David Stern does not act like a plantation owner, nobody should ever argue that he does, but he assuredly sits high upon his throne, staring at his subjects from afar with condescension beaming from his eyes and a smirk, always a smirk, scarring his face. The NBA is Stern’s league, he’s governed since 1984 as the head honcho, and now, in David Boies, he might finally have met his match.

Boies has been on the NBA scene for one day, and already he stated a plan to use Stern’s own words against him. Judging by his prodigious track record, by his famed work ethic, Boies has already pored over each word Stern uttered in the past two years and will highlight every legal mistake that slipped out of Stern’s mouth. Boies is the man who beat Microsoft, the man who once said Microsoft’s bushel of lawyers didn’t scare him because they didn’t look as tired as he did, and Stern and the NBA are his latest targets.

Stern has forged a reputation recently by steamrolling everybody in his way, threatening and strong-arming the NBA’s negotiations at every turn. But Boies does not scare. Asked by Vanity Fair how he would prepare another lawyer to try a case against himself, Boies exuded self-confidence.

“You’d tell him that Boies is smarter than you may initially think, he’s more careful than you may think—don’t underestimate him,” he said. “Don’t try to play games with him, because you’re going to lose those games and make yourself look bad. He is not going to forget whether or not you’ve answered his questions.… You can’t impress him. You can’t make him mad. You can’t discourage him. You can’t embarrass him. None of the techniques you use generally to deal with people are going to work with him.”

In other words, none of Stern’s bullying tactics will work, not anymore, not now that the union has dissolved and the world’s most well-respected trial lawyer leads the players.

The NBA players are now following someone they should trust, which may or may not have been the case when Billy Hunter reigned supreme. Hunter is still technically the figurehead behind the players’ new trade association, but these negotiations have moved to the courts, where David Boies cracks the whip.

Boies is a dyslexic, did you know that? Still, he graduated second in the Yale Law School Class of 1966. When he left the Cravath law firm in 1997, the move made the New York Times’ front page. “In the legal industry, it’s like it’s 1956 and Mickey Mantle is suddenly a free agent,” Steven Brill, the founder of Court TV, said at the time. If you want to read more about Boies, I suggest you read this Vanity Fair profile from 2000. You will find that he dresses like an every-man, yet is actually anything but. He jumps from high-profile case to high-profile case, doing his job and then moving along to the next courtroom, and people who know him note that every word he says, everything he does, is calculated.

“I don’t believe anything David does is an accident,” said one lawyer who knows him well. “They say of great trial lawyers that they eliminate to the extent possible accident and uncertainty and surprise in the courtroom. David is not a great trial lawyer by accident. He has the ability to anticipate every possibility and permutation and prepare himself for it, perhaps without seeming to have done so. David thinks more moves ahead than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“To understand David, you have to understand that you may not understand him,” he concluded.

I don’t know exactly where the NBA players are going and I’m not sure exactly how they got here. You can easily argue that disclaiming interest was a tactical error, that Billy Hunter never should have let it get to this point, at least not this late in the game. Even if you choose to argue otherwise, the state of the NBA is pathetic — the league should be two weeks into its season,  but instead it braces itself for legal warfare.

I don’t claim to be a lawyer and I don’t know very much about these terms I now must familiarize myself with, phrases like “summary judgment” and “the Sherman Act.” I’m not sure whether the NBA will win or lose the court proceedings, I don’t know whether owners will reopen negotiations due to fear, and I have no idea whether the disclaimer of interest is only prolonging the inevitable, which is that the players will sign a lopsided deal. These NBA labor talks have entered uncharted territory — this is the first time the players union has ever dissolved, and nobody really knows what will happen from here.

Wherever this convoluted battle goes, for better or worse, David Stern finally has a competitor equal to the task. The smirk remains, for now, but surely Boies aims to smack it off.

The NBA players union is ready to decertify, and could begin the process as early as Friday. If the players do not accept the owners’ revised proposal, expect this negotiation (can I call it a negotiation if neither side really does much negotiating?) to get uglier than the form on Kevin Martin’s jump shot. (CBS Sports)

Another outcome likely will begin to unfold Friday before the union even decides whether to accept the proposal — and would continue to progress regardless of the outcome of next week’s player rep meeting: Agents dissatisfied with the deal the union has negotiated and the intransigence of league negotiators already have more than 200 signatures on decertification petitions which are ready to be submitted to the National Labor Relations Board requesting a vote to dissolve the union, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Such a move would threaten to torpedo whatever support there is among the union membership to approve the owners’ offer, and if it resulted in the players deciding not to vote on the proposal or voting it down, could throw the 2 1-2 year negotiations into the chaos of an anti-trust lawsuit — virtually guaranteeing that the 2011-12 season would be lost.

