Time running out on NBA negotiations

The end is here for the NBA. The league's collective bargaining agreement with the National Basketball Players Association will expire at midnight Thursday night and the sides will meet again Thursday in Manhattan with little optimism that they can beat the clock.

"There's always time to make a deal," commissioner David Stern told reporters in Dallas on Tuesday after the league's Board of Governors meeting.

But how much time? The expectation is that if significant progress isn't made in Thursday's talks, the league will impose a lockout Friday. It would be the NBA's first work stoppage since 1998.

Billy Hunter, the executive director of the players union, said last week that the players made a written commitment to not strike and asked the league to commit to not locking out the players. So far, that hasn't happened. "I didn't expect them to do that," Hunter said.

The main sticking point continues to be a battle of wills over the salary-cap system that will go forward. The league has been insisting on a hard cap system and recently presented one similar to what is currently used by the NHL with a midrange of $62 million and a promise that the players would get at least $2 billion in salary and benefits in each year of the 10-year agreement. That number would increase as league revenues increased.

The union has been opposed to a hard cap system, plus the league is also asking the players to take a dramatic reduction in revenues. Under the current agreement, the players get 57 percent of the league's basketball related income (or BRI). The NBA, citing widespread losses by a majority of its teams, wants that number reduced to around 50 percent.