Stale contracts provide new ammunition in this NBA labor battle

If there was ever a moment to crystallize why there very well may not be an NBA season and what this is about, it came when Mark Cuban spoke freely about a recurring frustration among his peers: stale contracts.

“When we had Tariq Abdul-Wahad, he didn’t seem to want to train, didn’t really want to practice — he really was interested in a lot of things besides basketball,” the Dallas owner said, according to three participants who attended the meeting, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.

Cuban added Abdul-Wahad, the former player whose physical ailments sidelined him for a full two seasons while with the Mavericks, had a guaranteed contract of six years, $40 million. “And I’m stuck with that,” he said, the participants remembered.

A lawyer for the players’ union then shot back that J.J. Barea, an emerging spark off the bench for the Mavericks en route to their first NBA championship, was making a pittance of $1 million for his considerable talent. “How about that? You’re getting a bargain in a guy like J.J. Barea.”

Finally, NBA Commissioner David Stern could not take it anymore.

“All right, you want to go tit for tat, I’ll go tit for tat,” Stern said, according to the participants. “I’ll see you J.J. Barea and raise you Eddy Curry.”

A shot to the gut, just like that.

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cause as bad as Lewis’s $19 million-plus deal per year was for a player with declining numbers the past three seasons, at least they only had to have his contract around for two years instead of three.

It’s why Deron Williams has already signed with a team in Turkey, and Kevin Durant might not be far behind.

“We’re still negotiating and exchanging proposals back and forth,” said Durant’s agent, Aaron Goodwin, after he took in the best game featuring NBA players anyone might see for a while, the Goodman-Drew league pro-am challenge at Trinity University in Northeast Washington last Saturday.

Goodwin later mentioned Russia, Spain, France and Italy as possibilities if a deal with the Turkish team could not be worked out. “We’re definitely looking to have an option if the lockout continues, either [Turkey] or another country. Most [agents] are taking the position that players are going to miss games and we need to look at other alternatives.”