giving up on Christmas, not yet anyway, but the league won’t be playing in November and they won’t be playing a full 82-game schedule this season.
Stern announced Friday night that 
“It’s not practical, possible or prudent to have a full season now,” Stern said. “There will not be full NBA season under any circumstances.”
Stern added that the decision isn’t a “punitive announcement” but instead a reality of the calendar. The league would need 30 days to be up and running from the time they reach an agreement with the player’s union. However, there are no new talks scheduled after the sides met for nearly 30 hours over three days in midtown Manhattan.
A union source maintains that the owners were committed to having the players miss two pay checks, which is what they will now lose with November games removed from the schedule. The Daily News, quoting an unnamed NBA official, reported on its website Monday – two days before owners and players had face-to-face negotiations – that the league would announce it was canceling the final two weeks of November.
For two days, both sides reported making progress on systems issues such as luxury tax, length of player contracts and the mid-level exception. But the owners and players cannot find common ground on the white elephant in the room basketball related income.
Stern said NBA owners would agree to a 50-50 split but said union executive director Billy Hunter and union president Derek Fisher were unwilling to “go a penny below 52.”
“(Billy said) that he had been getting many calls from agents, and he closed up his book and walked out of the room,” Stern added. “And that’s where we are.”
In the previous collective bargaining agreement, players were guaranteed 57% of basketball-related income.
“Derek and I made it clear that we could not take the 50-50 deal to our membership,” Hunter said. “Not with all the concessions that we granted. We said we got to have some dollars.
“We made a lot of concessions, but unfortunately at this time it’s not enough, and we’re not prepared or unable at this time to move any further.”
Stern estimates that the league has already lost $200 million with the preseason being canceled and that they’ll lose “several hundred million dollars more” with November gone.
“The NBA’s next offer will reflect the extraordinary losses that are starting to pile up now,” Stern added, “and you can assume that our offer will change to reflect the changed economic circumstances.”
Hunter said each player would have received a minimum of $100,000 from escrow money that was returned to them to make up the difference after salaries fell short of the guaranteed 57% of revenues last season.
On Thursday, Hunter said he was ready to strike a deal while Stern said it would be a failure on both parties if they couldn’t reach an agreement. Less than 24 hours later, the NBA was announcing that it wouldn’t play a full season for the second time in its history and that the lockout, now in its 121st day, is still going strong.
“I would say both sides are very badly damaged,” Stern said. “The amount of dollars lost to the owners is extraordinary, and the amount of dollars lost to the players under individual contracts is also extraordinary. There will be two severe sets of losses. But that’s what happens in a labor dispute where there’s a shutdown.
“And invariably you could make computations about who’s going to be able to make it back and who’s not going to be able to make it back, and I’m not sure that anytime in the short run the owners will be able to make it back. And I know for a fact that in the short run the players will not be able to make it back and probably never be able to make it back.”
