text:
- Hagen: Your father wouldn't want to hear this, Sonny. This is business not personal.
Sonny: They shoot my father and it's business, my ass!
Hagen: Even shooting your father was business not personal, Sonny!
Sonny: Well then, business is going to have to suffer.
That's one of the most famous scenes from one of the most famous movies ever made. You know how things end for Sonny Corleone — he ignores his consigliere, makes it personal and ends up gorging on a bowl of bullets parmigiana. His brother, Michael, assumes command and remains all-business for his first few years, slowly losing perspective and becoming more and more paranoid. He stops trusting his inner circle, grows apart from his family and murders his bumbling brother. Killing Fredo is strictly business for Michael, a warning that nobody should ever cross him. He can't see anything beyond making money and keeping power. He's dead inside. No different than Sonny, really.
What does this have to do with the NBA lockout? The owners wanted to blow up their current model; the players gave them gas and matches. But why? I think the answer lies in that Godfather scene. The owners treated these negotiations as a natural extension of their business, only caring about their bottom line and nothing else. The players took the proceedings much more personally. After things fell apart on Monday — when the NBPA rejected David Stern's "take it or leave it" ultimatum and decided to decertify, a confusing move (because of the timing) that almost certainly wrecked the 2011-12 season — agent Aaron Goodwin made a telling comment to the Washington Post's Mike Wise.
"For years owners have treated players as if they are just their property," Goodwin said, "fining them over how they dress, act, everything. This is the first time the players have the opportunity to say no."
Whoa. For months and months, bubbling beneath the surface of the posturing and rhetoric, buried under anonymous leaks, veiled threats and everything else that makes any professional sports lockout or strike so insufferable, a dynamic had been swelling that was entirely, 100 percent personal. Let's look at Goodwin's take a second time.
For years owners have treated players as if they are just their property
That's a recurring theme of this lockout, something Bryant Gumbel broached on Real Sports when he compared the NBA owners to plantation owners, then festered when nobody on the players' side distanced themselves from Gumbel's words (if anything, you could almost feel them silently nodding). A few days later, Wise's column "Negotiations could be hijacked by racial perceptions" publicly nailed many of the points that NBPA insiders had been whispering privately for weeks. Why isn't anyone pointing out that Peter Holt is one of Rick Perry's biggest donors? Why isn't anyone remembering that Donald Sterling battled those racial discrimination housing lawsuits, or that Dan Gilbert skewered LeBron James after The Decision and made him seem like, as Jesse Jackson said later, "a runaway slave?" Why hasn't anyone noticed that 28 of these 29 owners are white, or that everyone in David Stern's inner circle is white except for Stu Jackson? Race overshadowed these negotiations more than anyone wanted to admit. Gumbel recklessly ripped that scab open. The NBPA's lead negotiator, Jeffrey Kessler, reopened it last week by stupidly saying, "Instead of treating the players like partners, they're treating them like plantation workers."1 Goodwin (an African-American) revisited the theme a little more diplomatically on Monday, but still calling the players "property" is pretty telling.2
This was such an idiotic statement by Kessler, and so counterproductive, that Hunter and his cronies quickly distanced themselves from it AND made Kessler apologize. Somehow, he's still in charge. Go figure.
Here's where it gets tough for me. I am white. Jackson's "runaway slave" remark never sat well with me for the simple reason that — in my mind — slavery should never be brought up with professional sports (no matter the topic). My friend Michael Wilbon disagreed. He thought Gilbert's remarks failed the racism "smell test" and mentioned that, independently of Jackson, he read Gilbert's rant and wondered, "Wow, did one of (Gilbert's) cotton-pickers get away?" Wilbon is one of the smartest, most rational people I know, someone who succeeded by positioning himself as an entertaining writer and TV personality who happens to be black. He never makes race an issue without a reason. Wilbon was bothered by something in Gilbert's letter that I couldn't see. His life experiences were different than mine.
Is this what happens when 28 wealthy white guys (plus Michael Jordan, who emerged to everyone's surprise as a leader of the "let's screw the players over as much as we possibly can" side) keep trying to impose their will on a collection of not-nearly-as-wealthy-and-mostly black guys? This was one of Stern's biggest mistakes — believing the league had squashed their race issues decades ago, that his record was impeccable on this front, that he could negotiate one last labor deal without worrying about things like, "The players won't care that nearly everyone on my side for this meeting is white, right?" Stern would disagree — vehemently — with Goodwin's assertion that owners treated players like "property." But Goodwin isn't some low-level flunkie. He has represented superstars like Jason Kidd, Paul Pierce, LeBron James and Dwight Howard over the years. He represents Kevin Durant right now. He has a better feel for these guys than Stern does. And if he truly believes the players feel like "property," that's pretty frightening.
Let's look at the second part of Goodwin's quote
For years owners have treated players as if they are just their property — fining them over how they dress, act, everything.
That's not an outlandish claim. For the past twelve years (since our last labor shutdown), Stern capped contracts and rookie deals so players didn't get paid too much (or too much right away). He instituted a mandatory dress code so injured players looked more professional (translation: less "urban"). He cracked down on taunting during games, physical play, leaving the bench during altercations and anything else that might lead to another Artest Melee or Kermit/Rudy scenario. He pushed players to participate in "NBA Cares," fined them for not showing up on time to All-Star Weekend, fined them for avoiding the press during the playoffs and basically treated them like an overbearing high school principal. And, of course, he made every decision in his typically smug, sarcastic, endearing-or-bullying-depending-on-how-you-feel-about-him manner.3
For the record, I find it endearing. Then again, I've never been on the opposite side of a bargaining table with him.
