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.

David Stern has a gun pointed at the players’ heads.

“This gun will not kill you,” he is shouting. “But as soon as I pull the trigger, the 50-50 split is gone. The relatively soft cap is gone. You will be faced with a 47-53 BRI split and a hard — err, I mean flex — cap.”

The players need to decide whether Stern’s gun is loaded. Stern swears it is. (Brian Mahoney twitter)

I asked Stern about the idea that players could ask for tweaks to the current proposal, which has been speculated. Answer to follow.

“I want to answer this diplomatically. The next time we meet to discuss anything, we’ll be discussing the 47% proposal. This is it.” _ Stern

“We’ve been negotiating this for 2½ years. The owners authorized a revised proposal, and they said if it’s not acceptable …

“… and they want to keep negotiating, we present them with a 47 percent, flex cap proposal. They know it,” Stern said.

Billy Hunter reportedly wants to present NBA owners with a counterproposal. A ticking time bomb rests underneath this week’s negotiations (or lack thereof). I’m afraid. Very afraid.

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.

Another weekend, another 20+ hours worth of meetings have resulted in the continuation of the NBA lockout. This time, the players at least left the meetings with a proposal to vote on.

After ten hours Thursday, NBA owners offered players a revised proposal, which the union will present to its members. David Stern characterized the proposal as the union’s final proposal before reverting to the 47% BRI, hard (-ish) cap system, doomsday offer Stern has threatened. Stern loves holding a wrecking ball nearby Hunter’s window, just in case.

For now, the clock remains “stopped,” and the union will present the revised proposal to its members on Monday. If the player reps like what they see, or even if they don’t, a vote can presumably be held on the proposal sometime next week. If the players vote yes, a 72-game schedule (of basketball games, real basketball games!) will begin on Dec. 15.

Yes, there could be basketball on the horizon. Then again, the union could reject the deal, the NBA could revert to its doomsday stance, and David Stern could resume his role as the Lockout Ness Monster.

The ball is now in the players’ court. If I were them, I’m not sure what I’d do with it.

The NBA negotiations have been like Paul Pierce’s favorite shot — two dribbles forward, one giant leap back — except the negotiations have been hanging in the air for quite a bit longer than Pierce.

Reporters briefed by sources on Wednesday’s negotiations could all agree: progress was made. But whether that progress is enough to stem the prevalent tide of instability remains to be seen. These labor discussions are like Rasheed Wallace — you never know when they might boil over and become completely irrational, all you know is they become irrational far more often than they should. And they almost became irrational yesterday. (NBA.com)

One source told NBA.com that the negotiations remain fragile. “It could blow up at any minute,” he said. “It almost blew up a couple of times [Wednesday], but it didn’t.”

(Here comes the putter toss … wait, he’s restrained himself!)

The players, should this week’s negotiations fail, are reportedly ready to drop two different nuclear bombs. A source told NBA.com the players are ready to move with a disclaimer of interest, and another source told Zach Lowe the players are also ready to file for decertification of the union. Both legal maneuvers could be done simultaneously, since a petition for decertification would take 45-60 days before going to a union-wide vote.

But those options will only move forward if the league does not reach a labor agreement this week. Somewhere in the middle of all the negotiating ruckus, all that fragility, progress was made. Both NBA.com and Adrian Wojnarowski reported there was progress made on three of the five key issues holding back a deal. (NBA.com)

There allegedly was even some progress on three of five issues cited Tuesday by the union as vital to their willingness to consider a 50-50 split (the players received 57 percent in the old CBA and had moved to a formal position of 52.5).

Much of the debate is over restrictions that would be imposed on free-spending teams above the luxury tax threshold, with the union striving to keep them in the marketplace for players and the owners hoping to direct free agents to other rosters.

The problem is, three out of five is equivalent to Dwight Howard’s free throw percentage. The league at least needs to shoot like Ray Allen.

One shot they’ll need to drain is the mid-level exception. Zach Lowe reports the league and union moved closer to an agreement regarding the exception, but cautioned there has been no agreement on the issue.

The league has softened its proposal to take the full mid-level exception from teams that pay the luxury tax and replace it with a miniature mid-level worth half as much, according to one source familiar with the matter. The union has fought against measures that would, in its view, make the luxury tax operate like a hard salary cap and remove the league’s biggest spenders from the free-agent market. The union has argued such measures would redistribute salary away from middle-class veterans and toward superstars, stifle freedom of movement and do little to create competitive balance among teams.

The mid-level exception is a crucial battleground, and the two sides aren’t close to an agreement there despite the league’s move to bat around a variety of potential compromises on Wednesday, per a source. But at least they are talking, and there is incremental progress — enough progress to at least justify another meeting Thursday at noon, according to Stern, union president Derek Fisher and union executive director Billy Hunter.

Can’t I just write about real basketball issues yet?

“We’re not failing and we’re not succeeding. We’re just … there.” — David Stern, perfectly summarizing the 132-day (so far) NBA lockout in two sentences

The NBA owners and players association spent 12 hours meeting Wednesday, and will meet again Thursday at noon. Despite some very optimistic reports (I’m looking at you, Woj), David Stern, Billy Hunter and Derek Fisher all used sobering tones when addressing the media after Wednesday’s negotiations session.

Yes, that’s what the lockout has reduced my analysis to: judging speech tones during press conferences. That’s all I really could base my judgments on though, because both sides were evasive during the sessions.

David Stern told reporters, “I don’t even want to talk about where we are or our current state of mind,” and “I would not read into this optimism or pessimism.”

Derek Fisher said, “We can’t characterize whether they showed flexibility or not,” but did note, “we can’t say there was significant progress today.”

And best of all, for the seven or eight minutes ESPN aired the two NBA press conferences, the station actually gave us a breather from Joe Paterno coverage.