The NBA lockout endures. And critical dates are approaching. The owners and the players need to come to a resolution soon, or otherwise the season is in danger of shorting out. Games will definitely be lost, and no one knows what exactly the end game will be then.
Phoenix Suns guard Jared Dudley is one of the more popular players when it comes to the social media world, and he is the player rep for the team players union. He was asked about the lockout, and where he felt things were going. Brian T. Smith of the Salt Lake Tribune with the report.
Whether the increasing talk of decertification is distracting: I don't know if it hurts or not. At the end of the day it's going to come down to money, and basically how much the players are willing to give up. Because the owners really aren't right now willing to give up some. We already had an offer giveback, I think it was $200-300 million. We're trying to cut their losses as much as they can. For them … we're $800 million apart. So, is the decertification distracting? To me, it's not. To me, it's an option. It's an option that some of us are going to have to discuss. If we do do it, we have to do it the right way. But hopefully we don't have to. Hopefully we can sit down like they were doing last week and, hey, let's get to a common number. The hard cap? As a player myself, no guaranteed deals — that's basically what a hard cap is; no guaranteed contracts. It's not football. It's not injuries and everything. I understand that the common thing is they don't want players that make a lot of money not playing. Look, if you were a business or you were a restaurant, you don't pay someone that you think's not [working]. We're not going to put it all on the owners. We're going to take some of the blame. But, hey, we're willing to work on it. We're just not willing to give up guaranteed contracts and $800 million.
Again, a lot of what's going to happen will depend on how much the NBPA decides to concede to the owners. The owners seem to expect the players to cave because of their need to play basketball. The players seem hopeful that they'll be able to hold and not give up too much in the new agreement, but it might require sacrificing games--or worse, taking on the idea of decertification, the one bargaining chip the players have left.
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