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.

The only good thing about the NBA lockout? Writers are stepping to the plate and launching tape-measure home runs.

Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports:

For all the talk about the Robert Sarvers, the most strident of the hardliners thrust himself to the forefront of fear that this could be a lost basketball season. For the past 15 years, Allen’s been the wildest of wild spenders, the salary cap-buster hell-bent on buying an NBA title. Outrageous contracts, $3 million a pop to purchase late draft picks. And now, the NBA’s board of governors found him the perfect candidate to be the bearer of gloom and doom in Thursday’s meeting, even when a union attorney Jeffrey Kessler said: “I thought we were making progress toward a deal.”

These are the mind games the owners will play with the players, all the way to a January deadline to cancel the season. They’ll be Lucy to the players’ Charlie Brown, pulling that ball away again and again. This is a high-stakes game full of backward agendas and hidden motives. Here’s the scariest part of it all for those who want labor talks to have a puncher’s chance at saving the season: Allen appears to be checking out on the Blazers, and there’s suspicion that his motives center on saving as much money as possible in this CBA to eventually ready his franchise for a sale.

“He’s gone the other way, the complete other way,” a high-ranking league official told Yahoo! Sports. “He’s been the most vociferous lately that [the owners] have given up too much to the players, that they should be holding out for a hard cap, for 40 percent to the players [on the revenue split]. No one has gone after the labor committee harder about this than him.”

Ben Golliver, CBS Sports:

[Paul] Allen is Garnett on steroids.

You want stubborn? Allen rode his pipe dream of running a cable company all the way to the ground, losing billions of dollars and eventually declaring bankruptcy.

You want off his rocker? He’s currently being sued by his own ex-military bodyguards for allegations of illegal activity, his helicopter recently crashed during an excursion to Antarctica and, oh yeah, he’s gone through two general managers and a vice president of basketball operations since the 2010 NBA Draft. He passes his time, including on Thursday morning, exchanging tweets about what rock song the Seattle Seahawks, his NFL franchise, should play at practice. Carroll plays along, of course, because he, like every Allen employee, knows his job depends on it.

You want “uninformed” on the state of the negotiations? Allen deputized team president Larry Miller to attend Board of Governors meetings and labor negotiations on his behalf. He put exactly the same amount of blood, sweat and tears into the possibility of a labor agreement as Garnett: none.

You want emotional? Allen recently wrote an autiobiography that included many unflattering stories about, and a recounting of decades-old grudges towards, his Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, one of the world’s greatest philanthropists. The book led to a falling out between the two men, who had been friends since high school, with Allen admitting during a television interview that Gates had stopped talking to him.

Kelly Dwyer, Ball Don’t Lie:

Guaranteed profits for poor basketball businessmen should be guaranteed no more thanRashad McCants’(notes) second NBA contract. The owners are flat wrong, in every way. Wrong in the way they purchased their teams, wrong in how they’ve run them, wrong in how they’ve handled this lockout (even to their own hoped-for ends), and wrong in the way they have not bargained in good faith. The owners never wanted to play in November.

And you have made concessions, real concessions, NBA players. And this isn’t coming from someone dying to start writing about NBA games again. Frankly, I’m burned out, even with no games in four months. I could use the break I didn’t get during the offseason. The owners are being prats. I get that, players. You’ve given in, and they haven’t; despite their talk of “concessions.”

It’s time, though. Because it’s only going to get worse. No, David Stern didn’t technically break the union; but he did unofficially. Just in the same way that Derrick Rose(notes) doesn’t really break Andre Miller’s(notes)actual ankles — he just gets to waltz in for the easy lay-in, while his team goes up real, real big.

And there’s no coming back from this deficit.

Andrew Sharp, SB Nation:

Anyway, there you have it. If you want to understand what’s driving the lockout and why it could last all year and why the owners are willing to jeopardize the future of the league to keep this going, it all comes down to a handful of issues that are misleading at best and in some cases downright lies. But David Stern and the NBA owners think you’ll believe. And whether you believe or not, they think the players will cave.

And as someone that loves basketball more than just about anything on earth, it makes me sad. Not even because we’re going to miss a lot of great basketball. It’s because if there’s common thread to all the issues above—other than greed, dishonesty, and ignorance—it’s the owners’ fundamental lack of understanding of the NBA.

That’s what’s killing the league right now.