Regardless of whether the owners moved on many key issues (and reports say they didn’t budge much from their last offer), the players must consider accepting the proposal. Yes, the owners are predatory creatures designed to suck the players’ blood. Yes, the players have lost this “negotiation,” if you can call it that, by a landslide. Yes, free agency might be slightly restricted and the cap would remain hard-ish, or at least a lot harder than it used to. But the alternative is scary: the owners will cut back their offer, causing a long legal battle during which the players will use a tactic that, according to Ken Berger, hasn’t worked in the history of professional sports.

Right now, the players can either pass to Joel Anthony posting up, allow Rajon Rondo to launch a three pointer, or bring Bruce Bowen out of retirement to run an isolation play. In other words, the options are not good.

Reasonably, as long as they are trying to make a deal with the players rather than pancake them, the NBA owners would accept the 50-50 BRI split players offered on Tuesday, make system tweaks by Wednesday, and David Stern and Billy Hunter would shake hands with a tentative agreement Wednesday evening.

In a negotiation that was initially expected to come down to money, players have already agreed to $330 million worth of givebacks per season, according to Ken Berger, more than exceeding last year’s reported NBA losses. The problem is, NBA owners have been portrayed as far from reasonable, and David Stern may not hold any more power among them.

Hunter was the latest to question whether Stern is anything more than a puppet for the owners at this point. He actually wondered aloud whether Stern is now a “hostage” of NBA owners. (CBS Sports)

I asked Hunter, knowing Stern for as long as he has, how he expected the commissioner to react to having his bluff called Tuesday.

“I don’t know that we’ve ever called his bluff,” Hunter said.

“I think you just did,” I replied.

“It’s yet to be seen,” Hunter said. “My concern and what I’m trying to determine is whether or not David may be a hostage in his own camp. That’s what kind of concerns me, what’s going on over there. He may not have the sway that he once had. He’s been a hell of a commissioner, but I’m not sure.”

This thought is scarier than Rajon Rondo dribbling the ball thirty feet from the basket, Celtics down three, Game 7 of the NBA Finals, no time left to pass to anyone.*

What if Stern really isn’t calling the shots anymore? What if Dan Gilbert, Paul Allen and Michael Jordan have somehow seized control of the negotiations? What if the NBA owners really won’t budge from the proposal they made this weekend, which the players already decided they could not accept?

What then?

A prolonged legal battle centering on decertification of the union? The owners reversion to offering players 47% of the BRI split and a (mostly) hard cap, which the players would never accept? One year lost? More?

Hunter has already moved the players farther than they reasonably could have been expected to move. It’s David Stern’s turn now, unless he is nothing but a tool for the owners to boss around.

If Hunter’s worries are well-founded, if Stern is really being controlled, these lockout negotiations could soon resemble what Kobe Bryant called “nuclear winter.”

*Who am I kidding? At this point, if you told me the next NBA season would come down to one play, Celtics down three, Game 7 of the NBA Finals, Rondo shooting a thirty-foot jumper, I would A) call you a liar, and then B) jump for joy at the possibility you might be telling the truth.

Paul Pierce indeed led the NBA players’ push for decertification, but he did it with the consent of players union chief Billy Hunter.

Despite being the Celtics’ player representative, Pierce was the only team rep not present at the mandatory union meeting yesterday. ESPN cited sources who said Pierce did not miss the meeting as a boycott.

Pierce’s decertification push has succeeded, or rather, it has advanced to the next step. Hunter said the league garnered enough petition signatures to force a decertification vote, which would take place 45-60 days after the players association officially files the decertification with the National Labor Relations Board — if, that is, the players decide to file the motion. The players are waiting on the results of Wednesday’s negotiations, when David Stern’s ultimatum looms like an approaching tornado. (CBS Sports)

“I think Paul is kind of frustrated with the process,” Hunter said after a news conference in which the players said they were rejecting the league’s latest take-it-or-leave-it proposal. “Paul has been at the bargaining table and he doesn’t feel that we’ve been making any kind of progress. And so he thought that maybe that’s necessary. We don’t have a lot of options and that’s the option Paul was pushing – still is pushing.”

Asked in a small group of reporters if he’s cool with that, Hunter said, “Of course. Listen, I’m cool with Paul and all these guys. I think it’s very important. I’m happy that Paul and the others are involved in the process. That’s always been the problem with athletes, that a lot of stuff is foisted on them and they have no input. Paul has been actively engaged, he understands, he’s been in five or six of our negotiating sessions, he talks to me, and when they had the (decertification) calls, he called and let me know that they were having the calls. And I said, ‘Hey, I’m not at all opposed to you doing that.’ … I endorse what Paul did.”

