NBA offers revised proposal, hope for season

Adam Silver and David Stern handed the union a revised offer that it will present to its player reps soon. (AP)

NEW YORK — There is still no deal after another marathon negotiating session between NBA players and owners. But there is another deadline set by commissioner David Stern.

Thursday’s 11-hour meeting ended with the league giving players a choice: accept a revised offer on the table by the middle of next week or see that offer pulled and replaced with a new one — the harsh one Stern threatened to whip out earlier in the week.

“There comes a time when you have to be through with negotiations,” Stern said. “And we are.” He added that he is confident a majority of owners would approve this deal if the players accept it, even though some of those owners — by Stern’s own admission — don’t particularly like it.

If you think that exact summary could have applied to the breakdown of talks last Sunday, you’re right. That was when Stern gave the union until 5 p.m Wednesday to accept a deal that included a 50-50 split of the league’s approximate $4 billion in basketball-related income and a host of system changes that would make it harder for big-market teams to outspend rivals by huge amounts every season.

But three key things are different now, as Stern awaits word (to come next week) from the union’s executive committee and player representatives from each team — the same group that stared down his first ultimatum:

1. The calendar has moved up nearly a week, and every day that passes forces both sides closer to a decisive choice: accept a deal you don’t really like or risk the full season. That is a particularly painful choice for the players because they have made almost all of the meaningful concessions here. They have the alternative of dissolving their union and filing a monster antitrust suit against the league. A source close to the players has insisted for days now that they could gather the signatures necessary (they’d need roughly 130, or 30 percent of players, to sign) to start that process in 24 hours.

To be clear: The players can start that process via submitting that signed proposal to the National Labor Relations Board and continue talks with the league at the same time. But it still adds an unknown and volatile element to talks that are getting short on time.

2. The league produced the carrot of a 72-game season that would start Dec. 15. That would require the two sides to shake hands by around Wednesday because the league needs a month to get in gear, conduct free agency and hold training camps. And though it would involve some compression of the normal season schedule, it would not be as bad as a rumored 76- or 78-game season starting around the same time.

The union now knows exactly how many games’ worth of salary players could earn by taking this deal, and the public now has a shiny number on which to fixate.

3. The league, for now, is not moving much on its offer. There have been tweaks, but they are on the margins. The offer as a whole still includes the same extra hit for repeat taxpayers — teams that cross the tax line more than twice in any five-year span — as it did five days ago, according to a source close to the matter. It still bans tax teams from using the full mid-level exception, though the league has offered to give them a “mini” mid-level worth $3 million per year over a three-year deal, as Ken Berger of CBS Sports first reported. That’s a small bump from the league’s initial mini mid-level of $2.5 million over two years, but it does not appear to be a game-changer, and it might come with a stricter definition of what constitutes a “taxpaying team.”

The offer still includes limitations on tax teams using sign-and-trade transactions, though the league may have softened those limits, reports Berger.

There are other concessions. The league has offered the union the right to opt out of the new collective bargaining agreement after six years instead of seven. Players have sought that earlier opt-out in part to get a chance to negotiate a new (and presumably better) deal just as the league’s lucrative new national television contract kicks in, after the 2015-16 season. The NBA has also offered to create a new kind of exception for teams that begin the offseason under the cap. Such teams normally forfeit their rights to any cap exceptions, but owners have offered to allow teams a special $2.5 million exception if they start under the cap and then spend right up to it, as the Heat did in the summer of 2010.

Again, taken together, these tweaks do not appear to be game-changers, and if there was one thing that stuck out in Thursday’s meeting, it was the league’s firm commitment to achieving competitive balance through payroll equality. Deputy commissioner Adam Silver was adamant in the face of skepticism: “We believe we will be proven right over time,” he told reporters, “and that this new model, if the players agree to it, will create a better league.”

The league, in other words, does not seem to be ready to budge on the core issue of whether teams that pay the luxury tax should be able to spend freely. Union executive director Billy Hunter and president Derek Fisher said as much during their press conference. “There was some revision from the proposal we saw,” Fisher said, “but not enough.”

Added Hunter: “It’s not the greatest proposal in the world, but I have an obligation to at least present it to our membership.”

That membership rejected a similar proposal a week ago, testing Stern’s ultimatum and ultimately winning another week and a few concessions. Are those concessions enough, together with the pressure of the calendar, to force a vote of acceptance from the full membership? Or will the players test Stern again?

If the players do challenge the commissioner, what happens this time is uncertain — and potentially dangerous to the 2011-12 NBA season.