The NBA lockout is not nearly as close to coming to an end as its NFL brethren. In fact, the exact opposite could be happening following a meeting scheduled for Friday between Billy Hunter and agents of some of the league's top players.
Hunter, the Executive Director of the NBPA, will meet with agents including Mark Bartelstein and Arn Tellem in New York on Friday according to Bloomberg News. Among the topics of discussion will be decertification of the union -- a move the NFL players made much earlier in the process.
Decertification is rumored to come with some grave consequences, according to an earlier report, but making that move would send a new message to the owner's side according to sports law professor Paul Haagen of Duke University.
"Decertification is potentially an expression of lack of confidence in the existing union and its effectiveness in negotiation," Haagen said in a telephone interview. "Or it is a strategy about unions and collective bargaining all together, the belief that it might be better to operate outside of the federal labor laws and have a much more open labor market."
Either way, let's hope this is more of a bluff than something that might actually be on the table as it doesn't seem to have helped the NFL straighten their mess out.