Tom Ziller, SB Nation:

Dan Gilbert’s company, Quicken Loans, was one of the worst offenders in the housing bubble, offering scores of subprime loans to unqualified buyers, pumping up the real estate market until it burst, contributing to a collapse of the global financial markets and at least one bonafide U.S. recession. Gilbert wasn’t alone — plenty of banks got too loose in the name of profit and stupidity but mostly profit. But Quicken Loans was a big player in this game.

As such, Dan Gilbert doesn’t get to tell anyone to “trust his gut” in a business deal. Dan Gilbert can’t drop an ultimatum on someone, tell them to trust him and get away with it. Of all the delusion, the brand torching, the picking over carcasses that the NBA’s vultures have done over the past four month, nothing tops this. Nothing tops Dan Gilbert asking players to trust him. How could you blame anyone from laughing in his face?

In the end, it is David Stern and Adam Silver who need to get Allen, Holt and Gilbert — and the 26 other owners — back in line, back on a path to solutions, not union-busting. That is, of course, unless Billy Hunter is right, and this was the end-game all along.

If so, God help us. Our world can only survive so much bulls–t, and these owners are adding to the tally every single day.

Ken Berger, CBS Sports:

There are hard-liners among the owners who refuse to give the players a dime more than 50 percent, and some harder-liners who were reluctant to go even that far. But you know what? There are hard-liners on the union side, too — agents and super agents and clusters of seven agents who didn’t want to go a dime below 53 percent. I know of at least one powerful agent who never thought the players should have offered anything below 57 percent — the share they received under the previous six-year deal.

The difference? Fisher and Hunter have successfully excluded those hard-liners from the bargaining process, all the way up to Thursday, when sources told CBSSports.com that some agents were still working the phones and telling their clients to “hold firm” and reject any deal below 53 percent. Hunter and Fisher ignored them and offered to go lower on Thursday — to 52.5 percent if revenues came in as projected and as low as 50 percent if they came in lower.

The league has not only been unable to keep hard-line owners from influencing the negotiations, they couldn’t even keep them out of the room Thursday.

Of course, other than all the tremendous writing being published today, this lockout sucks.

Trust Dan Gilbert’s gut. We’ve come through two years worth of negotiations, 45 meetings between the owners and the players union, $1.1 billion worth of concessions by the players, two weeks of regular season games canceled, who knows how many artificial deadlines, one federal mediator, dozens of Ken Berger lockout columns, and almost four months since the lockout began. Yet yesterday, with the NBA’s future again on the line, David Stern sat at home sick and Dan Gilbert urged Billy Hunter, “Trust my gut.”

The owners have been reduced to this, leaning on the leadership of Paul Allen and Dan Gilbert, two incompetent, bullish owners who can’t run their own franchises right, never mind try to fix the entire league. When the players and owners could not agree on the BRI split, Billy Hunter requested to set aside the BRI issue for the time being and focus on “the system” instead. With Stern vomiting somewhere else, Allen — whose Blazers tenure was once described, “The team may win games. It may even win another playoff series someday. But there is high-level congruency necessary, top down, and Allen’s operation will never have that as long as he is in charge.” — was called as the owners’ leader.

Like a mature man, like a rational man, Allen listened to Hunter’s request and replied with no words whatsoever, just staring at Hunter in silence, unwilling to formulate words even to tell Hunter no, like a teenage bully who refused to even acknowledge a classmate. Did I say mature? Did I call Allen rational? I meant he behaved just as one would expect him to behave, with indecency, like he expects everyone to bow down and kiss his money. He acted like a man who doesn’t seem to get along with anyone he works with, whose dysfunctional Blazers franchise runs through talented GMs like pairs of underwear, using them for a little while and then throwing on another pair, always leaving the old GM dirty and in need of a wash.

The inmates are indeed running the asylum now, and I’m not talking about the players. Considering the damage incurred while Stern rested at home, perhaps Stern wasn’t the fire-breathing, throwing star-chucking bully everyone has portrayed him to be. Perhaps he is actually the most reasonable voice in the owners’ circle, the only person capable of staring 30 mega-millionaires in the eye and telling them it’s not worth it to sit on the players’ backs until they break. With Stern gone, these owners didn’t want to negotiate. They drew a 50-50 line in the sand and would not cross it.  They would not even discuss system issues unless the players association submitted to the owners every monetary demand. They acted like 30 spoiled, condescending brats who are used to getting everything they want.

