LOCKOUT IS OVER

 Best christmas present ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was so sure this was a troll… when it wasn’t I ran around the house shouting I was that happy. If they don’t ratify it all hell is going to break loose.

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/7281052/nba-owners-players-get-tentative-agreement

It’s a tenative agreement, nothing offical yet. But this is great progress. I know it’s hard not to get excited, but let’s wait until everyone involved has agreed.

HALLELUJAH!!!!!!!!!!

 but i think i really just shed a tear…………..

lol i was really gonna curse you out until i seen it on espn.com, nothing set in stone but they are getting there i like college basketball but there are not many teams id like to watch on enough

Ohhhhhhhhh lawddddddddd thank you Jesus!

I am very excited！！！

Feels good to be able to forget all this lockout nonsense and get back to the players and on-court issues. Remember Bismack Biyombo? Rubio’s signing?

Had to blog about the huge amount of low-profile storylines for this season which were swept under the rug by lockout shenanigans. Normally I would just post it here in its entirety, but it’s over 2000 words and didn’t want to take up too much screen real estate.

http://itsahardwoodlife.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-dawn-is-breaking.html

I woke up this morning, and the first thing I did was check on my computer what’s going on with the lockout and where they’re at right now, and when I saw "A Deal has been Reached", words cannot explain how happy I was! II like college ball too, but the level of play hasn’t been good so far. I just hope the players pass this. It is expected that the deal gets done, but it’s not official yet. I just hope nothing screws this up.

 Nut Busted.

66-Games is fine with me!!!

Finally

OOOOOOOOKAY!!! They struck a deal, but my f*ckin PG "DWill" is still under contract way cross f*ckin yonder.

Relax bro, Williams has an opt-out clause. China’s the only place they don’t allow them.

Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We will survive, we will survive!

wokpe up this morning to two boners! THANK YOU (BASED) GOD! 

whoop whoop

Owners not wanting to negotiate? Players having no leverage? Nothing that suing for six billion dollars won’t help!

LOL at you "wise" guys who’ve said the players have no leverage. Lol at David Stern’s "nuclear winter" and "this deal won’t get any better" threats.

– Extend and trade deals still allowed, just modified.

– Full MLE for non-tax paying teams. Four years at $5 million.

– 10% cap on escrow tax, instead of the UNLIMITED that owners wanted.

– Compromise on repeater tax.

– New benefit pool for retired players. 1% of BRI.

The owners STILL get majority of what they want in this deal, but the players get ENOUGH to be happy with the deal. THIS is what the owners should’ve done a long time ago. It shouldn’t have taken the players to sue them in order to get this. Like I’ve been saying all along, this lockout was mostly on the owners’ shoulders.

My wife was just complaining because I told her we were going to watch basketball all day on Christmas. YAHHHH

 Could someone please tell me if they moved the draft age limit up a year? 

The owners would have never lost that Anti Trust Lawsuit, ask around, even NFL Lawyers said the NBA pl;ayers didn’t have a case…This deal was agreed To because Players could not afford to lose 1 Full season, a few games sure but an entire season would have really hurt Most of the NBA players(as they’re more Mid level and Low Level players than Maxed Out superstars)…If the players do indeed agree to this and move along with this Season, we the fans are in for a wild sprint to the playoffs…Younger teams will have an early advantage and The NBA2K roster’s will finally be updated I’m hoping(LOL)…Good News for NBA fans that stuck it out and never gave up hope for the Season(unlike Me who expected this to last a lot longer)…But in the End the Owners got the deal they wanted and the players will have the next 6 years to see how The New CBA works out….

What you’re saying doesn’t make sense…

IF the players had no case, then why did Stern and the owners conceed on the issues they said they would NOT conceed on just a couple of weeks ago? Why are non-tax paying teams getting the FULL mid-level exception every year? Why are extend and trade STILL being allowed? Why is the escrow tax being capped at TEN% now, instead of the unlimited BS the owners were proposing just a couple of weeks ago? Why are they making a compromise on the penalties of repeat tax offenders?

