Delonte West’s 13 dependents may not struggle through poverty much longer (kidding, guys). The guard is reportedly receiving interest from the Guangdong Southern Tigers, the Chinese Basketball Association’s defending champions. (Sheridan Hoops)

Including Yi, the defending champions have eight national team players and a number of national youth team players. Their only American player for now is James Singleton, but the club is contacting Rodney Stuckey and Delonte West, one of whom may come to China, sources told me.

The Shanghai Sharks had previously shown interest in West, but he tweeted in August, ““Can’t even get that over seas money. Judge said it’s a no go on leaving the country” and decided to move furniture instead.

I’m not sure the exact terms of West’s probation. China might still be out of the picture. But West is off house arrest and most players would run through a pit of fire to compete alongside Yi Jianlian and James Singleton.

Don’t worry, guys. Another joke. If he did sign in China, West’s contract would prohibit him from returning to the United States until the end of the Chinese season. The rule was designed to keep NBA players from fleeing when the lockout ended, but apparently J.R. Smith wants to return already.

I feel you, J.R. The FIBA three-point line just isn’t deep enough for a gunner like you.

P.S. – For what it’s worth, West tweeted on Nov. 13 that he can’t wait to get back to Boston. Please stay true to your word, Mr. West.

UPDATE (9:04 a.m.) – Guandong reportedly signed Aaron Brooks, meaning West probably isn’t an option regardless of his legal situation.

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.

It normally takes the entire UN translating staff to understand Delonte West’s tweets. Most of them are a combination of gibberish, ebonics and misspelled words. For example: “U in d city tonight….if u see matt grey street glider…with black ape hangers 21 inch blackspokess…..tail pipes dragginn.” If you know what that means, I’m not sure whether that means you’re a lot more intelligent than I am, or a lot less.

But the past two days, Delonte West tweeted some realities of NBA lockout life.

Full disclosure: I have no idea whether West is serious, ever. He got a job moving furniture earlier in the lockout, claiming he needed the money. But I have no clue whether he was serious about needing money. He’s just a quirky dude. It’s entirely possible he got that job as a joke, or he signed some secretive endorsement deal with Regency Furniture where he pretended to work there.

But he’s tweeting realities, even if they aren’t his own realities. I know NBA players made an average of $5 million last season. I know nobody making $15 per hour moving boxes in a warehouse feels bad because 450 millionaires missed paychecks yesterday. But when somebody like Delonte West has a $1.4 million salary, like he did last year, he often also has $1.4 million bills. A lot of these players live lavish lifestyles, sometimes far beyond their means. Within five years of retirement, 60% of NBA players are broke.

I’m not saying you should feel bad for them. If Delonte West can’t take care of his dependents after making $1.4 million last season, that’s entirely his fault. But missing paychecks hits players harder than it probably should.

Glen Davis complained that he was not educated enough about the NBA lockout developments, which begs the question: Glen, why didn’t you educate yourself?

“I don’t think I’ve been kept in the loop as far as what’s going on and how things are going on,” he said. “I want to be kept in the loop, but when I say that, they say, well, come to the meetings.

“It’s not just Paul making that decision. It’s also Derek (Fisher) and Billy Hunter. I talk to players, but my friends are guys like Paul and (Kevin Garnett) — guys who are in a different stage of their careers from me.

“I don’t talk to a lot of the guys who are more in my stage, like Carl Landry and DeJuan Blair.”

I was prepared to suggest that Davis should have sought information more actively, but Zach Lowe beat me to it. (Sports Illustrated)

The first part of that quote – about coming to meetings — should take its place in the Lockout Quote Pantheon. “They say, well, come to meetings.” And? Did you go? Did you find out where and when the regional meetings were? Did you call your union representative (Pierce) to get that information? Heck, did you read guys like Ken Berger of CBS Sports, sharp minds who published just about every nuance of these talks along the way?

And why didn’t you contact Carl Landry or DeJuan Blair or any other young player trying to cement his place in the league? They aren’t hard to find.

Some very intelligent people have wondered why the union failed to put the latest proposal to a vote. The thinking goes that the union’s membership deserved to vote on a proposal that might have been the best the union will get.

