon would be important. Until tomorrow.