FanPost

Owners and players we respect a little more.

Posturing, spin, negotiation judo.... If you want to enjoy sausage, the aphorism goes, then you shouldn't watch it being made.

I don't hate David Stern. His role during a collective bargaining negotiation is to represent the interests of NBA owners. We're all beyond expecting sports commissioners who see past that and represent the game, right? Nor do I hate Derek Fisher, the public face of NBA players this summer and fall.

Neither one of those guys is our favorite voice right now, either, though. We'd like to hear from them one last, positive time, shaking hands over a big vellum scroll with a deal on it and some signatures written in the blood of lowly stadium employees, and then have them disappear from our news feeds for a while.

But there have been some positives here too, haven't there? We knew that Kevin Love's a self-involved kid who likes to talk. But haven't you been surprised, a few different times, by the candid remarks of people you wouldn't particularly have expected to be honest and direct and fairly thoughtful?

Friday night "tweets":

There's a deal to be made just not 2day.

Trust me us players understand that 50% of a bigger pie is better than is better than 52% of a small pie. But the 50% is not the real % after we pay all their expenses to BRI we're really left with about 47%. If that's the case than we need a favorable system and a BRI split where we're not responsible for their expenses especially since we have no say so about those expenses.

Us being locked out isn't about basketball. It's about the division of revenues between promoters (owners) & it entertainers (players).

@ honest question. Say players stay firm and season scrapped. What will BRI split for players be a year from now?

no one knows. That's the dooms day question that we r considering

Nazr Mohammed

and then, when he moved on from the CBA back-and-forth with a number of fans:

Saturday morning soccer. I'm so happy this is the last game. It's cold as sh*t out here.

That was funny...my son just ran over a kid cuz he knocked him down earlier. I love his fight but I have to act like it was wrong lol

You know.... There's a pretty reasonable, and basically honest, guy. Anyone who's been a parent at kids sports knows the conflicting emotions he's talking about. I know nothing much about Nazr Mohammed, but he doesn't seem like a bad guy.

So I got to thinking: Who else has shown us a decent, or anyway capable-of-surprising-us, side during this whole thing?

Mark Cuban always says every other thought in his head, of course. Still, when things looked like they were at an impasse a week or so ago, there was this:

(Billy Hunter) seemed enthusiastic about Mark Cuban’s plan to create a better economic model — dubbed "The Game-changer" by Cuban, it eliminates the salary cap completely — and admitted that they had some quality brainstorming before some of the smaller-market owners derailed that momentum.

Chris Sheridan

If what you want is someone to stir the pot with a "big picture" idea from left field, the Mavs' owner is your guy. He's managed to be a pretty constructive presence during all this. If Cuban had been setting the momentum, no doubt there'd have been more talk this summer.

Anthony Tolliver had some real back-and-forth with fans that impressed some of us.

Who else? Conversely, which news sources showed themselves to be unable to see past their usual suspect sources? (I nominate Adrian "Embedded in agents' back pockets" Wojnarowski.)