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.

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.

Today’s NBA labor discussions weren’t completely without progress, as the two sides inched closer to a 50-50 revenue split, “give or take a point with ranges based on revenue performance,” according to a source cited in a Yahoo! Sports report.

As long expected, the two sides have moved closer to a “50-50 split, give or take a point with ranges based on revenue performance,” one source said.

While the league’s owners and players made progress in Wednesday’s 8½-hour mediation session, one source involved in the talks was hesitant to characterize it as a “breakthrough” moment, saying system issues could again derail talks. The two sides will resume mediation at 2 p.m. ET Thursday following the conclusion of the owners’ board of governors meetings. The owners are meeting to discuss a new revenue-sharing plan, and what type of proposal they present to the players on Thursday will determine whether the labor talks continue to gather momentum. …

Yet, it was always believed the two sides would eventually have to meet in the middle, and sources said there was momentum on Wednesday to get there.

“I think everyone is expecting miracles. It is still going to take some time even with a mediator,” one league executive said. “I don’t think Cohen has solved disputes in two days.”

Is 50-50 a fair deal? That’s for the two sides to decide. But it’s a revenue deal the sides are reportedly approaching, and if they want to agree, you certainly won’t find me standing in the way picketing.

Yet former Celtic Leon Powe made a lot of sense Wednesday night on his Twitter page, even if he did so without using proper grammar. If the players concede to a 50-50 split, that is more or less taking the entire brunt of the league’s losses and pinning it on the players. The league reported a loss of $300 million last season. A drop from 57% of BRI to 50% of BRI equates to the players shouldering $268.8 million of the owner’s losses, or 80.6% of the league’s losses, by my calculation. And that’s assuming the league actually lost as much as it said it did, despite reports of secondary ownership benefits like Cavs owner Dan Gilbert turning his Cavs ownership into two brand new casinos, which cast a shadow of doubt over the NBA’s balance sheets.

“We need a fair deal, we the players got to make up for everything, all of the lost. Which is not fair, if we got to miss the season, then ok,” Powe tweeted.

As usual, there are other blood issues. Adrian Wojnarowski said the biggest hurdle might be luxury tax proposals which the NBA wants to use to further discourage teams from overspending. The owners also want to limit Larry Bird rights and restrict teams over the cap from using the mid-level or bi-annual exceptions. And, they would like to take each player’s first-born child.

In 24 hours, Jack Bauer saves the world, staves off life-threatening disease, escapes from impossible conditions while being held hostage, develops a heroine habit, saves the world again, loses a family member to terrorists, goes rogue, makes enemies on his own side, kicks his heroine habit, further infuriates the new enemies on his own side, redeems himself in the eyes of his new enemies, turning those enemies back into friends, and then saves the world for a third time.

In 24 hours, the NBA owners and players association have reportedly made little progress, jostled back and forth quite a bit, and agreed to meet tomorrow for the third time in three days. Which, come to think of that, WHY HAVE THEY NOT BEEN MEETING EVERY DAY TO BEGIN WITH?

The owners and players have been given a gag order by federal mediator George Cohen, probably so neither side says anything stupid to set back whatever jostling progress has been made. But Cohen spoke today after the eight and a half hour mediation session, telling assembled reporters that “everyone is focused on getting a deal done” — which should have been assumed since, um, THE NBA IS CURRENTLY LOCKED OUT, but you never know when David Stern and Billy Hunter act like blind folks leading deaf folks into war.

After the meetings, Cohen reportedly ordered a drink at the hotel bar. No word yet on whether it was a double, but you try dealing with Stern, Hunter and co. for 24 and a half hours. That shit is tough.

There still wasn’t a negotiating breakthrough today, though sides reportedly made slight progress on the BRI split, one of the major moats standing in the way of an NBA season. Cohen said the meetings were “direct and constructive,” which sounds good, but may or may not have been code for, “For the love of God, can somebody please get Dan Gilbert the f*** out of these discussions before I quit my job as federal mediator?”

