With a federal mediator prodding them along, and the stakes increasing by the day, negotiators for the N.B.A. and its players union returned to the bargaining table for a marathon session that began early Tuesday and bled into Wednesday morning.
The meeting in Midtown Manhattan lasted 16 hours, ending just after 2 a.m. The parties left without speaking to reporters, at the behest of the mediator, George Cohen. They are scheduled to resume talks at 10 a.m., giving everyone precious little time to rest.
“The mediator has asked both sides to refrain from commenting,” said Mike Bass, an N.B.A. spokesman. “Both sides have agreed to abide by his wishes.”
There was no outward hint of progress -- other than the length of the meeting and the agreement to continue the talks.
The N.B.A.’s labor-relations committee had been scheduled to meet on its own Wednesday morning, in preparation for a full owners meeting in the evening. Instead, the 12 committee members will again gather with union officials and Cohen in an attempt to break a stalemate that has already wiped out two weeks of the regular season.
The owners meetings are scheduled to continue on Thursday, but they could be postponed if progress is being made at the bargaining table.
If the duration of Tuesday’s meeting inspired some hope for fans, it also came with a large caution flag: the parties have had several lengthy bargaining sessions in the past six weeks, all of which ended without an agreement. This is the first time, however, that the talks have been steered by an outside party.
The lockout is now into its 111th day, the second longest labor crisis in N.B.A. history. The first two weeks of the season – 100 games scheduled between Nov. 1-14 -- were canceled last week, after the last round of talks between owners and players broke down. They appeared to be headed for a long standoff.
Cohen, who last spring attempted to resolve the N.F.L. lockout – to little effect -- brought the parties together again, in hopes of creating the foundation for a labor deal that has eluded them for two years.
Cohen arrived with impeccable credentials and the imprimatur of the federal government, but with no authority to compel an agreement. He was armed only with the powers of persuasion, and the ability to offer each party some cover to make a compromise.
But there had been no shortage of meetings, proposals, ideas and suggestions. By the time mediation began, N.B.A. and union leaders had logged 60-plus hours at the bargaining table over a six-week span. Yet they remained hundreds of millions apart, with an ever-widening rhetorical gulf.
Commissioner David Stern last week ominously hinted that the league’s Christmas games could be canceled if an agreement was not reached soon. Stern has been on a virtual media tour for the last several days, hammering the N.B.A.’s talking points in a furious effort to win the public’s support.
“It’s time to make the deal,” Stern said in an interview with WFAN last Thursday, referring to the mediation session. “If we don’t make it on Tuesday, my gut –this is not in my official capacity of canceling games – but my gut is that we won’t be playing on Christmas Day.”
Stern then implied that the entire season might be at risk.
Derek Fisher, the union president, fired back the next day, saying, “My gut tells me that there’s no way Commissioner Stern and the N.B.A. would damage their business by making us miss a whole season.”
Perhaps not, but more games will be canceled soon in the absence of a deal.
Talks have been stalled on two primary issues: the division of revenue between owners and players and the structure of the league’s salary-cap system. Owners want to reduce the players’ share of revenues to as low as 47 percent, from the current 57 percent. The players have offered to reduce their share to 53 percent. The owners have dropped their demand for a hard salary cap but they remain determined to place severe new restrictions on the soft-cap system, which the players oppose.
Both sides brought their full negotiating committees on Tuesday. Twelve owners, all members of the N.B.A.’s labor-relations committee, joined Stern and the deputy commissioner Adam Silver. Eight players from the union’s executive board joined Fisher and Billy Hunter, the union’s executive director.
As the lockout dragged on, the N.B.A. approved the sale of the Philadelphia 76ers to a group led by Joshua Harris, a New York billionaire. The club sold for $280 million, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, considerably less than its $350 million value, as estimated by Forbes magazine.
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