NBA winning public fight with players

This fight has grown nastier, more personal, in the past weeks. Privately, management insists that everything changed when the Boston Celtics’ Kevin Garnett(notes) walked into the negotiating room on Oct. 4. The owners knew it wouldn’t go well when Garnett started glowering across the table, sources said, like the league lawyers, owners and officials were opponents at the center jump. He was defiant, determined and downright ornery. He was K.G. Everyone knew Hunter had to cede to the wishes of the stars, and the stars demanded that the players stop making concessions to the owners.

As one league official said, “We were making progress, until Garnett [expletive] everything up.”

Easy for management to say, and yes, Stern spent the next meeting griping to Hunter and Fisher about the superstars parachuting into the meetings and usurping the process. Stern hounded the top union officials about who held the authority to make a deal with the NBA, about who was running things here. Within 24 hours Stern had canceled the season’s first two weeks and talks have ground to a stop.

Nevertheless, Garnett had every right to interject himself into the process. This is a stars league, and the NBA will need those stars to sell it again. To end this lockout with the best players in the league feeling left out of the discussion, left silent, everyone’s asking for trouble, because it will not be Donald Sterling and Robert Sarver and James Dolan bringing the NBA back in the public eye. It will be the best players. Whenever this ends, they had to be a part of the fight, the debate and, ultimately, the resolution.

“We can’t have completely poisoned waters here when this is over,” one front-office executive said. “Stern gets that, but I’m not sure all of our owners do. We have to have these guys on board, or where are we as a league?”