He's clearly wearing out the players and not in a good way. During one of Stern's typically biting lectures in a crucial labor meeting two months ago, Dwyane Wade snapped and yelled at him, "Don't you point your finger at me!" That was personal, not business. That was Wade telling Stern, "Fuck you, you're not my dad. We're tired of your condescending bullshit. It's not happening anymore." Same with Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce staging their infamous (and totally ill-conceived), "We're not budging from 53 [BRI]" walkout a few weeks later. Even more interesting: Stern and his inner circle were (and are) genuinely dumbfounded by the players' growing enmity towards them.4
Something that probably didn't help — unlike in 1999, every twist and turn during this lockout was dissected immediately on Twitter, sports blogs and web sites, and any player could become a character in the negotiations just by tweeting something either inflammatory or defensive. The coverage of this lockout, in general, was incredibly comprehensive and so pointed that I can't even imagine how casual fans followed it. Even if the players barely (if ever) heard from their player reps, they could certainly educate themselves about the day-to-day proceedings of the lockout if they wanted.
Quick tangent: My father served as the superintendent of schools in Easton, Massachusetts, for nearly twenty years. He retired in the summer of 2009, at the age of 62, for a variety of reasons but mainly this one. He didn't want to stay too long. When you're a superintendent, it only takes one renegade school committee member, one unexpected budget cut, one scandal or one tragedy to shift momentum against you. Once it happens, you can't get it back. Adversaries smell your weakening power the same way zombies smell blood. You start getting undermined or browbeaten into ideas you never wanted to do. By the time you finally resign or get replaced, those final years become part of your legacy, the last thing anyone remembers about you (whether you like it or not). My father never wanted that to happen. He left one year too early instead of one year too late. He has no regrets.
And as an NBA die-hard and 38-year season ticket holder for the Celtics, he watches what's happening with David Stern right now and has one reaction: "He stayed too long. That's exactly what I didn't want to happen to me."
I don't blame Stern — sometimes you're the last to know. I think that he thought his track record was impeccable. He can't see how his players see him in 2011 — as the little/old/sarcastic/white/out-of-touch dictator who patronizes them, orders them around, genuinely feels like THEY should listen to HIM, and by the way, works for the owners (and not them). And it's not like fans are delighted with him, either. He stopped thinking outside the box years ago.5 It's funny that the league obsesses over its big market/small market issue, revenue sharing and international growth and keeps trotting out the same laborious 82-game regular season with the same jacked-up prices and the same annoying issues (like tanking for draft picks, or exhausted teams playing their fourth road game in five nights). You know what was really telling these past few weeks? We were coming off of one of the top-five NBA seasons ever, now it's November, the league isn't playing and nobody really cared. Imagine the outrage if pro football disappeared for an entire month. Where's the clamoring for regular season pro basketball?
I'd list some examples but I've written about this 275 times.
If anything, it's swung the other way. Many season ticket holders don't care if they miss these first six weeks of games, feeling their tickets are overpriced, anyway. Casual fans only care during the playoffs; for them, it was always a nine-week sport and that's it.6 Only the junkies are pissed off. And even then, you don't REALLY feel the NBA's loss until after the holidays, when college football is gone and the NFL playoffs are winding down. No wonder the league claims to be losing money even after a godsend of a two-year stretch (pre-Decision and post-Decision) in the midst of a historic talent boon. When you remember it happened on Stern's watch, then factor in his disconnect with the players, it's sure starting to seem like one of the greatest sports commissioners ever overstayed his welcome.
That apathy vindicated the owners' position to some degree: In case you were wondering, nobody really gives a crap that we're not playing right now. By blowing up the NBA and trying to create a more logical model, we weren't exactly breaking up the '27 Yankees here.
Which brings us to the last part of Goodwin's quote
This is the first time the players have the opportunity to say no.
That's a pretty bold statement. And by the way I don't disagree. When can you remember NBA players truly standing up to Stern before these last few months? See their quotes or tweets dating back to the summer and the same themes keep popping up. Why should we trust the owners' numbers? We already gave back, what are they giving up? Why are we the ones making all the concessions? How is this a partnership when one side is telling the other side what to do? Why do they claim so many franchises are in trouble when people are still buying them? Who was putting a gun to the owners' heads when they were giving out all those contracts that they knew were dumb?
Some arguments make sense; others are too idealistic. But there is definitely an overriding theme. We don't trust them, we're tired of kowtowing to them, we're standing up for ourselves. The players would rather implode a season than accept an unfavorable deal — not as a business move, but for their own sanity, because they're over-competitive, proud people who no longer want to be told what to do. They convinced themselves (perhaps foolishly) that there's a greater good here, that their collective dignity was worth sacrificing a paid season of their preciously short playing careers. They believe they conceded enough (a 10 percent drop of their revenue share, basically), they're worried about protecting future generations of players (or so they claim), and deep down, it pisses them off that the Old Haughty White Guy Who Bossed Us Around For Years basically told them last week, "Here's our offer, here's our deadline for you to take that offer, and if you don't like it, I am going to ram that offer up your asses and you won't play this year."
Really, they're just rebelling. And over everything else, that's why the 2011-12 season is about to get canceled.
Of course, these things don't just blow up by themselves. Everything described above was the "gas." We still needed matches, and we still needed people lighting those matches and tossing them towards the gas leak. Here were the offending parties in no particular order.
1. Billy Hunter and Derek Fisher
Imagine riding in a car with someone who doesn't care if he dies. He's driving 100 miles an hour on the highway and cackling like a maniac. You're asking him to slow down. He asks, "What's it worth to you?" You stammer. He says, "Unless you give me everything in your wallet right now, I'm driving into that highway divider up there." You have to make a decision: Do you pay him, or do you think he's bluffing?
