I love NBA players. Always the optomists and telling an adoring public what they want to hear.

ITs what they should do. Never hear a player say "Tonites game? Yeah, we gonna get killed!"

Stat is a good guy in my opinion and I like him.

Stoudemire Willing to Form New League

Posted By Alex Raskin On October 11, 2011 @ 9:18 pm In Main Page,NBA | No Comments

The NBA may have cancelled the first two weeks of the regular season, but Knicks power forward Amar’e Stoudemire is as busy as ever. In addition to playing charity basketball games during the NBA lockout, Stoudemire has taken up acting, gone back to school to study history, launched a fashion line and at a Foot Locker in mid-town Manhattan on Tuesday night, he presented onlookers with his new Nike sneaker.

With his entrepreneurial spirit running at top speed, Stoudemire also divulged his latest brain-storming efforts: a new basketball league.

“If we don’t go to Europe then let’s to start our own league,” Stoudemire told a group of reporters. “That’s how I see it. It’s very serious. Yeah. It’s very, very serious. It’s a matter of us coming up with a plan, blueprint and putting it together. So we’ll see how this lockout goes. If it goes one or two years, then we got to start our own league.”

That’s how Stoudemire had intended to end the interview, but he was persuaded to expand on that thought a few minutes later.

“If it don’t resolve then we’re thinking about starting our own league,” he continued. “Obviously we’re trying to get things started now as far as, you know, getting the lockout resolved. You know what I mean? We want to play NBA basketball. But if it doesn’t happen, what are we going to do? We can’t just sit around and not do anything.”

Stoudemire was asked if he had been approached by an outside party to start a league, to which he replied, “No.”

Another league, as it currently stands, is not an immediate concern of Stoudemire’s. Even while showing some New Yorkers the new Nike Air Max Sweep, he had a laundry list of tasks on the horizon.

One of the top things on Stoudemire’s “to-do” list is to bring his Knicks teammates together for a pre-training camp camp at the IMG facilities in Florida. Stoudemire has been keeping in touch with all the Knicks, even rookie Iman Shumpert (the two trained together briefly at Georgia Tech), but he says he wants to time the event to correspond to the beginning of the season.

“The season is now being pushed back even longer so the dates have been changed,” he said. “But I want to try to schedule it right around the time I feel that we’re getting close to starting the season so that way guys can start to take that momentum from that training camp on to our seven-to-10 day training camp and then on to the season.”

In the meantime Stoudemire says he’s staying in shape, working out his back injury, adding “skills” and maintaining his strength. Most importantly, Stoudemire says he’s “pain free” which should be a relief to Knicks fans who saw him suffering at the end of last season.

In addition to charity basketball games and acting—he’s been on “Entourage” and will appear in a new sitcom set to come out next month—Stoudemire says he plans on going back to Florida International University to continue studying history (“I’m always with history. Just connecting the dots.”).

When asked if he’d consider studying history in Europe, Stoudemire said that’s a possibility, but he’s not ready to consider playing there yet.

“As of right now, I haven’t thought about that far down the line,” Stoudemire said of playing in Europe.

“I received calls but I haven’t entertained them because of the fact that I’m trying to stay healthy,” he continued.

Stoudemire seems to have en endless energy reserve, but even he can’t put his attention to playing in Europe while he and the players are hoping to finish a new collective bargaining agreement with the NBA owners.

Besides, the first two weeks may have been cancelled, but the Knicks captain thinks a deal may be closer than we expect.

“I think after these two weeks of the regular season getting canceled, I think we’ll come to an agreement soon,” he said. “The owners don’t want a lockout. We don’t want a lockout. We both want to play basketball. It’s just a matter of us making it happen.”

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URL to article: http://www.hoopsworld.com/stoudemire-considers-forming-new-league/

Here is a stupid question and this might have been mentioned before....but... How are contracts treated in the lockout? If you have 1 year left in your contract and the season gets cancelled, then are you a free agent next year?

More importantly, what happens to those poor agents when their clients are not getting paid?