NBA: Talks continue as lockout nears three-month mark

NEW YORK – NBA players and club owners met for talks in small groups on Tuesday as an ongoing lockout approached three months with no sign of a new contract while the planned November 1 start of the season looms.

After about two hours of meetings, negotiations were halted until Wednesday with progress needed to spark more sessions before the weekend.

“So long as there is reason to keep discussing, we will keep discussing, undeterred by the calendar or weekends or things like that,” NBA commissioner David Stern said. “We will know more after tomorrow’s session.”

Club owners want to reduce the players’ portion of $3.8 billion in annual revenue from 57 percent to less than half and seek a firm salary cap rather than the exception-filled current payroll model.

Players want to avoid a hard salary cap and while they have offered to trim their share to 54 percent, they are far apart of revenue divide numbers with NBA management.

“We’ve talked extensively in ideas and concepts,” said players’ union president Derek Fisher of the Los Angeles Lakers. “These are things that if we can get into the range of, get into the zone of, then maybe we can put a deal together.”

The NBA has already called off 43 pre-season games through the middle of October and training camps that had been set to start Monday. Two more weeks of pre-season games are next on the cut list.

“The calendar is not our friend,” Stern said.

If a deal cannot be struck in time for the season to begin on November 1, the league would have a shortened season for only the second time in its history after a 1998 financial dispute led to a season that was trimmed to 50 games each.