Well, you pay him. Quickly. You don't want to find out if he values his life less than you value yours.
Guess who had the leverage that whole time? That's right the suicidal maniac driving the car. And really, that's how the latest NBA lockout played out. We have known for nearly three years that the NBA owners (a) wanted to change the financial structure of their business, and (b) didn't care how they did it, just that it happened. If they lost 30 games of the 2011-12 season to get what they wanted, fine. If they lost the season, fine. If they lost three seasons, fine. They didn't care. Just don't ask them a question like, "If you're so unhappy owning your NBA franchise, why don't you just sell it?" See, heading into the summer of 2011, your average NBA franchise was more valuable for the investment itself than for the revenue it yielded. That's pretty liberating — if you don't care that your business stops, how can anyone possibly negotiate with you? You're basically driving them towards that highway divider and asking for their wallet.
You could see the owners' devious plan percolating as far back as All-Star Weekend in 2009, when I wrote my "No Benjamins Association" column7 and predicted doom. You know who else could see it coming? Billy Hunter! You know, the guy who admitted last week to knowing this day was coming for two or three years. That begs the question, "Why didn't you start the decertification process on July 1 instead of November 14, Billy?" It's like losing your house to an earthquake and saying, "I knew we were going to have another earthquake, I've been saying this for years," only never buying earthquake insurance. Excuse me? Maybe Hunter doesn't realize it yet, but he's become a permanent punchline for playing the decertification card so late (and for how he handled the past six months in general). I wouldn't let Billy Hunter negotiate an eBay bid for me at this point.
One prediction from that column: "The owners will happily lock out players as soon as the current CBA expires, then play the same devious waiting game from the summer of 1998 will the league survive a yearlong disappearance? What about two years? We're less than 29 months from starting to find out. If you think it's a good idea to disappear for even six months in shaky economic times, ask any Writers Guild member how that turns out. These wealthy or used-to-be-wealthy owners don't want to keep losing money just to feed their ego by continuing to own a basketball team. They will make other arrangements, the same way they would arrange to sell their favorite yacht because they didn't feel like splurging on gasoline anymore. These guys don't want to fix the system; they want to reinvent it."
As a friend who works in professional sports (not the NBA) pointed out by email this week, "When one party has all of the leverage (like the NFL lockout once the Court of Appeals ruled the lockout could continue, or the NBA lockout until now), it does not necessarily mean the other party has to hit its head against the wall. What is wrong with figuring out, well in advance, that you have a weak position and cutting the best deal you can? This notion that a good negotiation lasts right up until a deadline (or past a deadline) is stupid. A good negotiation is understanding your position and getting a deal done before bad things happen. That is where the NBPA (Kessler, really) screwed this up. Sometimes you just have to understand that the best deal to be made (under any circumstances) CAN be made early. If you get criticized as a Gene Upshaw-type lackey then so be it. By the way, when you are willing to do a deal early you can sometimes get peripheral issues your way because the other party does recognize the value of avoiding a fight and missed games."
And sure, if the league suddenly started making boatloads of money, that leverage would shift and the players could say, "Everything stops unless we get more." But those weren't the stakes this time around. Hunter and Fisher failed to prepare the players, fed their anti-Stern neuroses, never unearthed a decent strategy and misread every conceivable tea leaf. Their goal from Day One should have been, "We have no leverage, we need to get the best deal we can without missing any paychecks." Even last week, they mistook Stern's ultimatum as "take it or leave it" when it was really an "S.O.S." — with his influence eroding, Stern barely had enough owner votes and knew small-market teams (along with Washington and Denver) wouldn't back any other offer unless it pillaged the players.8 Hunter and Fisher thought he was bluffing. They were wrong. Dead wrong. That offer is gone. And it's not coming back.
We learned these past few weeks that Stern barely has enough juice to mobilize his owners any more. There's too much new money in the league and too many owners who weren't around during Stern's prime. Goes back to my dad's whole "stayed too long" thing.
You can't oversell how disorganized Hunter's side has been — especially last weekend and on Monday, when they never allowed the players to vote, failed to give them enough information and couldn't even wrangle every player rep to Monday's meeting in New York. It took them five solid days to respond to Stern's offer; instead of countering with four or five system tweaks like Stern expected (he would never admit that publicly because it would belie his whole "take it or leave it" stance, but it's true), the players simply shredded it and launched the NBA's "nuclear winter" (Stern's words, and really, his only inspired moment of the past few months). Anyone who commends the players for standing up for themselves should mention that, during those five days — which doubled as the five most essential days in the recent history of the players association — many players couldn't even get in touch with their team reps (much less Hunter or Fisher). Those players were standing up for themselves, all right — they were standing up to make sure they had cell phone reception because nobody was emailing them any updates. What a mess. If I wrote a book about the 2011 NBA Lockout, it would either be called Clusterfuck! or CLUSTERFUCK!
2. The Owners
Either they never wanted a season (and lied this whole time), or they badly misread the players' resolve and their growing contempt for Stern. It's one or the other. Hmmmmmmm. Let's lie and pretend they wanted a season. Who "negotiates" like that? Why were they going for Eff You touchdowns like the post-Spygate Patriots? Why weren't they more magnanimous? Why did they try to win every single issue? Whatever happened to the concept of "I want to win, but I also want to be fair because these are my partners for the next 10 years?"
