Wednesday Bolts – 11.23.11

The Basketball Jones put some photos of their time in OKC on Facebook. Check ’em out!

Royce takes a look at Kevin Durant’s lockout travels: “There’s a pretty good chance you saw Kevin Durant play some kind of sport this offseason. Which should be a little weird since A) the NBA is locked out and B) he’s a basketball player. But Durant had to get his sporting fix somehow. XBox just wasn’t cutting it anymore, I guess.Besides playing in basically every basketball event he could, including your Saturday morning rec league (probably), he even went and played flag football with a Twitter follower. I guess the question is: What’s next? Golf? Dodgeball? Wall-ball after school behind the playground? As long as there’s no NBA season, there’s really no telling where he might show up next. Maybe Germany. Maybe Israel. Maybe your driveway. If you bounce it, he will come. Or something like that.”

Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett thinks the players have a pretty good deal: “Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett said NBA players need to recognize a good deal when they see one. “I think the players have to, at some point, come to a conclusion that this may not be as good a deal as they had, but it’s still a pretty good deal,” Cornett said in an interview with HoopsWorld concerning the NBA lockout, which on Tuesday reached Day 145. “The owners, to a certain extent, do think in business terms. We all want to pretend it’s a sport, but it is definitely a sport played inside a business. And the owners, who run the business, say the business model is broken and it’s got to be corrected.”

Hunter expects court to mediate NBA lawsuit: “Union executive director Billy Hunter said Tuesday he expected that a Minnesota magistrate judge would mediate the players’ lawsuit against the NBA, as the court did in the NFL’s labor dispute.Hunter specifically mentioned U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan, the court-appointed mediator in the NFL talks. Boylan is not the magistrate assigned to the NBA antitrust suit, although the district judge has the discretion to appoint a different magistrate to mediate.”

The NBA’s nuclear winter: “We’re in yet another NBA-less week of November, and the labor talks between the players and owners took an ugly turn last week when the NBPA dissolved its union and players filed antitrust suits. With a lawsuit already pending in New York between the owners and the players, we have now officially moved from the sometimes-contentious collective bargaining phase to always-contentious litigation period. And, instead of battling over BRI and salary-cap exceptions, the players and owners, represented by some of the best litigators and antitrust lawyers in the country, will now battle over labor exemptions and antitrust violations.”