Didn’t Stern say the players’ best deal was behind them? Didn’t he say the NBA was in for a nuclear winter? CLEARLY that hasn’t happened and the players got a "better" deal than what was on the table the last time.

The players didn’t crack… They threatened to sue and the owners came up off of few of their hardline demands. I fully believe the players were willing and READY to miss the entire season in order to hold their stance. I think the owners realized that… The owners’ goal was to make the players crack and when they realized the players weren’t going to crack, they agreed to deal.

Regardless, owners won this battle. The players conceeded the most. They were in concessionary bargaining the entire lockout… It wasn’t about getting more for them, just holding onto the things they had.

NOW, with all of these changes, let’s see if it really makes a F’N difference to the competitive balance of the league…

I’m willing to bet the garbage teams stay bad and the good ones stay good. There’s a reason bad teams stay bad and the good teams stay good… They don’t throw dumb money at the wrong players. As long as there are incompetent general managers and decision makers, they’re still going to be bad teams.

I already know the owners are going to be complaining in six years when this CBA is eligible for the opt out… I’m just eager to see what they’ll complain about next.

@yupyup

The age limit is a "B-List" item and hasn’t been discussed or made public yet. Should be interesting what they decide.

They weren’t out to Hurt the Non Tax Paying Teams(as they are the Ones who Follow the Cap rules) but the Luxary Tax Payers will still be Charged out the Arse for breaking The Rules of the Cap…The Players had NO chance at winning a lawsuit against the NBA…Their case would have been dismissed at some point, the Owners didn’t want to spend More money destroying the Players in front of The Court system, they already destroyed them in the Public Relations department…Yes the Owners did WIN the WAR…and the players have to settle for mini Victories, like all the Things you brought up…The BRI split is now in favor of the Owners(a huge Win for the Owners), 1% goes to retired Players(a victory for the NBAPA)…everything else is subjective…we won’t see how everything plays out until later, the Extend and Trade actually benefits Teams in most cases as they get something back for the Players they currently Employ(so that’s a Win for both sides, players can still try to pick and choose where they land if they’re in the final year of their Contract…)…If you Really think The Majority of NBA players could have survived a Full Year Off you are CRAZY, most of the rookies have made 0 dollars so far, most Veterans cant afford to lose the last full year of pay they’d likely recieve from the NBA, Most Mid Level guys are Not in the financial shape as the Top tier(endorsed Stars)…Yeah, KG and Paul Pierce(both Near Max guys) gcould have survived if the NBA locked them out for a Year, but would Von Wafer or Carlos Arroyo, what about the low/mid level guys On the Pacers, could Lance Stephanson survive a year without pay after only making a few Hundred Thousand last year(not with Agents, Friends and Family sucking you dry)…Most players didn’t want a stopage of work(Checks…) They wanted a deal that would allow them to play(and Be Paid handsomely for it) and they wanted it in June…This lock out was a Complete failure for the Players who misssed 2 months of earnings and still got the Deal the Onwers wanted from Day 1…

Who cares who won? Let’s just play some real pro basketball! 

 @Indiana

Thanks and yeah it should definitely be interesting.

I Heard that most of the players didnt understand the Legal aspects of the talks…

Not that I care, but when I see negatives, that means someone didn’t agree with me OR I posted something that was off. What did I post that was off about the owners conceeding on key things that the players did NOT get in the previous offer???

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/7283065/sources-nba-owners-relented-several-key-issues

Sources: Players won key concessions

By Ric Bucher
ESPN The Magazine

Whether the handshake agreement the owners andplayers reached early Saturday morning on a new labor deal is ratified remains to be seen, but the players apparently did win some concessions on vital system issues that prompted union leaders to reject the previous offer without a vote, league sources said.

League sources said the players’ union viewed the following three aspects of the owners’ previous offer as the most unappealing:

• An escrow system that assured owners would be fully reimbursed in subsequent years if they spent too much on player salaries in any given season.