Players are competitors. They don't want to be "embarrassed" or "broken." It's easy for them to confuse "taking a stand" with "not making the best available deal given the limited leverage you had." Why didn't the owners find a few subtle ways to let the players save face? Didn't they learn anything from how Roger Goodell and his owners handled those few days after their NFL agreement, when they effusively praised the deal for both sides even after working the players like a speed bag? And if Team Stern expected the players to counter, why not say that? Hell, why not say, "We screwed that 'last offer' thing up, we're revising our offer as a sign of good faith in one last attempt to save the season"?
One thing's for sure: If Stern believed they were that close (and I know for a fact he did), then he totally failed and totally underestimated how the players felt. Not their resolve, just how they felt. Maybe that's why he seemed visibly stunned afterwards, blaming Hunter and Kessler when the reasons were so much more complex. The players know they have terrible leadership. Their agents have been telling them that for months and months and months. And at this point, they don't care. Even though Hunter was an unequivocal disaster these past few months — his lack of urgency was stupefying, his lack of a coherent strategy was almost criminal, his summer media strategy couldn't have been worse, and his inability to keep his 450 players in the loop from day to day was inexplicable — the players kept following him and Fisher if only because the other option (trusting Stern and the owners) was less palatable. How can someone run a sports league for 28 years and lose the trust of his players that completely? And how could he possibly expect to win that trust back?
(The short answer: He won't. It's gone.)
3. The Pampering Issue
Your typical NBA owner operates like a sugar daddy of sorts. He coddles his players, flies them on chartered planes, serves them gourmet meals on those planes, puts them up in five-star hotels, builds them state-of-the-art practice facilities, hires them the best possible training staffs, sneaks them extra tickets for every game, enables their entourages, builds ticket campaigns around them, kisses their asses and (in some cases) even allows their friends to hitch rides on team charters. That's the real reason Dan Gilbert was so pissed off two years ago — after giving LeBron everything he wanted for years and years, LeBron never had the courtesy to call before he picked Miami. Gilbert felt more like a spurned boyfriend than anything (and acted like it).
I thought we had something! What about all those times I let your buddies ride on our team charter! You used me! I'm throwing away everything you ever gave me!
Once Gilbert flipped that switch and went after LeBron so ferociously, the players took it personally just like they took it personally when the owners started playing hardball this summer. (You can only imagine how the players would have reacted had the owners pulled "chartered planes" and "suites in every five-star hotel" out of their last proposal. Then we REALLY would have had a problem.) There's a general disconnect here that almost feels like a bad marriage. Follow me here
• The owners bitch about the players being greedy, and yet all they've done is enable that greed.
• The players claim they're being disrespected, and yet no group of professional athletes has ever been more spoiled.9
No American professional sports league ever had a higher average salary.
• The owners claim they care about the quality of the game, and yet, every player says the ideal number of regular season games — if your goal is to have healthy, rested players entertaining your fans to their best abilities every night — is somewhere between 70 and 74 games. (The owners, of course, ignore this.)
• The players claim it's not their fault that owners keep handing out lavishly dumb deals to forgettable players, and yet they ignore that their fans — the people who pay their salaries and keep their league afloat — hate nothing more than seeing overpaid assholes jogging through games, faking injuries, showing up for camp 20 pounds overweight, clogging their team's salary cap and making it harder to improve their team's roster. The fact that they don't realize this reflects on them is kind of alarming. Can you really be that self-absorbed?10
The counterargument to that point (as Stein & Bucher made in our podcast on Tuesday): Come on, you'd want yourself or any other writer to make as much money as they could! I would have rebutted this more effectively if Bucher's crappy cell phone didn't make it impossible to interrupt him. Here's the problem with that argument — a professional sports league only has a certain amount of money to give its players. Why do you want too much of that money going to the wrong players? Why not come up with a better model, something that addresses the issues of rookie contract guys outperforming their deals (like Derrick Rose or Russell Westbrook) or meal tickets like LeBron and Durant making less money than Vernon Wells or John Lackey? I'm fine with players making as much money as they can — can we just make sure those players are good and deserve the money? God forbid we figured out how to work performance-based incentives (like All-Star or All-NBA appearances, top-5 MVP votes, the Finals MVP or someone who spends a certain number of years with the same team) into the labor negotiations these past few months.
• The owners claim they need a better financial model, and yet, they're the ones recycling the same incompetent executives — seriously, someone is hiring Ed Stefanski again???? — and handing out cringe-worthy contracts year after year after year after year. I wrote the "Atrocious GM Summit" column in 2006 — four years later, with a lockout looming, we watched more moronically dumb contracts handed out than EVER before. These guys can't stay out of their own way, and even worse, the players want to keep it that way.
Aren't they "partners" here? Don't they care about the league as a whole? Don't they want fans to like their product? The players want it both ways — please, keep the chartered airplane seats, hotel suites, crab legs and stupid contracts coming, just don't ask me to care about the quality of my league. In a perfect world, both sides would work together and create the best and most fan-friendly NBA model possible. But the world ain't perfect.
You know what the real irony is? The owners' last proposal actually made a ton of sense. Read Howard Beck's breakdown of what it would have looked like, potentially, and try to find ONE thing that isn't logical. Contracts should be shorter so fans aren't getting constantly turned off by that relentlessly overpaid mediocrity. The gap between big market teams and small market teams should be smaller. A team like Cleveland should have a more favorable chance to keep its best player. A star like Carmelo shouldn't be able to force a trade and get rewarded with a mammoth extension. The mid-level exception should be tempered — it spawned too many dumb contracts and made it harder for teams to improve. What's wrong with coming up with a smarter model in which the right money goes to the right people? That's a bad thing?