At least, the two sides will return to the negotiating table tomorrow. But as Billy Madison once told Veronica Vaughn, “Talky, talky, talky. No more talky.” It’s time for action. It’s time for a deal. It’s time to save the NBA season.

Or else Bill Simmons and a few other people might buy NHL season tickets instead.

NBA owners and players have had since July to negotiate a new labor deal to end the NBA lockout. Really, the two sides began negotiations two years ago, at least according to Billy Hunter. Yet Kevin Garnett went to five hours worth of meetings and reportedly [expletived] everything up.

This fight has grown nastier, more personal, in the past weeks. Privately, management insists that everything changed when the Boston Celtics’ Kevin Garnett walked into the negotiating room on Oct. 4. The owners knew it wouldn’t go well when Garnett started glowering across the table, sources said, like the league lawyers, owners and officials were opponents at the center jump. He was defiant, determined and downright ornery. He was K.G. Everyone knew Hunter had to cede to the wishes of the stars, and the stars demanded that the players stop making concessions to the owners.

As one league official said, “We were making progress, until Garnett [expletive] everything up.”

In other words, as one league official said, “Billy Hunter was ready to completely cave into Stern’s demands, ready to hand Stern the keys to his house and Ferrari, 50% of BRI, his first-born child and his limited edition Boy Meets World DVD set, until Garnett started glowering across the table and assured the players would not accept a bum deal.”

Seriously, though. If Kevin Garnett being Kevin Garnett at one single meeting can cause progress to come to a swift end, maybe there wasn’t so much progress after all. It sounds like a lot of owners are conveniently blaming Garnett to hide the fact that they’re trying to give the players a swirly after taking their lunch money. This lockout will continue until one of two things happens:

1) the players, missing their paychecks, decide to crumble

or

2) the owners, knowing they’re huge assholes, decide to put the subs in the game and settle for a 20-point win instead of a 40-point blowout

In case you were wondering, the two sides were scheduled to meet for a mediating session with George Cohen today at 10 a.m. But not everyone’s convinced the session will help.

But can a mediator swoop in and smooth out two years of bickering in one day?

Attorney Jay Krupin, chair of EpsteinBeckerGreen’s national labor practice in Washington, doesn’t think so — unless the players are prepared to concede on some issues.

“If the players want to get back on the court, then this is a great time for them to try to show that they’re willing to make some type of compromise, and I think that’s what it is,” he said. “This is an opportunity to really determine whether or not the players are willing to make concessions. I think the owners are willing to walk away without concessions, so if the players really want to make concessions when they meet, that has to be expressed to the mediator.

“If that happens, then the burden turns to the NBA to say, ‘All right, you’ll be willing to make some concessions; now we’re willing to talk.’ If they’re not willing to make concessions, then the mediation would just go on for the day and it’ll let the NBA know that they probably have to cancel, go through Christmas and maybe even the rest of the season.”

Here’s how I expect the mediating session to go:

According to two separate ESPN reports (and I’m not sure you can label Bill Simmons’s musings a “report,” but I don’t know what else to call it), Kevin Garnett was one of the polarizing forces keeping the NBA players union from reaching a 50-50 agreement (or similar terms) with the owners, a deal that would have ended the NBA lockout. The second report, by Henry Abbott, also listed Paul Pierce and Kobe Bryant as culprits.

We’ll start with Simmons’s account of the events, regardless of how tongue in cheek it may be:

Kevin Garnett, who inexplicably turned into Norma Rae these past few weeks and led the charge to fight the fight and stand strong … without, of course, ever mentioning that his agent was savvy enough to defer a significant amount of money from his last contract extension so that he still has fresh money coming in this season (unlike 95 percent of the players), or that a 50-game regular season would be absolutely perfect for his aching knees, or that losing two months of 2011-12 money might help him with his next contract because he won’t break down during a shortened season (increasing the odds that he’ll get one last lucrative extension next summer).

