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.

Sorry this has become Lebron James Town today, but this is the best Lebron-related article I’ve read yet, written by Andrew at Waiting for Next Year.

To be perpetually stabbed in the back by our heroes, to face continuous reminders of the seemingly endless string of painful losses in the most heartbreaking manner possible on the biggest stages, to having our most beloved franchise torn away from us only to watch it win the Super Bowl in another city just a few years later…..and through it all we have the resiliency to get back up and to do it all over again. We move on to the next hero who we will put our hopes in, and ultimately, probably be let down by again. It’s who we are and it’s what we do.

So no, we don’t deserve this. No, we don’t revel in this latest devastation. But we will get back up from this and we will persevere as Cleveland sports fans. LeBron James took a lot from us last night, but I ask that we not let him take away our passion. That passions is ours and is what makes us who we are.

And I know, I just know, that people are going to take delight in our misery and others will call us classless and will take Dan Gilbert to task for his letter (again, we’ll get to this later as well), but I’m sorry, unless you’ve been a lifelong Cleveland sports fan, you cannot possibly fathom what this is like.

Just read the whole thing. It sucks to be a Cleveland fan right now. It really, really sucks.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I knew the excuses for Lebron were everywhere, but this one went a little overboard. Delonte West bangs Lebron’s mom? Remember, this is a report from some celebrity gossip blog that probably isn’t the most credible source ever. (Terez Owens)

In what is truly a disturbing story, comes exclusive Terez Owens news that LeBron’s teammate Delonte West is sleeping with LeBron’s Mother Gloria James..Yes, this is the purported story coming from my source in Cleveland..My source explains the following.”My uncle is the general contractor at the Q and has been for the last 7 years. He’s good friends with a lot of guys at the Q, including some of the bigger boys in the organization and knows Dan Gilbert personally.My uncle has been told that Delonte has been banging Gloria James (Lebron’s Mom) for some time now. Somehow Lebron found out before game four and it destroyed their chemistry and divided the team. I am not making this up, I wish it wasn’t true but it happened. .” With Delonte West’s checkered past, LeBron can be none too pleased with his teammate and good friend hanging with his Mother… The Cavs definitely looked like a different squad from game 4 on..especially LeBron…coincidence, or did this really just happen? Maybe this is the reason LeBron’s leaving Cleveland..-TO

My favorite part about this report? The first comment on it: “I don’t doubt it. Delonte did hug LeBron’s mom after the game the other night.”

According to that commenter, hugging your teammates’ mother definitely means you have sex with them.

Also, I don’t buy this report at all. Besides the report being so far-fetched and from such a poor source, Cavs reporter Brian Windhorst reported how loose and joyful all the Cavs were prior to Game Six. If Lebron’s mother was really getting violated by Delonte, do you think they would have been such happy jokesters before the game? No, me neither. So no, I don’t think Delonte West had sexual relations with Lebron’s mother.  And that’s probably a good thing for everybody involved.