Unless the NBA’s latest ultimatum is a smoke screen designed solely to make the players fold, the NBA season is in serious jeopardy. A number of players have weighed in on the latest proposal, most of them describing a reaction similar to disgust, but those players may or may not have seen the full document.

One person who has? NBPA executive first vice president Etan Thomas. To say the least, Thomas does not think fondly of the NBA’s latest offer. Thomas wrote a guest article for ESPN.com, during which he more or less ran over the proposal with an 18-wheeler, backed up over it again, then dropped a grenade out the window to make sure that goddamn proposal would not survive.

Thomas called the proposal “awful.” He called it “worse than the proposal they gave us last week.” He said he has not met a single person who thinks it’s an acceptable deal. He said the proposed system functions as a hard cap. He said Michael Jordan’s presence at the negotiating table scares nobody. He said the proposed mid-level exception is so restricted, it’s ultimately useless. He said the players’ options are currently “a horrible deal now or a worse deal later,” and he said nobody should be surprised when the players take neither.

Sounds like no season, how u.

But Howard Beck of the New York Times obtained a copy of the proposal, too. Through what he called a side-by-side examination, Beck determined the new proposal is indeed better for the players than the last one, albeit not incredibly changed. He then called Adam Silver, who — surprise, surprise — defended the league’s proposal.

“It’s of grave concern to the league that there is an enormous amount of misinformation concerning our proposal,” Adam Silver, the deputy commissioner, said in a telephone interview Saturday night. “We believe that if the players are fully informed as to what is and is not in our proposal, they will agree that its terms are beneficial to them and represent a fair compromise.”

Of course, even if Beck’s position is correct and the new proposal is improved, slight movement on a few issues does not necessarily mean the players will accept the new proposal. To many of the players, accepting a poor deal is about far more than the money. Principles matter, too.

Thomas said the owners “want a bailout from their own mismanagement decisions.” He said the NBA doesn’t try to negotiate; it tells the players how things will be. He seconded Troy Polamalu’s opinion that this is bigger than millionaires fighting against billionaires: During the NFL lockout, Polamalu said, “The big business argument is, ‘I got the money and I got the power, therefore, I can tell you what to do.’ That’s life everywhere. I think this is a time when the football players are standing up saying, ‘No, no, no, the people have the power.’”

Thomas said the owners are equivalent to the “1%” that have inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement, and he said nobody should be surprised that Michael Jordan has become a hypocrite. “Why do people have difficulty understanding that he is no longer a player but currently joined at the hip with the rest of the CEOs of the NBA, who — like Bank of America, Wall Street and the rest of the 1 percent — not only want but expect a bailout for their own actions?” asked Thomas.

Tell us how you really feel, Etan. No need to hold back, sir.

David Stern, according to Thomas, has attempted to manipulate players through the media. I doubt you’ll find too many able-minded people to argue that premise. And that promise of a 72-game season if the proposal is accepted? It’s just to put pressure on the players. That deadline, after which the NBA will revert back to an incredibly inferior offer? It’s just to make the players fold. All these leaks, saying progress has been made, saying a deal is close, saying the league won’t consider a season less than 70 games, some of the leaks even coming from a close friend of Stern’s? They’re just to make the backlash greater if and when the players decide to reject the proposal.

What Stern should know better than anybody, what these blood-sucking owners need to realize, is that the NBA is, was and always has been a players league. Before Magic Johnson and Larry Bird became stars, playoff games were shown on tape delay. Then Michael Jordan took the league by storm, and Kobe Bryant carried the torch, and Lebron James, Dwyane Wade, Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan, Dwight Howard and a number of other stars made the league more profitable than ever. If the backlash against players, against the league, is substantial — and it will be if this lockout continues much longer — the league will suffer.

After already winning all the economic concessions they could reasonably expect, the owners are continuing the lockout based on a wild goose they call “parity.” The NBA says it’s chasing competitive balance, but that’s like chasing a ghost — according to studies, competitive balance in the NBA cannot be achieved by changing the league’s financial landscape. Even if the mid-level exception is restricted, luxury tax is heightened, and sign-and-trades are not allowed for taxpayers, there’s zero reason to believe any proposed changes will result in increased parity.

All of which brings us back to the title of this post: Is the NBA’s new proposal better or worse than the last one? Maybe the answer doesn’t matter. If the players still consider the most recent proposal awful, which their executive first vice president certainly does, whether it’s better than the last one means absolutely nothing.

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.

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.

The NBA has been locked out for two months. In that time, the players union and the owners have met a whopping two times, an impressive average of once per month. Yesterday in a meeting that took place at a hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Derek Fisher acknowledged that “there has not been a drastic ideological change on either side,” but hey, at least the two sides decided to stop taking public shots at each other. The negotiations will now be kept private between only the two negotiating parties.

If science moved this slow, we would still be driving around town in horse and buggies.

Don’t misunderstand me; the latest meeting was somewhat productive. The two sides will now stop posturing in the press and instead focus on making a deal. My only concern is, why didn’t this come sooner? The two sides have spent so much time flexing their muscles and puffing out their chests that they’ve almost entirely foregone the negotiation process. Until yesterday, from what we heard in the press at least, little to zero progress had been made in the past two months, mostly because both sides had been more stubborn than a 90-year old mule.

Finally, the two sides have decided to meet more often. Yesterday’s meeting reportedly lasted six hours, consisted of three people on each side and should have happened months ago. Key figures on both sides said the smaller meeting encouraged more negotiation and better faith.

“We discussed virtually every issue that’s on the table,” NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver told the New York Times, “and there was an agreement that we needed to continue meeting and pick up the pace.”

Admittedly, I’m not skilled or experienced in negotiation. My most impressive negotiating occurred in middle school, when I once successfully haggled my friend to drop his lunch-time price for Jolly Jellies from $0.50 to $0.25. But from a fan’s standpoint, the pace should have picked up a long time ago. The potential for an NBA season relies on these meetings; I know posturing is important, but so is sitting in a room and ironing out a compromise. Training camp is scheduled to start on Oct. 3, but neither side seems all that concerned.

The privacy policy both sides have adopted is still an important step. Not that it means anything by itself, but it’s the first sign that the sides are operating toward the same goal. For months they have been competitors from afar, demeaning each other in the press, filing law suits, trying to win the public opinion battle any way possible. But now the sides are working together, if only to keep the negotiations private. To build a house, you must first put down the foundation. Unless you’re me, and then your first step is to call someone who actually knows how to build a goddamn house.

Yesterday’s progress, if small, was an important first step. I just wonder why the step didn’t come months ago.