NBA Owners Say No to Crucial All-Star Weekend Meeting With Players

by Sam Amick

Filed under: Celtics, Hawks, Hornets, Knicks, Lakers, NBA Rumors, Sports Business and Media, NBA CBA, NBA Business

An NBA labor situation that has been dire for months may have reached doomed status recently, as a crucial negotiating session between the league's owners and players at next month's All-Star weekend does not look likely to happen.

The meetings that so many expected to take place were seen by most as a final frontier of sorts on the labor front, an 11th-hour attempt to resolve their many differences in time to avoid a lockout that would begin when the collective bargaining agreement expires in July. But according to Maurice Evans, the Atlanta guard who serves as executive vice president on the NBA Player's Associations committee, the owners have made it known that they have no interest in engaging the players on such a stage.

"They don't even want to meet with us at All-Star break," Evans told me by phone on Wednesday. "You're telling me you can't pull a few guys and some owners into a room for an hour and try an update what's important? What's important is us continuing our league and not having a work stoppage, so if it was really important to them, I would think they would want to find time to do that."

 

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Source: http://nba.fanhouse.com/2011/01/19/nba-owners-say-no-to-crucial-all-star-weekend-meeting-with-playe/

Avril Lavigne Bali Rodriguez Bar Refaeli Beyoncé Bianca Kajlich