NBA sides vow to keep talking

The effort to preserve the upcoming NBA season will carry into the weekend, as the NBA and its players' union emerged from a five-hour collective bargaining session Friday agreeing on one issue: to keep talking.

"We had an engaging meeting," NBPA president Derek Fisher said after the meeting broke just before 7 p.m. "We discussed a lot of different ideas and concepts . . . We discussed a little bit of everything. We did not, however, complete a deal today, but we will be back [Saturday] to continue to discuss and try to get this done."

Asked if a deal could get done by the end of the weekend -- with the clock ticking on the regular season, which starts in exactly one month -- Fisher replied, "I can't answer that. I don't have the answer . . . I don't know if that's going to happen this weekend.''

Though NBA commissioner David Stern on Wednesday pointed to this weekend as a critical point in the negotiations, he blasted an ESPN report on Thursday that said he would tell the union that he would cancel the entire season if evident progress was not made by Sunday.

"Whatever the eventuality is, the idea that we would, at an early stage, cancel the season is as ludicrous today as it was when ," Stern said. "It's just not in the cards. The only thing that we said is that it's hard, in terms of negotiations, if you start to lose regular-season games because both parties' positions harden."

Billy Hunter, the executive director of the NBPA, also dismissed the report. Both sides said talks will continue through the coming week as long as there is reason to continue. But the sides, according to several people who attended the meeting, remain apart on the key points -- salary cap and revenue split -- and nowhere near the point of formulating the foundation of a deal.

There were no proposals on the table, no new ideas to sleep on and, according to those at the meeting, neither side made a move off its respective demands. Some who emerged from the meeting, however, promoted optimism mainly because of the sense of urgency that was evident from both sides, which included a large-group setting with the NBPA's executive committee and owners from the NBA's labor relations committee.

"Overall, we felt like this was worth our time," Fisher said. "It was not a waste of time."

Miami Heat forward Udonis Haslem, one of a group of about 20 players -- including superstars such as LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony -- who attended the meeting, came away saying he was "very encouraged . . . You can see that everybody wants to make a deal."