As my aforementioned pro sports friend says, "In every part of life there are systems that protect people from doing things that will ultimately hurt themselves — its why banks don't charge $30/month for debit card usage; it's not like they don't want to, and it's not like some people wouldn't pay for it. Once you have the BRI split then EVERYONE should be working towards a better system. The NFL got to the dollars, got to the cap, then tried to make it so the rookie pool made more sense. This is a system issue that benefitted everyone. It doesn't make sense for Sam Bradford to make more than Drew Brees, right? The key with any system issue is trust — you tell the NBPA that the money WILL be in the system no matter what — don't they want it to go to guys like Wade or Dirk or Monta Ellis (early in his career) instead of mediocre veterans like Darko or Cardinal? This is where the agents have too much power — some of the powerful ones benefit from certain system structures even if the overall cash doesn't change — they just need to be ignored, and the players need to really trust that the system change won't cost them dollars in the aggregate."
Which leads us to
4. The Agents
If the players don't trust the owners or Stern, and they're losing trust in Hunter and Fisher, who's left?
You guessed it it's those shrewd and lovable legal minds who negotiate for players, call them every day, know their kids' names, won them over years ago, spent the last few months quietly undermining Hunter, know how to butter up media members and curry favor, and currently have their clients lathered into an anti-The-Man frenzy. The agents despised the owners' latest proposal — they don't want the middle class compromised in any way, or sign-and-trades, or the luxury tax, because that might curtail player movement (their bread and butter). They would rather lose a season to protect what they have, knowing they have much longer careers and they'll make those commissions back over time as long as they can prevent the NBA's model from changing against them too drastically right now.
Make no mistake: The agents are the single smartest group involved in this lockout. They make absurd commissions working over general managers (usually ex-players) who are almost always unequipped to negotiate with them. You know that saying "laughing all the way to the bank"? That's what the best sports agents do. Trust me, they have done the math. They figured out exactly where this lockout needs to end for them — repeat: for them — and advised the players accordingly. Meanwhile, these players can NEVER get that lost season back from three standpoints: how it affects them financially, how it affects their playing careers, and how it affects their fans (especially the casual ones who hopped on the bandwagon these past two years and will just as quickly hop off). The agents were supposed to be protecting these guys; instead, they protected themselves. Of course
5. Jeffrey Kessler
The agents could never act more selfishly than Kessler, who waited his whole career for the right antitrust suit and finally found his patsy. It's his chance to become the focal point of an HBO documentary, bring the NBA to its knees and maybe become the Marvin Miller of antitrust lawyers. (It's a longshot, and we might lose a couple of NBA seasons in the process, but who cares, right?) Those just-as-ruthless NFL owners sniffed him out early, chopped his balls off and eventually shut him out of the final negotiating process, knowing he didn't totally care about getting a deal done. Now he's operating in a much bigger vacuum — thanks to a leadership void, Kessler kept amassing power even after his "plantation owners" comment backfired so spectacularly.11
A cynic would say that Kessler deliberately tried to undermine negotiations with that comment in a last-ditch attempt to mess things up so he could get his antitrust suit.
Again, one of the world's leading experts in antitrust law is mobilizing NBA players towards a potentially historic antitrust suit that could wipe away multiple (repeat: multiple) seasons. You don't see anything shady there? Giving Kessler a significant say in these proceedings makes about as much sense as putting Kris Jenner in charge of a Parents Shouldn't Exploit Their Kids support group.
6. The Veteran Superstars
That would be Steve Nash, Grant Hill, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce seven of our wealthiest, most-thoughtful and most-accomplished NBA players. Five of them have been missing in action — most disappointingly, Nash, one of the smartest athletes in any sport. Kobe can't decide whether he wants to cross Fisher and Hunter or not; he's done everything but call them out, he's allegedly leaked information to writers, he pushed hard behind the scenes for the 50/50 deal, he obviously wants to play and yet, there's an invisible line he won't cross.12 Pierce has gone the other way — he's been the union's most vocal "veteran star" voice, and if there's been a revelation these past few months, it's that Pierce carries more weight with other players than anyone else.
I thought for sure that Kobe would be our saving grace here. Of everyone, he has the most to lose — a chance at a title, 2,000 more points towardsto Kareem's scoring record, maybe one last elite year from his knees, and oh yeah $25 million. By the way, I hate this lockout for so many reasons, but the fact that it's making me root for Kobe ranks right up there.
All right, so let's look at Pierce for a second. He's one of my favorites. As a Celtics fan, I stuck with him through thick and thin. I remember when he was nearly stabbed to death, how that incident affected him, how his personal issues nearly led the Celtics to trade him in 2005, how that moment didn't happen only because Boston's new owner stuck up for him, how he reinvented himself over the next three years, how he graciously stuck around during a rebuilding process because his GM promised him help, how he thrived during that championship season, how he soaked in that special moment during Game 6 (in the fourth quarter against the Lakers at home, when the crowd was going bonkers and Pierce turned towards the stands, nodded happily and seemed to be saying to himself, "I've been waiting my whole life for this"), how he tried so valiantly to win a title these past three years as his body slowly betrayed him. He's one of the toughest (and most durable) Celtics ever. He could have played with Russell, Cowens, Bird, you name it.
I'm not surprised that Pierce emerged as a behind-the-scenes leader during this lockout. Every Celtics fan knows how he's wired. Here's what surprises me: Knowing how competitive he is, knowing how much he cares about one more title, knowing how much he loves playing in Boston, knowing how much he appreciates how Wyc Grousbeck and Danny Ainge stood by him over the years, knowing how he thinks about his career in a big-picture sense, knowing that he's a pretty rational guy it frightens me that Paul Pierce cares this much about standing up to the owners and potentially losing a season. It makes me think the owner/player relationship (and the Stern/player relationship) is significantly more damaged than we want to believe. I don't agree with many of the reasons why we arrived there, or with the motives of the people who either conspired to get us there (or pushed us there with their own ineptitude), but we're there and really, that's all you can say.
