Monday Bolts – 11.14.11
Darnell Mayberry talked with Scott Brooks about what he’s up to: “‘With all the coaches, the goal is just to have no injuries,” Brooks said. “I was the first injury. I hurt my hamstring. And then the next day, Coach (Mark) Bryant hurt his calf. It was like every day we were losing guys.’ Asked how he injured his hammy, Brooks admitted he overexerted himself after constantly getting beat off the dribble by the team’s video coordinator. ‘My mind still thinks I can do things that my body can’t,” Brooks said. “And I didn’t like Coach Vinny (Bhavnani) going around me that easily. When you get to your mid-40s, you think you’re still in your mid-20s.'”
Nazr Mohammed has been a star of the lockout in terms of players having a strong voice. But he whiffed over the weekend on the incorrectly reported D-League clause. Matt Moore of PBT: “If that proposal did make it in, it would be used only for players who clearly weren’t ready. When they were, they would come up. If you draft a top draft pick, you’re not sending him to the D-League for five years to keep costs down. You want him up. The guys this would impact would likely not be part of the union long-term anyway. And we don’t know any of the surrounding details of the proposal. Oh, and what’s that? One more thing? Oh, yeah. It’s not in the proposal anymore. It’s gone. It’s dead. It’s over. But players are still reacting to it.”
The NBA’s full proposal can be read here. Too bad it’s not in Comic Sans.
Or if you prefer video form, the NBA’s put it on YouTube. Warning: slightly spun.
And here’s a memo to the players directly from Stern.
Howard Beck of New York Times tries to imagine the league under the new rules: “Under the new rule, a traded player must wait six months to sign an extension, and a player who signs an extension cannot be traded for six months. Sign-and-trade deals would also be curtailed. The top-spending teams — those that pay the luxury tax — would be prohibited from acquiring a player in a sign-and-trade deal, starting in 2013-14. That could knock six or seven teams out of the market for top free agents each summer.”
David Stern to USA Today: “We start with the fact this is a proposal that does not call for a reduction on contract (value), that does not call for a hard cap, does not call for the absence of guaranteed contracts,” Stern told USA TODAY on Sunday, “and will see players’ salaries from over $5 million to between $7 million-$8 million during the length of the deal. … We think it’s a very fair deal for the players.”
Maccabi Tel Aviv is refuting the report that Durant is interested: “However, a senior figure at Maccabi told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that there is absolute no truth to the report and that no offer has been made to Durant, who finished fifth in MVP voting in the NBA last season.”
Ken Berger of CBSSports.com on the Twitterview: “Stern and Silver — primarily Silver, judging from the tone and familiar content of the answers — did provide some useful information in response to specific questions about the league’s latest proposal (the complete details of which were obtained by USA Today and are posted here). That would be the one that is on the table only until the players decide Monday whether to accept it for a vote or reject it, after which it will be replaced by a new negotiating position that includes a further reduced share of revenues for the players as well as a hard team salary cap and rollbacks of existing contracts.”
