Instead of portraying this as another owner-driven proposal, with an ultimatum to accept it or get slapped with a far worse one, it should've been described as the product of both sides' work and the best both sides could do. Players are tired of hearing Stern deliver ultimatums. They're tired of being backed into a corner, tired of having Stern say duplicitously that he won't negotiate in the media -- except for all the times he's negotiated in the media.
If anybody knows that it's cool to be good at what you do, but that flaunting it just makes you come across as an arrogant show-off, it's professional athletes in general and basketball players in particular.
If anybody knows that it's cool to be good at what you do, but that flaunting it just makes you come across as an arrogant show-off, it's professional athletes in general and basketball players in particular.
So one way to avoid half the players in the league immediately turning on this proposal without even knowing what was in it would've been to stop showing everyone what a great negotiator and famous bully you are. A little more humility and a lot less gun-to-the-head, gotcha-moment cornering of the very people who make the money for these owners would've gone a long way.
If this is, indeed, the best the league and the union can do, it should've been presented in a way that didn't turn the players against it from the jump.
And yet there was Stern again Friday night, in a nationally televised interview with broadcast partner ESPN -- complicit in forcing this deal on the players whether it knows it or not -- pinning the blame for a lost season on the players if they don't accept his owners' offer.
"It's all in the hands of the players," Stern said.
And yet there was Stern again Friday night, in a nationally televised interview with broadcast partner ESPN -- complicit in forcing this deal on the players whether it knows it or not -- pinning the blame for a lost season on the players if they don't accept his owners' offer.
"It's all in the hands of the players," Stern said.
If Stern delivered an offer the players cannot accept, in an offensive manner that turned them against it before they even read it, then that part is on the commissioner and his hard-line owners -- some of whom are just hoping this thing blows up so they can see their 47-percent proposal on the scroll of the league's broadcast partner. If hard-line agents are mobilizing to torpedo this deal, whatever it is, without seriously walking through the alternatives, then shame on them, too.
Don't forget who won this negotiation in a landslide this week, but weren't happy until they got a monsoon and hurricane to go with it. There's such a thing as being careful what you wish for because you might just get it.
Source: Ken Berger, CBSSports.com
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