Trust my gut, Gilbert told Hunter. The players had offered a perfectly reasonable 50-53 band to split BRI, but the owners were not willing to move, not even a little. Later, the owners acted like they were the ones making concessions. “We made clear we were willing to go to 50 percent in an effort to compromise,” said Adam Silver, acting commissioner for the day while Stern nursed his illness. But settling on 50% is not an effort to compromise by the owners. It’s a damn scheme they keep trying to sell everyone on, a big, round number that seems fair in theory but really would amount to the players conceding 12% salary cutbacks, no small concession.

The players have already offered to take 7% salary cutbacks, perhaps even more with the band they proposed, perhaps even more if the system issues could be ironed out in the players’ favor. But the owners aren’t here simply to give the players a black eye and take the spoils. They are here to break the players’ arms, take out the players’ legs, and leave the players to spend the next CBA in a wheelchair while the owners celebrate with their winnings. NBA players are the most highly-paid athletes in the United States, and nobody will cry for them if they have to give back 12% of their salaries. But don’t let owners tell you they want a compromise. They are here to win this fight, and they are here to win it by a KO so vicious people will YouTube it for years to come.

The owners want an NHL-like system, with a hard salary cap whereby each team can only spend X amount of dollars. The hard cap would level the playing field, the owners say, giving small-market teams like Sacramento the opportunity to compete with the limitless pockets of the Lakers. But the owners decline to mention that in the NBA, where having a super-duperstar or three is absolutely essential in a championship quest, competitive parity is almost impossible to achieve. Go ahead, NBA, change the system as much as you want. You still won’t find this myth you call “competitive balance.”

Why not? Because it’s impossible. Let’s just pretend, for argument’s sake, the NBA redesigned its entire system tomorrow. Instead of using the current rosters, every player is placed in a draft pool and the rosters are reconfigured in a league-wide fantasy draft. That sounds like a fair way to do things. But it wouldn’t come close to achieving parity, I can promise that.

Why not? The team drafting first would have Lebron James. The team drafting 30th would have Joakim Noah. The NBA is a stars league, and there just aren’t enough stars to have parity.

In the NBA, one star can lead the Cavs to the Eastern Conference’s best record one year, and leave them to its worst the next. One star can carry Smush Parker and Kwame Brown to the playoffs. One star can lift Michael Beasley, Quentin Richardson and the mummy formerly known as Jermaine O’Neal to 48 wins. One star can mean the difference between a Finals appearance and a lottery season. But not every team can have a damn star — no matter how high or how low, how soft or how hard, the league makes the salary cap.

How do we promote parity in a league where Lebron James is willing to take a pay cut, leave a 61-win team for a 48-win team, reduce his own offensive role, and do all that in the name of winning, in the name of forming a “Super-Team” in Miami? A league where Carmelo Anthony forced a trade to the New York Knicks not because they could pay him more money (they couldn’t), not because they fielded a better team (they didn’t), but because they play in a bigger market? What hard cap are the owners going to install to keep THAT from happening?

Parity is nothing more than a buzz word the owners are throwing out there to divert us from what’s really going on. David Stern was sick at home, but he could have been present at the meetings with just as much authority. Peter Holt, Paul Allen and Dan Gilbert have taken charge, the hard-line owners raising their fists and hoping to land them squarely in the players’ jaw. The plan was for the players to back down, but Billy Hunter and Derek Fisher have prepared the players well for this moment, they’ve told the players for two years to save money because the owners want blood.  And so the lockout continues, 112 days and counting, more senseless than ever, with the two sides only $110 million apart for next season, yet each side willing to lose far more than that just during the two weeks of the season already canceled.

“Something happened in that board of governors meeting,” union lawyer Jeffrey Kessler said about a meeting between owners that took place yesterday after negotiations. We don’t know what it was. But we do know that Stern missed today’s negotiations, ever important, a meeting Stern would normally have to be on his death bed to miss, claiming he was sick. We know that hard-line owners, who had previously taken a quiet backseat, came to the forefront. We know that the league, which by all accounts seemed ready to negotiate yesterday, gave a take-it-or-leave-it offer today and refused to back away from it.

We don’t know exactly what happened in that board of governors meeting, and neither does Billy Hunter. But he thinks he knows why.