For that reason and all the others, I keep saying "no" whenever anyone asks me if there will be a 2011-12 NBA season. Just know that there's no side to take — it's mutually assured destruction in its purest form. That's difficult to explain to anyone losing their job over these next few months. I work across the street from the Staples Center at L.A. Live, in a complex that houses something like 10 restaurants and three bars within a two-minute walk of Staples. They were expecting three or four NBA games every week from now until next spring. Now on those nights, it's quiet as hell. A little eerie, even. Bartenders, waiters, bus boys and cooks will start getting axed soon. Same for many Clippers/Lakers employees across the street, and for every other team, and for everyone else who works near an NBA arena, and for every media entity that covers one of the 30 teams it's a ripple effect that keeps going and going, and it's happening because this lockout went sooooooooooooo much deeper than just "we're taking a stand."
I can't see the players caving at this point. They're too entrenched and too rankled. Stern and Hunter are too stubborn to step aside; it's like they're trapped in the same never-ending hockey faceoff, only the referee won't ship them off. Kessler and the agents only care about themselves. Same for the small market owners and even a few of the bigger market ones. If you're looking for a voice of reason13, a veteran star14 to throw his hands up and say, "Wait a second,15 we're not really throwing this season away,16 right?", you're going to be disappointed.17 That renegade player18 would have emerged by now.
"I'm Kobe Bryant"
"for Kobe Bryant"
For the owners, nothing has changed — it's strictly business. For the players, something has changed — it's almost entirely personal. You can't find a middle ground between those two worlds. You just can't. Maybe it's the opposite of how definitively The Godfather: Part II ended — with Michael Corleone sitting outside by himself, lost in thought, alone in every sense, a ruthless businessman with no personal connection to anything — but even so, that deafening silence sounds the same.
Bill Simmons is Grantland's Editor in Chief, the host of the BS Report podcast, the author of the New York Times no. 1 best-seller The Book of Basketball and the co-creator of ESPN's Peabody-award winning "30 For 30" series. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook
Previously from Bill Simmons:
Welcome to the National Mailbag League
Sports Book Hall of Fame: Ghosts of Manila
The Career Arc: Eddie Murphy
Bill and Jay's YouTube Adventure
NFL Quarterback Power Rankings
Proactively Mourning the NBA
Behind the Pipes: Into the Arms of the NHL
Avoiding the Lockout and the Red Sox
We Need a Renegade Basketball League
A Running Diary of Game 162
Welcome to Amnesty 2.0 in the NBA
To submit questions for Bill's mailbag, click here; to comment on this story through Facebook, click here.


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Frank Cho announces: LIBERTY MEADOWS Is Coming Back!!!
FRANK CHO – Liberty Meadows
People have been asking me about the status of Liberty Meadows for awhile now. So today, I'm here to address that very question.
Yes, Liberty Meadows is alive and well. I've been quietly working on it since I got my rights back from Sony. Issue 38 will hopefully come out end of this year.
Let's back track a minute. About 3 years ago, Sony got the rights to Liberty Meadows to develop it as a downloadable original cartoon series for their new Sony Digital division. I wrote the original pilot episode but it was rejected for being too "risque". So other writers were brought in to tone it down and make it more kid friendly. Once I read the rewrite, I thought it completely missed the point of Liberty Meadows. So I rewrote the rewrite, and this went back and forth couple of times until we reached a compromised script. We turned that script into an traditional 2D animated pilot episode.
Enter Sony Television division. They saw the pilot episode and liked it. Liberty Meadows get bumped up to their television division and a TV series is planned. However there is one request, Sony Television people wanted Liberty Meadows to be more "risque" with adult humor like the "Family Guy". This is the point where I rip my hair out in frustration. Sony Digital people rejected my original script for that very reason, for being too "risque".
So I go back and re-polish the original script, adding more scenes to make it longer to fit the television episode time frame. As I'm doing this, a new Sony television contract is being drafted to replace my Sony digital contract. Then the recession hit. Then the three Sony executives who were shepherding this project along since the beginning leave Sony. The new guy who takes over have no interest in projects started by his predecessors. Thus Liberty Meadows TV show goes into limbo… and we wait and wait. Ultimately under the inactivity clause, all the Liberty Meadows rights revert back to me, and concludes my 2 year journey at Sony.
Now Liberty Meadows is back home, firmly under my complete control again.
Will I turn Liberty Meadows into a movie or a TV show? Sure, if the right offer comes along. However until that offer comes, I'm going to enjoy writing and drawing the next misadventures of Brandy and crew at Liberty Meadows with no suits looking over my shoulder telling me which market I should target.
