Decertification or disclaimation are the truly nuclear options.  Decertification is the one we’ve heard of for a while, where the players would vote to basically, legally say “The NBPA no longer represents our interests.”  It doesn’t mean the union doesn’t exist, which I’ve always thought, it simply means that the people involved (the players) are no longer using the NBPA (union) as their bargaining agent.

Disclaimation, and I don’t know if I’m using that correctly, I think the correct term is disclaimer of interest, is the union saying “We no longer represent the players,” sort of voluntarily.  It happens far more quickly than decertifying the NBPA.  The union is able to walk away, legally speaking, from the players.  Decertification would need a vote of something like 30% of the players, which of course takes time, maybe there’s a petition in there or something as well.

Now, technically, the union still exists however it no longer is acting in the interests of the players.  Ok, well, hmm, if that’s true, how come the lawyer who filed the anti-trust law suit held a press conference today outside of the offices of the NBPA?  Well, I guess, it’s really because it’s not actually stepping aside.  It’s not suing the NBA, in one law suit it’s Carmelo Anthony, Chauncey Billups, Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard and Leon Powe and in a seperate suit Caron Butler, Ben Gordon, Anthony Tolliver and Derrick Williams and “on behalf of all other similarly situated.”

Law suits, much like unions, are a foreign concept to me.  It’s never crossed my mind to sue someone.  I had some crappy jobs too and didn’t make what I was told I would make but I never thought a law suit would enable me to get what I was due.  Involving lawyers always seems to make things worse.  I watched the HBO documentary “Hot Coffee” and I was cheering for tort reform.  I’m that guy.  The players suing the owners after all their negotiations failed not just in one suit but in two different states and picking and choosing the districts that they think will be the most sympathetic to their cause is just beyond the pale, to me anyway.

There is a horrible spiral staircase straight to hell that this lockout has taken.  Each step makes us all reach for the dictionary and then we search our souls for what we would do in the same or similar situation.  I don’t want to be that guy who questions everything and finds issue with about 97% of it, but I am.  The call to declaim the Players Association is something like step 5 and it’s pretty much the one that makes the least sense to me.  Step one was the previous CBA.  Step two was both sides sort of resigning to the fact that they were headed to lockout and an extended one at that.  Step three, not having negotiation sessions until the end of September.  Step four was giving voice to the hard-liners, whether it was the players conference calls last week or the board of governors meeting where Michael Jordan got his “hard-line” card punched. Now, there’s a complete shut down of negotiations and the players have resorted to legal manuvering.

I’m having a hard time explaining why the disclaimer of the union is so unpalpable to me.  The players as a group, formed a union, the NBPA.  They negotiated all the deals up until now.  As I said, the union doesn’t go away, but they want the ability to sue the NBA and the owners so they had to set the union aside for a while.  It’s disingenuous.  I can’t agree with something like that.  I know it’s a means to an end, that the players have to do something to try and get their way and this is the final tool they have.  I think, whoever said it, whether it was twitter or a blog I read, was right on when they said that the agents and lawyers pushing for disclaimation were more concerned for their long term ability to make money than for their client’s relatively short time to make it themselves.  Average salary last season was $5.765 million.  If you figure there are around 400 players in the NBA at any given time and the latest offer that the players rejected was a band around 50%, the difference is 7% from last year, the math comes out to about $700,000 per player per year difference.  Really?

I’m getting a little delirious here but, if all that math is right, and it makes sense, players are giving up $5.765 on average to save themselves $3.5 million.  The average length of an NBA career is 5 years, at $700,000 (the share if you take 7% of $4 billion and divide it by 400 players), yeah, that’s $3.5 million and Larry Coon tells me $5.765 million is the average player

I’m having such bold thoughts at the moment because when you do a google news search on the Charlotte Bobcats you find story after story about Michael Jeffery Jordan.  As the world’s most famous (former) athlete, he somehow wedged owning my favorite NBA team into his packed plate.  It used to be, “Michael Jordan launched his 25th variation of his ‘Air Jordan’ line of shoes.  Jordan also owns the Charlotte Bobcats.”  Now, it’s a bit different:  ”Michael Jordan, evil, greedy owner of the Charlotte Bobcats (a franchise with a losing record) has sold out and stabbed all basketball players, black people and anyone who liked him in his playing days directly in the back.” (more…)

Yeah, it's 2 years old and Flip Murray is in the pic but any excuse to show the NASCAR uniforms is well worth it.

