Tuesday Bolts – 9.6.11
Ben Golliver of CBSSports.com on KD’s new ink: “Home, God and hoops. That’s a fairly winning formula for an NBA player, and this design, despite its size, is almost mild by the league’s standards. It’s not a giant tree like the one owned by Golden State Warriors Monta Ellis and it’s certainly not the creepy World of Warcraft design sported by Utah Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko or the skull-eating woman abomination Miami Heat forward Chris Bosh put on his back. Of course, like Durant’s other tattoos, this green mural will be covered by his jersey while he’s playing.”
Kurt Helin of PBT on it: “Maryland, know that Kevin Durant loves you. A lot. So fond is he of his native Maryland that he got this new back tattoo (at the bottom of the post). Which is an impressive piece of work, first off. And we might suggest that he is now seriously committed to the number 35.”
Russell Westbrook is promoting the new Call of Duty and talked about it.
Did you know Jeff Green is back on Twitter? And that he said he’s going to get a tattoo? And that James Harden said he’s going to get one too? KD’s advice: “we both dark. Lol kd said start with moms name.”
Mike Fisher of FS Southwest on KD’s summer: “Maybe mine is a Pollyannaish viewpoint. Maybe I’m wrong, and this Summer of KD is all orchestrated and corporate and strategic and only meant to look impromptu and pure … and it’s all as fake “The Blair Witch Project,” with its grainy film quality tricking the viewer who would eventually learn that even the watery snot that dripped from a frightened kid’s nose was scripted. But I’m falling for it. As anger threatens to devolve into apathy, right now the NBA world needs something to believe in, something to care about. So let’s believe in the sincerity of Oklahoma City Thunder star Kevin Durant.”
Players and the league to meet again Wednesday. Fingers crossed!
Chris Sheridan, formerly of ESPN.com, writes the gap isn’t as large as we think: “Yes, under the 10-year collective bargaining agreement the owners have proposed, the gap is indeed somewhere in the area of $7-8 billion range…. Moreover, if you look at years 1, 2 and 3 of the proposals, the sides are a total of $870 million apart. (The players are asking for $2.17 billion in salaries and benefits in 2011-12, $2.33 billion in ’12-13, and $2.42 billion in ’13-14. The owners are offering a flat $2 billion per year.) Or to put it another way, in a business that brought in $4.2 billion in revenues last season, the sides are only $170 million apart for next season…. But here is the key thing, the two most important words to keep in mind as this lockout plays itself out: Aggregate dollars. Right now, the owners have offered the players slightly more than $12 billion in total compensation over the next six seasons. The players are seeking just under $15 billion. Somewhere in between $12 and $15 billion lies the settlement number, and they’ll get there one way or another.”
Matt Moore of CBSSports.com says not to get too excited though: “Still, even with the advance knowledge that most of what both sides have said is nothing but empty rhetoric, and even with both sides meeting this week for the second time in as many weeks, it’s hard to see all the doomsday talk as nothing but bluster. There are hard-liners on both sides, and eventually, even if the intimate circles meeting now are able to find compromises, the BRI hawks in the owners’ contingent and the principled compensation defenders in the union will have to be brought in. And that’s where we wind up the same place we’ve been for two months… Nowhere.”