If nothing else, the players themselves have remained strong during the negotiations. David Stern has been pummeling them with haymakers and ultimatums. Reports have this hardline owner demanding one thing and that hardline owner demanding another. But the players themselves have remained strong. Other than JaVale McGee’s brain fart (vintage McGee), when he told reporters players were ready to fold, then subsequently denied the comments despite video evidence, and a few tweets or text messages here and there, most players seem banded together willing to follow Hunter and Derek Fisher’s lead.

Of course, the players BRI split request has dwindled to 50% down from last year’s 57%, owners haven’t made any concessions whatsoever relative to the prior CBA, and according to Ken Berger the players have already conceded more money ($330 million) for the coming year than the owners claim to have lost last season. So maybe I’m giving the players too much credit.

Wednesday’s negotiations (assuming the two sides meet) are likely to lead to a resolution, or a cloudy future of legal maneuvering and hardline stances. I vote the former, though I wouldn’t bet my (admittedly minuscule) life savings.

Decertification isn’t the only option to dissolve the NBA players association and apply pressure to the owners, according to Ken Berger. There’s also a slim possibility Billy Hunter could step aside as executive director of the union, in a legal maneuver called a disclaimer of interest.

The legal term for this would be a disclaimer of interest, which would only require a letter from Hunter to Stern advising him that the National Basketball Players Association no longer exists as the bargaining unit for the players.

The advantage of this for the players would be that, once the letter is sent, their attorneys would not have to wait 45-60 days for the National Labor Relations Board to authorize an election to formally dissolve the union. With a disclaimer of interest, the players could almost immediately commence an anti-trust lawsuit against the NBA, said Gabe Feldman, director of the Sports Law Center at Tulane University.

“The owners have threatened to, in some ways, end the negotiations if (the players) don’t agree by Wednesday, because 47 percent is a non-starter — we all know that,” Feldman said. “So the owners have given the players an ultimatum with an artificial deadline, and it may force the players to respond with their own ultimatum. But both are destructive of the negotiation process.

“Clearly, what David Stern has said is designed to push the players to make a concession with the threat of essentially ending the negotiations,” Feldman said. “And that’s what the players would be doing by threatening to dissolve the union.” …

The question of how Stern and the owners would respond to the players’ own ultimatum is a risky and unknown game of roulette that union leaders will have to decide if they want to play.

“It could go either way,” Feldman said. “It could cause enough owners to be skittish and want to avoid the risk of anti-trust litigation — because if they lose there, it’s a huge loss. … The other side is that it could cause Stern and the owners to say, ‘We’re not going to let you manipulate labor law by threatening us with an anti-trust suit and we’re going to take a stand.

“The question becomes: Do all of these threats bring the sides closer together,” Feldman said, “or push them further apart?”

In the case of decertification, the NBPA would remain functional during the 45 or so days between a petition for decertification and an actual election. A disclaimer of interest would dissolve the union immediately, although — due to the possibility it is being used strictly as a bargaining tactic — it would have a lesser chance of holding up in court.

Another thought I had, which wasn’t addressed in Berger’s report: If Billy Hunter steps aside, he would probably be forfeiting his job and remaining salary. While he might consider doing that for the sake of the union, this option seems like a slim one that would only be used as a desperate recourse to Stern’s ultimatum. Then again, times might call for a desperate recourse.

Ugh.

UPDATE: Against my best advice, Mr. Walker has re-signed with the Idaho Stampede.

Unfortunately for Antoine Walker, the Polish Basketball League does not recognize four-pointers. But Walker is nonetheless interested in making Poland the next step in his basketball journey, according to a report.

Considering the NBA’s lockout, the move makes sense. A maximum D-League contract only pays $25,000. For a player like Walker, the incentive for playing in the D-League is the ability to showcase your skills in front of NBA scouts. Since the NBA season does not currently exist, neither does the potential for being called up. Plus, it wasn’t like Walker — who is 35 years old, played last season at least 25 pounds overweight and still doesn’t know the true meaning of “intelligent shot selection” — was making NBA scouts salivate anyway.

Walker should head overseas, make as much money as he can while he still can, and maybe, just maybe, if he gets into better shape and shows a willingness to become a role player, hope for an NBA call-up.

The D-League is a lot of things. But one thing it’s not is the proper location for a 35-year old, overweight, former NBA All-Star with nearly a million dollars worth of debt.