Should someone who’s earned over $300 million (including endorsements) and has deferred paychecks coming really be telling guys who have made 1/100th as much as him to fight the fightand stand strong and not care about getting paid? And what are Garnett’s credentials, exactly? During one of the single biggest meetings (last week, on Tuesday), Hunter had Kobe Bryant, Paul Pierce and Garnett (combined years spent in college: three) negotiate directly with Stern in some sort of misguided “Look how resolved we are, you’re not gonna intimidate us!” ploy that backfired so badly that one of their teams’ owners was summoned into the meeting specifically to calm his player down and undo some of the damage. (I’ll let you guess the player. It’s not hard.) And this helped the situation … how? And we thought this was going to work … why?

Congratulations, players — you showed solidarity! You showed you wouldn’t back down! You made things worse, and you wasted a day, but dammit, you didn’t back down! Just make sure you tell that to every team employee who gets fired over these next few weeks, as well as to all the restaurant and bar owners near NBA arenas who are taking a massive financial hit through the holidays. I’m sure they will be proud of you.

Simmons’s “report” came out yesterday, and Abbott’s was published today. Abbott quotes Matt Bonner later in the piece, who cautions that the entire account of Abbott’s main story seems dubious. “There’s no way,” Bonner said. The players needed huge convincing just to agree to lower their share of BRI to 53%. Offering to take 50%, or agreeing to such an offer, seemed outrageous to Bonner.

“That was a huge point of contention,” he said. “Talking to all these veterans and all-stars, they were upset we went down to 53. We had to sell them on that. I’m pretty certain [union lawyer Jeffrey] Kessler didn’t have the authority to offer 50, and nobody in the room would have agreed to that.”

Still, Abbott published a report claiming that Garnett, Pierce and Bryant might have torpedoed an approaching deal and built a moat between the two sides. Pierce was wearing his packpack, which was apparently a bad sign, for reasons unstated.

As Stern has recounted a dozen times since, not long after what was supposed to have been the hallway conversation that saved the season, something odd and wholly unexpected happened. There was a knock on the door where Stern was selling his owners on the idea. The players wanted to talk.

When they convened, instead of the union’s head, Hunter, or their negotiating committee of Maurice Evans, Matt Bonner, Roger Mason, Theo Ratliff, Etan Thomas and Chris Paul, representing the players were Fisher, Kessler, and three superstars who had been to very few of the meetings at all: Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Kobe Bryant.

A bad sign: Pierce was still wearing his backpack.

The players had two pieces of news that shocked the league: 50/50 was not good enough. And there was nothing further to discuss.

“We had a large group of owners,” remembers Silver, “who had flown in and were prepared to negotiate around the clock.”

More importantly, they had made an aggressively good offer, the NBA’s leaders thought, the one that might get them in trouble with their owners but surely not with the players.

And players who hadn’t even been in the talks, and who seemed not to be on the same page with the crew that had endured more than 40 meetings, had been the ones to reject the best offer the league was likely to have, and to end the best day of negotiations prematurely.

What in the hell was going on? How had they so misread the situation? And where was Billy Hunter? Who spoke for the union? Should the league have been negotiating with Kevin Garnett all along?

Later the league would suggest that the talks had fallen apart because the union happened to have some particularly strident players show up that day.

Maybe it’s as simple as that. Or maybe it’s much more complicated.

Abbott then went on to wonder whether players were inspired by Lebron James’s decision and now believe themselves capable of acting “fully empowered.” As if Michael Jordan — No. 1 in your hearts, Roster 99 in your video games — was not fully empowered.

“It’s a business revolution with young black men, basketball players, in the corner offices. A new way of doing things, long overdue, and happening now,” wrote Abbott.

“And maybe that’s what Stern encountered in that hotel room in New York: A new generation of fully empowered players who no longer believe they have to conform to much of anything.”

Maybe. Or maybe Stern just encountered a trio of stars looking out for future generations, who didn’t want to sign off on a bum deal.