• The inability of teams under the salary cap to use a mid-level exception if it took a team’s player payroll over the cap and teams over the cap to have use of any exceptions at all.

• Prohibition of teams over the salary cap from making sign-and-trade deals.

The players won concessions on two of the three issues, league sources said.

Owners still will retain 10 percent of every player contract and have the right to keep that money if total salaries go over the allotted percentage allowed in a given season for player salaries, but they will not be allowed to take additional money from benefits or future escrow to settle up, as the owners proposed roughly two weeks ago.

Teams under the salary cap now will be allowed to go as far as $4 million over the luxury tax threshold without restrictions to utilize the $5 million mid-level exception. For example, if the luxury tax is set at $70 million and a team’s payroll is at $68 million, they would be allowed to use the full $5 million.

However, if a team is at $69.5 million in allotted payroll, they can go as far as $74 million and thereby use only $4.5 million of the exception. In the previous offer, the owners wanted teams below the cap to be required to get back under the limit by Oct. 15 of the following year if they used an exception to go over.

Mid-level deals can be a maximum of four years every season in the agreement reached early Saturday morning, sources said. Owners wanted them to alternate between four-year deals one season and three-year deals the next.

Tax-paying teams, meanwhile, will be allowed to use a "mini" mid-level exception of $3 million every year, sources said. Those deals can be a maximum of three years. At one point, owners proposed that teams over the salary cap could not use any sort of exception.

The players did not get all that they hoped for on sign-and-trade rules, sources said. For the first two years of the 10-year deal — either side can get out of it after six — tax-paying teams still will be eligible to do sign-and-trade deals. That opens the door for such impending free agents as Chris Paul, Dwight Howard and Deron Williams to be moved to big-market teams that are already over the salary cap (i.e. Lakers, Knicks and Mavericks).

But in the final eight years of the agreement, teams in the luxury tax will not be eligible to acquire players from another team by sign-and-trade. Teams also will continue to have the option of extend-and-trades, where they can sign their own player to an extension and then deal them. Owners, at one point, wanted to abolish extend-and-trade deals for all teams.

These elements will be presented to the 14 players, or plaintiffs, who filed an antitrust suit against the NBA in Minnesota nearly two weeks ago, union executive director Billy Hunter indicated early Saturday morning. If the plaintiffs find the terms sufficient to withdraw their suit, then the remainder of the labor agreement will be negotiated.

The players’ union, which disclaimed shortly before the suit was filed, would have to be reconstituted. The labor proposal would then have to be put to a vote and a simple majority of the league’s 440-plus players would have to approve it. That process could take several days or up to a week, commissioner David Stern indicated.

The tricky part at this point, one source said, is that only broad, basic tenets of a new deal have been agreed to by both sides and none of it has been committed to paper. One potential stumbling block is that when it comes to committing the entire deal to writing, disagreements on what was said and mutually accepted could arise. There’s also a host of secondary elements.

The owners also apparently relented on several other demands in the previous offer that were not mentioned in the summary proposal the league made available to various media outlets. According to a source, the owners also wanted to eliminate the opt-out clauses for players making above the league average salary.

The owners also abandoned reducing minimum salaries and the first year of rookie contracts by 12 percent in the handshake agreement, sources said.

Ric Bucher is a senior NBA writer for ESPN The Magazine.

 who among you here felt like their heart stopped beating for 0.5 seconds once they read "NBA reaches deal"? I’m pretty sure I had that sense of stoppage…lol

Let the games begin!

Now College Basketball will go to the back of everyone’s mind again.  Oh well…

I really hope I never hear or read anything about any labour disputes, the current agreement, the BRI, or any of the labour disputes ever again! So sickening… Now lets just play ball! 

Does anyone know if the schedules are being remodified or are they the ones currently posted on NBA.com? I gotta get some tickets ordered!

@Rudeboy its been a long time
IM BACK FROM RETIREMENT

@Rudeboy its been a long time
IM BACK FROM RETIREMENT