Credit: lockersmash.com

I’m hoping that this is the last day of the lockout. I’m also unsure of whether it will be or not. Regardless, I’m doing this post now because I’ll be out all night cheering on MAC football that shouldn’t feature 100-something points, because Temple’s involved (and that’s hopefully when the labor situation resolves).

While I had been intending to focus on twitter-gaming this week, I, like many others, read Ken Berger’s article today on the “Hard-Line Nine”. It just so happens that the Sixers are among the hard-line teams. The following is an excerpt from Berger’s column, “Despite the risks, NBA’s hard-line owners not backing down”:

The driving force behind this reset offer is a group of hard-line owners who needed a tireless and significant working over by Stern in recent weeks to get them to agree to offer the players a 50 percent share of BRI and a system that technically has no hard team salary cap. According to multiple people familiar with ownership dynamics, the effort Stern had to engage in to rein in the hard-liners and make the proposal that is on the table until 5 p.m. Wednesday should not be underestimated.

“They’re all good with 50-50,” one of the people briefed on the negotiations said of the owners. “David had to push and pull to get them all there, but they’re there. So why not give it to all the players and let them say, ‘Yay or nay?’ ”

…

In recent days, multiple people with direct knowledge of negotiations have identified the nine teams pushing the hardest for a draconian rollback of salaries and rules governing player contracts and team payrolls. According to those people, the teams holding the hardest line in negotiations have been Atlanta, Charlotte, Indiana, Memphis, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Portland and Washington. These nine owners or ownership groups have been trying, with increasing success in recent weeks, to recruit more moderate owners to their cause. If the players reject the deal on the table, the NBA will be turned over to the Hard-Line Nine, and it won’t be pretty. “Nuclear winter,” as Kobe Bryant referred to it in an interview with Yahoo Sports, just about sums it up.

As has been the theme of lockout coverage on this blog, everyone, individually, has an agenda.

(more…)

Credit: charlierose.com

We’re two days away from the arbitrary D-Day, so things could get interesting, especially tomorrow. But I’m kinda sick of talking about all that crap. So we’ll play a few twitter games over the next few days.

Tonight: #FakeBroussardTweets, from today (and courtesy of @AdamKoscielak, editor at Sun N’ Gun, who was also about the only person besides me to try this specific hashtag out)

The inspiration: from Chris Broussard’s Twitter account today. It’s possibly the worst tweet of “sources” ever. Why? Well, it took sources to say that there won’t be a consensus in the player’s voting. No crap. I could have told you that. Any NBA fan could have told you that. But our obsession of sources somehow makes it “more official”.

And if you have any good ones, use the hashtag #FakeBroussardTweets on Twitter. These might not be that “good”, but it’s my best shot.

From earlier:

Sources tell me that they might actually not be sources. #FakeBroussardTweets

Here’s one on politics:

Some people may want to vote for Obama in 2012, while others may vote against him: “There’s two different parties to choose from…”

Here’s one on competitive balance in the NBA:

Some owners think competitive balance is a key issue in these negotiations, while others ignore it: “Not everyone is focused on it…”

Here’s Broussard’s sources on the impact of the Sixers new ownership:

Some think they can improve the team’s value, while others think they will decrease it: “We aren’t entirely sure yet…”

And finally, here’s Broussard on the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Some think they can create social change, while others protest on principle “We aren’t very well organized but there’s a lot of us…”