“I think it’s all about putting money in their pocket,” he told reporters Thursday.

Trust Dan Gilbert’s gut. Or better yet, punch him in it.

The NBA lockout hit a major setback today. After breaking off negotiations today, the two sides have not scheduled any more meetings.

The only good news is that nobody can blame this on Kevin Garnett. The bad news is, well, everything else. Get used to the short three-point arc and the longer shot clock, because it seems as the only hoops played for the foreseeable future will be college basketball.

I would rant about the greedy owners who aren’t satisfied with being mere billionaires, or the greedy players who are the highest-paid professional athletes in any sport. But it seems I’ll have plenty of time to formulate that post. The mourning period has begun, hope has been sucked out of the NBA as if by a vacuum, and I have no freaking idea when my favorite sport will return. Maybe January, maybe February, maybe 2012-13.

If you’re drinking tonight, make it a double. And then pour one out for the NBA season, which is looking more and more like a mirage.

David Stern came down with the flu prior to today’s negotiations, leaving NBA negotiations to deputy commissioner Adam Silver.

There’s no word yet on whether Stern is impersonating Vince Carter (“I just don’t want to negotiate today, Mom. Let me stay home!”) or Michael Jordan (“I don’t care if I’m vomiting, sweating and have a 104 degree fever. We’re getting this deal done, damn it! /tongue wag), but it’s tough to envision the NBA reaching a deal while Stern sits at home.

For some reason, I keep picturing the scene in Wedding Crashers when Rachel McAdams (Claire) asks her puking boyfriend how he’s doing. There’s no way Stern is letting anyone help him today.

“Well, Claire. My head’s buried in a toilet. What do you think? You do the math.”

Oh, no, Stern isn’t letting anyone help him. Stern is ORDERING people to help him. So you can cut that psycho-babble bullshit and go fetch him a Seven-Up. Because he’s about to get vulnerable again.

With Stern gone, the NBA has still reportedly made some progress in its negotiations. After reportedly inching closer to a revenue split Wednesday, the league has already taken at least two more steps toward a deal.

1) The owners reached a revenue sharing agreement, agreeing to nearly triple the annual amount of revenue shared from $50-60 million to $150 million. The players should see that as a good step; since the owners currently making money are willing to help out their less fortunate brethren, the entire onus of lifting struggling franchises will not fall on the player’s shoulder. Unless, and this seems entirely possible if you’ve been paying attention, the owners expect the players to cut their contracts so they effectively pay for the entire difference between the former revenue sharing plan and this one.

2) The league has reportedly come close to settling its mid-level exception dilemma. The two sides are “close to compromising on a $5 million starting salary with a maximum length of three years.” That seems fair for all involved. The players are assured that the mid-level exception still pays a significant amount of money (the $5 million starting number is not much less than last year’s $5.765 million starting figure), and the owners get assurance that they will no longer pay Drew Gooden $32 million over five years.

3) The owners are reportedly offering a “bonus pool” to reward players who are under-compensated by their rookie contracts, such as Derrick Rose, who made just $5.5 million while winning the 2011 MVP. Rookie stars have long been some of the most underpaid players in the league. Something tells me the bonus pool would not effect Luke Harangody, but I have my fingers crossed for the big fella.

These steps seem promising. But Adrian Wojnarowski cautions that luxury tax proposals are still a major hurdle that has yet to be crossed.

The biggest obstacle between the two sides remains the luxury tax proposals to punish big-spending teams and discourage them from overpaying players. The NBA wants to limit players’ “Larry Bird Rights” they enjoy now by forbidding teams to go over the cap to pay their current players. They also want to restrict teams over the cap from using the midlevel and biannual exceptions to sign players on an every-year basis. The players contend the restrictions will act as a de facto hard salary cap.

Lastly, Silver did not rule out the NBA playing an 82-game season despite already canceling the first two weeks of the season. That would mean more back-to-backs than ever, sore legs, lots of ice packs, and very little time to rest. In other words, “Sorry, Celtics.” Hopefully, the NBA does not vote to reinstate the two weeks of lost games, or else Kevin Garnett may become mummified by the end of the 2011-12 season.

In other news, the new Harlan Coben novel, “Shelter,” came out recently. And my mommy just bought it for me. So please excuse me until any major news comes out. I’ll be reading about Mickey Bolitar — Myron’s nephew, people!!! — until I can’t read any more.