But Davis’ thoughts shed some light on why letting the membership vote on a proposal might not have been the brightest idea. Billy Hunter, Derek Fisher and a handful of others have been involved in the negotiations since day one. They have educated themselves on all the legal, system, and economic issues. They decided the proposal was unacceptable, and it’s their job to lead the union the way they see fit. Putting the proposal to a vote would have allowed uninformed players to vote on important decisions.

Maybe Hunter and Fisher are misguided, and the union should have at least voted on the latest offer before dropping the disclaimer of interest bomb. But putting power into the hands of the (largely) uninformed membership would have been dangerous.

Now that a missed season is a real possibility, the lockout could end the Boston Celtics’ Big Three era. It could potentially threaten Kevin Garnett’s career. It could mean that Ray Allen is 37 years old when the NBA returns, and Paul Pierce might be 35. And if all that’s not enough, a missed season could result in Danny Ainge scrambling to fill 12 roster spots for 2012-13. I don’t mean to exude pessimism, but these are now realistic possibilities.

“There will ultimately be a new collective bargaining agreement,” NBA Commissioner David Stern said after hearing of the NBPA’s decision. “But the 2011-2012 season is now in jeopardy.”

And for veteran teams that have few bodies under contract right now, like the Celtics, they could very well fall under the category of collateral damage associated with this lockout if it wipes out the entire season.

Beyond 2011-12, the Celtics only have three players under contract – Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo and Avery Bradley.

So if the season were to be wiped out entirely, the C’s would have as many as 12 roster spots to fill.

The Miami Heat certainly didn’t complain after needing to fill 12 roster spots last summer. But there were extenuating circumstances. Two of the game’s biggest stars (and Chris Bosh) were all free agents at the same time. The trio decided to combine their powers. It was a combination of luck, circumstance and the persuasive powers of Pat Riley (not to mention the persuasive powers of South Beach).

The Celtics wouldn’t be so lucky. Even if the free agency classes of 2011 and 2012 were combined, which is what would happen after a missed season, there’s STILL not the type of star power to rebuild on the fly. Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and Deron Williams are the only superstars on the market. Two of them play Rondo’s position. The other, Howard, will have many other realistic suitors besides the Celtics. If Howard did sign with the Celtics, the Celtics could presumably re-sign Allen and Garnett to smaller contracts and join them with Pierce, Rondo and Howard to form an awesome starting five. But that’s assuming Howard signs. And the Boston Celtics historically don’t land high-profile free agents.

More likely, the Celtics are looking at a lengthy rebuilding process after the (rumored) 2011-12 season. The thought is sobering, but it’s reality. The final year of the Big Three era is in jeopardy, and the future is unknown.

NBA players flipped the script on owners Monday, deciding to file a disclaimer of interest that will effectively disband the union, and an anti-trust lawsuit against the NBA. The only problem? Nobody knows where the hell this is headed.

Unsurprisingly, Ken Berger of CBS Sports has best described the effects of a disclaimer of interest.

The biggest legal benefit to dissolving the union through a disclaimer would be that, once the union was transformed into a trade association, the players could almost immediately file an anti-trust lawsuit against the league — which in theory would open the owners to not only the financial losses of a canceled season, but also anti-trust damages. In all likelihood, the players would file their action in the 9th Circuit in California, where more employee-favorable law exists. Since the league already has pre-emptively sued in the employer-friendly 2nd Circuit in New York, a messy and potentially lengthy jurisdictional battle would then unfold.

And while the disclaimer would be a more expeditious route to antitrust action, it would also be less likely to succeed than a decertification initiated by the players. Courts would be more likely to view a disclaimer as a bargaining tactic, rather than a decision with the true intent to dissolve.

NBPA outside counsel Jeffrey Kessler, who oversaw the NFLPA’s disclaimer of interest, “wants to protect not only players in this negotiation but players’ ability to use this weapon in the future,” Feldman said. “He has to make it appear that this dissolution is a not a sham.”

Pretty much, this is chaos. Nobody knows where these negotiations are headed or specifically how long this process could last. If you’re an NBA fan, today sucks. The only hope is that owners get spooked by the threat of legal action and (finally) decide to negotiate in good faith. But if you listened to David Stern’s interview today, you know that’s only slightly more likely than Jerry Sandusky being named Penn State’s next head coach.