NBA and players exchange nastiness

Associated Press

NEW YORK

The NBA players’ association, not Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, proposed the elimination of the salary cap during negotiations aimed at ending months of labor strife, a league official said Tuesday.

NBA senior vice president Mike Bass said union executive director Billy Hunter made “several misstatements” during an hour-long podcast with ESPN.com on Monday. Among them was the revelation of the salary cap plan, which Bass said was actually an exception to the cap, not the elimination of it.

Hunter said that, during a meeting last week, Cuban proposed what he called a “game changer” — a plan to replace the salary cap with a heavy tax for teams that spent to a certain level. Hunter said the players were interested in discussing it further and that two or three other owners in the room were really excited about it, but then were told by the owners they wouldn’t pursue it.

Union officials were angry with the league’s characterization of the breakdown of the talks Thursday. Now the league is unhappy with Hunter’s portrayal of the negotiations, such as when he mentioned items like a hard salary cap and salary rollbacks that owners are no longer proposing.

“In his podcast interview with Bill Simmons, Billy Hunter makes several misstatements and blatantly mischaracterizes the parties’ negotiations,” Bass said.