N.B.A. and Union to Hold a Rare Bargaining Session
By HOWARD BECK
Lead negotiators for the N.B.A. and its players union will hold a bargaining session next week — just the second since the lockout began — with an unofficial deadline fast approaching to save the start of training camps. Four people involved in the talks said the sides planned to meet in New York, although the day and the location were still being arranged. They might not be in a conciliatory mood when they arrive.

Union leaders are still steaming over comments made by Commissioner David Stern in a recent podcast with ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons. In the interview, Stern insinuated that players were not well informed on the issues. He also framed the economic debate in terms that the union considered misleading — most notably an assertion that players were being asked to take a pay cut of just 8 percent.

“It's not true,” Maurice Evans, a member of the union’s executive board, said Wednesday in a telephone interview. He added, “Blatantly, it's just lying.”

The N.B.A.'s proposal calls for an 8 percent cut in the first year, but it virtually freezes player salaries for the next six years, for a total reduction of $7.6 billion in player salaries, according to the union.

“Once you explain that to the guys, the guys understand more fully what's separating us and why we don't have a deal,” Evans said from Chicago, where the union is holding a membership meeting Thursday. Union leaders have been holding meetings across the country to keep players informed — and to correct the record when necessary, they say.

“While we haven’t heard Maurice Evans’s remarks, I can confirm that we last proposed $2 billion in total player compensation for next season, an 8 percent reduction from last season,” the N.B.A. spokesman Mike Bass said.

Officials on both sides of the labor divide have pointed toward Labor Day as a key milestone, because training camps are scheduled to open the week of Oct. 2.

Next week’s bargaining session may be the first critical moment of the two-month standoff.

“I think so,” Evans said. “Hopefully, the owners will have some kind of sense of urgency, sooner rather than later, for everybody’s sake.”

Evans called the elimination of the exceptions a “total slap in the face to Michael Jordan and all the great players that came before us.”

...considering Michael Jordan is actually on the other side of the table and has publicly stated that he's in favor of a hard cap to help small market teams.