NBA: Impasse deepens, players reject offer, move to dissolve union, season in peril

This is Armageddon. Nuclear winter is upon NBA fans.

The NBA players got together in New York Monday and not only voted to reject the league’s ultimatum offer, but voted to start process to decertify the union.

“We’ve arrived at the conclusion that the collective bargaining process has completely broken down, and as a result in the last hour we have served a notice of disclaimer on (David) Stern and the NBA,” union director Billy Hunter said after the meeting. “We plan to disseminate that to all 30 teams…

“The players are not ready to accept the ultimatum, they thought it was completely unfair on the part of the NBA ownership and management… We have negotiated in good faith for two years, but the players have felt they have given enough.”

That step — a notice of disclaimer that essentially says the union has no interest in representing the players in negotiations any more and is abandoning that right — is the first step in anti-trust lawsuits that will be filed by players in the coming days as this process moves into the courts. This is the step the NFL players union took and something agents have pushed the NBA union to do since July, it’s just that the timing of doing it now essentially blows up the negotiating process when there wasn’t a lot of time left to save the NBA season.

There is little chance of any NBA season right now. The courts are not exactly a fast process but the union has reached its breaking point. It has gone to the one big card it could play.

The reaction of the owners will be to hunker down, really play hardball now and try to force their entire wish list — such as salary rollbacks and a hard salary cap — on the players. The owners are not going to be scared off by this at all.

Read the rest here.

Not a basketball fan at all here.  But I do find this battle, essentially between two groups of millionaires, very amusing.