As Stern has recounted a dozen times since, not long after what was supposed to have been the hallway conversation that saved the season, something odd and wholly unexpected happened. There was a knock on the door where Stern was selling his owners on the idea. The players wanted to talk.
When they convened, instead of the union’s head, Hunter, or their negotiating committee of Maurice Evans, Matt Bonner, Roger Mason, Theo Ratliff, Etan Thomas and Chris Paul, representing the players were Fisher, Kessler, and three superstars who had been to very few of the meetings at all: Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Kobe Bryant.
A bad sign: Pierce was still wearing his backpack.
The players had two pieces of news that shocked the league: 50/50 was not good enough. And there was nothing further to discuss.
“We had a large group of owners,” remembers Silver, “who had flown in and were prepared to negotiate around the clock.”
More importantly, they had made an aggressively good offer, the NBA’s leaders thought, the one that might get them in trouble with their owners but surely not with the players.
And players who hadn’t even been in the talks, and who seemed not to be on the same page with the crew that had endured more than 40 meetings, had been the ones to reject the best offer the league was likely to have, and to end the best day of negotiations prematurely.
What in the hell was going on? How had they so misread the situation? And where was Hunter? Who spoke for the union? Should the league have been negotiating with Garnett all along?
Later the league would suggest that the talks had fallen apart because the union happened to have some particularly strident players show up that day.
Maybe it’s as simple as that. Or maybe it’s much more complicated.
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