Frank Cho

subset: commoncrawl


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Justice for BJ
William "BJ" Burnham was brutally murdered in his Dillsburg home on June 25, 2006. The man who beat him to death was found not guilty on May 10, 2007 by a jury in York County Pennsylvania. The evidence presented during this trial was enough to find the man guilty for First Degree murder. Not even the judge presiding over the trial agreed with the verdict. All of the facts I am about to give you were testified to under oath. The man had made phone calls earlier in the evening to his cousin trying to find his wife. She denied knowing his wife's whereabouts. As the night went on she eventually told him she knew where his wife was, she was at BJ's house. He asked where BJ lived and she gave him directions to BJ's home. Nextel had mapped these phone calls using cell phone towers. At this point in the evening the man was in New Cumberland (about 20 minutes from BJ's house). 25 minutes later the man made another phone call to his cousin asking what kind of car BJ drove, she told him in detail, he said thanks that's all I needed to know. At this point the cell phone towers put him in Dillsburg (where BJ lived). The man's wife than testified that she woke up to her husband dressed in dark clothing, wearing gloves and holding a baseball bat in BJ's bedroom. BJ and the man wrestled on the ground eventually getting up and going to the living room. The scared wife then ran into the bathroom. She said she heard metal hitting something and then gurgling noises. The man then burst into the bathroom and hit her in the face. He told her to get the hell out of the house. She fled the house wearing only a t-shirt. She met her husband in a church parking lot where he gave her clothing and her purse. She said he had blood all over his face and told her "I killed your fucking boyfriend". He then threatened that if she did not return home she would have the same fate. Did I mention he left his one year old child and his two year old child home alone while he committed this murder A DNA specialist testified that the blood found in the man's vehicle was probably BJ's blood. He could not say for certain because the windows on the vehicle were left down during the rainstorm that night. His wife also testified to the gurgling noises her husband had made mocking the noises BJ had made while he lay there dieing. I am asking you to sign this petition to show your support for seeking Justice for BJ. There are many loop holes in the law where this man can be tried again. Please help us in finding one and sending a cold hearted murder to prison.


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Early this morning, SpaceX's supply-hauling Dragon capsule was successfully captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station, in the first-ever commercial cargo delivery to the manned space outpost.
With 11 resupply missions remaining in the SpaceX/NASA contract, it seems the private company's billion-dollar delivery deal with The Agency is off to a good start.
"Looks like we've tamed the Dragon," said station commander Sunita Williams, as the capsule was captured by astronaut Akihiko Hoshide at 6:56 a.m. EDT. When ISS astronaut Don Pettit successfully captured the Dragon capsule during its first test flight in May, he said "We've got us a dragon by the tail!" Can we expect similar dragon-themed puns for the remainder of SpaceX's resupply missions? We certainly hope so.
"We're happy she's [Dragon's] onboard with us," said Williams. "Thanks to everyone at SpaceX and NASA for bringing her to us … and the ice cream."
Here's to 11 more successful deliveries. Let's just hope SpaceX can sort out that pesky "anomaly" with the Falcon 9's rocket engines.


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Rick DeBanks' video of a wild Surrey house party he attended almost 30 years ago has been viewed more than 12,000 times since he posted it to Youtube just one week ago.
The 33-minute clip shows a house full of rocking teens and young adults ringing in the new year at a residence in Newton, near 144th Street and Highway 10.
"It's a time capsule, for sure," said DeBanks, who added the "Surrey BC House Party Dec 31 1989" video to his Rick Richards account on July 3.
"I have a whole bunch of videos that I'm in the process of converting to MP4s, and I remember that video in particular – and I hadn't watched it in 20 years or more," DeBanks said when reached by the Now-Leader.
"I knew it would be an interesting video for people to see, because it's shot POV style – point of view – and if you watch it, it's almost like you're there, with all the people everywhere. There are some bad spots in the video but it's not too shaky or anything. It just gives the viewer a sense of being at the party."
DeBanks says he used a camcorder to shoot the video with the help of a friend – in an era before cellphone cameras were commonplace, of course.
The clip starts with eerie music for the first minute, then settles in a haze of smoke and booze as party-goers hoot and holler for the camera, to a soundtrack of Led Zeppelin, Tone Loc, AC/DC, Madonna, Poison and, in a group sing-along, John Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane."
The video is posted with the description of "a house party on the last day of the 80's in the Blue Collar town of Newton in Surrey, British Columbia," but DeBanks acknowledged it was actually filmed on the final night of 1990, not 1989. One clue is that Warrant's "Cherry Pie" can be heard in the video, and the song wasn't released until the fall of 1990.
Another clue: the lines of cocaine cut into a '91' shape on a table.
DeBanks said the video features a lot of Princess Margaret high school students and grads.
"A guy named Wayne lived in the house," DeBanks noted. "His parents were obviously gone for the weekend or something," he added with a laugh.
"It was just a real fun night. I almost got into a fight before I even got in, out in the driveway, and it kind of boiled over, but it was OK."
DeBanks, who lives in South Surrey, now runs Athletic Alliance and makes videos about the company's sports-nutrition products. In the mid-1990s, after broadcasting school, he co-hosted an "Inside Surrey" news program on community TV, and has posted one of those episodes – focusing on the Melanie Carpenter homicide in 1995 – on his Rick Richards account.
"I was a wrestler for awhile, as Rick Richards," explained DeBanks, who said he was known as Rick Brown in high school.
On Youtube, he's also planning to post video of his days as a football player with the Surrey Rams.
As for the Surrey party video, DeBanks said he's not entirely surprised by the reaction to it on social media.
"I knew it'd be fairly popular as a retro throwback for those who lived in that era, in that area," he said. "What I have been surprised by is the amount of people watching it who didn't grow up in that era. There's a fascination factor, a curiosity about it.
"It's funny because the video now has more views than any I've ever posted for my company."
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Thought you could get away with spending just $499 on the iPad? Oh no. There's going to be an official Apple keyboard dock for easier typing, which Jobs himself demonstrated the need for earlier with his few typos.
Did Elon Musk Regret Buying Twitter? | Walter Isaacson Interview
The keyboard looks just like the normal Apple keyboard, and actually makes the iPad stand upright, so it's like a mini iMac set-up. Really, this is probably the safest way of typing we can see—far better than the alternatives we suggested, which included a stylus. Gulp.


