NEW YORK — NBA players and club owners met for talks on Wednesday for only the third time since a July 1 lockout shut down the league and planned to continue negotiations on Thursday and possibly Friday.
ONGOING STALEMATE. NBA Players Association president Derek Fisher, of the Los Angeles Lakers, talks to the media after meeting with officials of the National Basketball Association to discuss the ongoing NBA labor impasse on Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2011, in New York. AP FILE PHOTO
Six hours of talks last week led to the five-hour session Wednesday in New York, and while owners and players agreed not to talk about how talks were progressing, both sides faced pressure as precious time ticked away.
NBA training camps are scheduled to open October 1, just three weeks from Saturday, with a month of pre-season exhibitions ahead of the planned November 1 start of the 2011-2012 season.
“We agreed that we’re going to sit here for as many days as we can to see whether we can make progress, but we agreed not to characterize.anything at all,” NBA commissioner David Stern said.
If a deal does not come soon, events will soon start to be called off and both sides will begin to lose revenues.
“Time is running down, not necessarily out, but I think we all feel in the room that if we continue to work at it we can possibly find a way to get a deal done,” said union president Derek Fisher of the Los Angeles Lakers.
“There’s a window here. We have an opportunity to make some progress, to try to hammer some things out.”
The only time the NBA has lost games to a bargaining dispute came when the 1998-99 season was trimmed to 50 games per club.
“Obviously, the more we have the opportunities to meet, talk and discuss and really try to figure out how we can put a deal together, the better, so you can characterize that as positive in a sense,” Fisher said.
“Whether we are making progress or we have momentum, we can’t say and it’s tough to say. Until the deal is done, there is no deal.”