Pretty good news out of New York today and I'm not talking about David Stern missing the negotiations with "flu-like symptoms".
Here's more details but the quick story is the two sides have narrowed the gap to the point that missing any more games than the two weeks already cancelled seems to make far less sense than finding common ground on the last few items of contention.
Of course, and this goes without saying, if common sense was the rule of thumb there wouldn't have even been a lockout to begin with so it might be too soon to start counting the unhatched gorilla eggs.
The agreement seems to contain an amnesty provision that would allow teams to drop one contract per team. The player would still get paid the full amount but only 25% of the salary would count against the cap. The waived player immediately becomes a free agent.
Say, just for example, the Suns waived Josh Childress under this provision. He would get the $27m he's still owed but only about $1.7m would count against the cap each year for the next four years.
My questions to you smart people, which player would the Suns mostly likely cut (if anyone) and looking around the league, do you see any one getting cut that could be a value pick up for the Suns?
Bonus question: Do you think there will be live games by December 1?
[Note by Seth Pollack, 10/20/11 5:32 PM MST ]
Looks like talks broke down tonight with no additional meetings between the two sides scheduled. We'll have more later. Remember that thing above about common sense? Yeah...not a lot of that going on here.
For more gory details, go here.
Also the twitter feeds of Ken Berger and Adrian Wojnarowski have the blow by blow of where is all went bad.
The players apparently feel that they were moving towards a deal until the owners meeting changed something and they came into the meeting today with a more hard line approach.