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This chakra birthstone necklace and pendant includes gorgeous hand picked topaz - November's birthstone. Our tree of life charm is the ideal gift for Scorpio and Sagittarius. Topaz is a 23rd Anniversary gemstone, a symbol of happiness and peace.
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Scott Brown joins Nixon Peabody
Scott Brown announced Monday that he is joining Nixon Peabody LLP as a counsel in its Boston office.
Since the former Massachusetts senator passed on running in the special election to replace John Kerry, he has also signed on as a Fox News contributor and joined a corporate board.
"Given his background in public service at both the national and state levels, Brown will focus his practice on business and governmental affairs as they relate to the financial services industry as well as on commercial real estate matters," according to a release from the law firm.
The Republican is keeping the door open to another run in 2014 — for Senate, when whoever wins the April special election will again face voters, or for governor, when Deval Patrick will leave office.
"During my time in politics, I never hesitated to reach across the aisle to work with members of any political party to secure a preferable outcome," Brown said in a statement. "My approach is consistent with the way Nixon Peabody does business and I believe we can be successful together."
Nixon Peabody has a stable of former elected officials. Former National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds, a onetime New York congressman, leads Nixon Peabody's government relations practice.


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Guatemala's Legacy Of Violence Follows New Leader To Power
As Guatemala's new president, Otto Perez Molina, takes office today, the former general carries the burden of a complicated history into a new struggle against violence.
The Associated Press reported Thursday that one of Perez' top priorities as president would be to regain U.S. military aid, which the U.S. banned because of alleged abuses during the country's 36-year civil war. Perez served as a "top military official" during the war, in which 200,000 civilians, mostly from the indigenous Mayan population, were killed, as the AP reported.
But the violence did not end with the war. Now, drug trafficking and organized crime plague Guatemala, according to an October 2011 report from the International Crisis Group. Experts say exactly how Perez will tackle the current wave of violence — or if his approach is effective — remains to be seen.
Perez has two histories, says Mark Schneider, senior vice president and special adviser on Latin America for the International Crisis Group. Schneider tells The Two-Way that Perez also served on the peace-negotiating team that formally ended the war in 1996. (The BBC has a timeline of Guatemala's history.)
During Molina's campaign, fighting insecurity was part of his platform, as The Christian Science Monitor reported when Perez won in November:
"Guatemalans had been wary of links to the military since dictatorship and extrajudicial killings by security mar the nation's history.
"But, in the context of a high murder rate and a country feeling that local street gangs and Mexican drug trafficking organizations are taking away their sense of peace, many were attracted to his security platform."
The latest news of Perez's hope to reinstate U.S. military aid worries Anita Isaacs, a Latin American studies professor at Haverford who specializes in Guatemala.
"This kind of confirmed — or gives reason to be concerned — that this marks a return to a kind of militarization strategy that characterized the wartime period," she tells The Two-Way. "This is a new war. And it's being perceived as a new war that necessitates a military response."
The legislation that banned U.S. military aid from going to Guatemala requires certain improvements in human rights before the aid can be re-established, the AP reports.
Getting the aid, Schneider says, would take "significant evidence of change."
Isaacs says those changes should be disassociated from military assistance. Building democracy in Guatemala, she says, "should be part of an agenda that doesn't have to do with military aid."
Both Isaacs and Schneider say the current attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, has made strides in strengthening the rule of law and that she should be kept on to finish out her full term (three more years).
"The immediate challenge," Schneider says, "will be to see what [Perez] does to support the attorney general, the U.N. Commission Against Impunity and the efforts to bring to justice those who were involved in mass atrocities in the past and atrocities in the present."
He said the new president "has made positive statements in that regard," but he later added: "We'll just have to wait and see if that in fact happens."
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Are you debating whether to buy a new iPhone 7 or fix a cracked screen on your current device? Well, if you have AppleCare+, you may not have to choose.
This week, Apple announced that AppleCare+ customers will only have to pay $29 to fix their cracked iPhone screens at an Apple Store. Previously, these customers had to pay $79 for screen repairs, or $99 to fix a larger Plus-sized screen. This lowered price also applies to customers who have purchased AppleCare+ in the past as long as they have an iPhone 6 or beyond.
AppleCare+ costs $129. This insurance plan extends the typical iPhone warranty to two years, and it covers up to two repairs within that time frame. Customers without AppleCare+ and whose iPhone are out-of-warranty can expect to pay $129 to fix an iPhone screen or $149 to fix a Plus-sized screen.
iPhone users with cracked screens also have the option to go to an independent repair shop or purchase DIY repair kits online. According to The Washington Post, repair shops typically charge anywhere from $100 to $150 to fix an iPhone screens, and DIY kits can cost between $40 to $100.
The impact on you: By making repairs more affordable, Apple is hoping to better compete against third-party solutions—not to mention, it brings added value to purchasing a pricey iPhone, and dispels the notion that the company has a monopoly on repairs. It also makes their devices more eco-friendly.
Even though going to independent repair shops may seem like it's still the most affordable solution, there are greater risks. Apple typically voids the iPhone warranty if it was taken to an unauthorized repair shop, and third-party tampering can even lead to bricking your device.


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Авторы:William Shakespeare
Год: 2004
английская литература
Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
Scene-by-scene plot summaries
A key to famous lines and phrases
An introduction to reading Shakespeare"s language
An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library"s vast holdings of rare books
Essay by Gail Kern Paster
The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is home to the world"s largest collection of Shakespeare"s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit www.folger.edu.