The NBA players and owners have concluded their latest negotiating session. It’s hard to say if the two sides are any closer to coming to terms and returning to the field of play. The league issued a proposal for a 72 game season to start in the middle of December. But if you listen to how the players are reacting to the offer, it doesn’t sound promising.

Derek Fisher, President of NBA Player’s Union, said, "It does not entirely meet us on the system issues that we felt were extremely important to try and close this deal out and so at this point, we’ve decided to, you know, end things for now, take a step back, we’ll go back as an executive committee, as a board and confer with our player reps and additional players over the next few days and then we’ll make decisions about what our next steps will be at that point, but right now, that’s where things stand and you know, obviously we would like to still negotiate and try and get a deal done, but right now, it’s not that time."

NBA Commissioner David Stern said, "We’ve gone with the, as far as we, labor relations committee is going to go. We’ve met the union and it would be, I think, it would have been mean spirited to just drop the new proposal on them, if in fact they requested to meet and we stopped the clock to have that meeting and now we await their response. There comes a time when you have to be through negotiating and we are."

The players union had hoped for more movement on several key issues after they expressed their willingness to move off their desired economic revenue split of in excess of 52 percent in their favor. NBA Commissioner David Stern says that should the union not accept their latest proposal the owners’ negotiating position would switch to a less favorable split of revenues benefiting the owners. Stern and the owners expect a decision from the players union next week.

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