I came in, slung my laptop bag down on the couch and my phone bleeps at me:  ”Charlotte at Orlando, 7:00PM.”  Son of a….

After a crap work day, being smacked in the face with the fact that I would not be seeing a Charlotte Bobcats opening night game in Orlando was the doo-doo cherry on top of my poopie sundae.

I knew it was coming. I mean we all knew that there would be missed games and it’s the feeling of sitting prepared as soon as they lift the lockout that made me forget that otherwise, I’d be tuned to whatever damn channel TWC lets me watch the game on tonight.  At this point, the roster isn’t even set.  I’m not sure Corey Maggette has met Coach Silas as an official member of the Bobcats.  I’m not so sure that brand new assistant Rob Werdann has met with any of the players at all.  We don’t even know if Charles Oakley is still on the payroll of the franchise.  I don’t even know if we’d have a center to start, maybe even play, depending on how Diop has dealt with his rehab from a ruptured Achilles.

As I type, the game would be getting on towards halftime.  Instead, ESPN has an extended SportsCenter followed by a college football game between Temple and Ohio.  TNT is showing back to back episodes of something called “The Mentalist.” We have “Transylvania at Kentucky” on my local Fox Sports Network.

I just have to share this, because it was striking to me.  My phone didn’t know those games were cancelled.  It blindly had the games loaded by some Google App or something.  It’s like if your great aunt died and you went to the funeral and all that and you knew she was gone, but it didn’t set in and really effect you until Thanksgiving came around and she wasn’t there.  I know, no games until at least December 1.  I get it David Stern.  But until today, I didn’t really miss it.  It didn’t set in.

I don’t want to beat this dead horse, but this sucks.  It sucks incredibly badly.

Andrew Barraclough is Senior Editor for RobertoGato.com, a Charlotte Bobcats Blog on theFansided Network.  Follow him on Twitter @therobertogato and Like the site on Facebook.

"Man, if Mr. Stern makes me miss Terra Nova again...."

I mean, you could be forced to watch Whitney.  You could be in one of those tribes in the Amazon that have never seen other people and think when a plane flies over it’s some kind of dark magic or an iron bird.  You could, I don’t know, be up in Massachusetts, be a Celtics fan, have 26 inches of snow before halloween, power out and the Patriots just lost, plus you’re still a Celtics fan.

It gets worse in life than not having any basketball to watch.  You could be the one to blame for taking basketball away from the world.  Who is that party we could blame?  Hmm.  Just about everyone involved, I’d say.  By my estimation, the owners hold all the cards, thus making the players at fault for not accepting the fate that they will be forced to accept at a later date.  The owners, supposedly being savvy businessmen that 9 times out of 10 made their money elsewhere before buying an NBA team, should have managed their business better and not surmise that the only way to make up losses are to take it out of the players’ chunk.

I don’t know, maybe even the fans could be to blame.  If we had been attending games, putting money into the system, nah, not $300 million of it, but maybe.  Plus maybe we could have been putting pressure on the parties at the negotiating table before the last 6 weeks, maybe a deal would be done.  The media, as we all know, far from being casual observers, could have dug the rift a little deeper and a little wider.

All I know is, we won’t have basketball for at least a month.  Right now, every day they don’t make a deal is one more day deeper into the future we won’t see a game.  I had heard that David Stern has promised 82 games to both ABC/ESPN and TNT, in this Sam Amick piece, which is just epic.  As I saw on the late Friday night SportsCenter, Stern said “In light of the breakdown of talks, there will not be a full NBA season under any circumstances.”   Is he more depressed about breaking a promise to the networks or about not making a deal?   (more…)