Sports Briefs
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Olpe volleyball wins two matches
The Olpe volleyball team picked up two wins on Tuesday night, logging a 25-8, 25-18 win over Southern Coffey County and a 25-7, 25-6 win over Crest.
NBA lockout hitting critical point
NEW YORK (AP) — Regular-season games could be at stake when NBA owners and players meet this weekend.
And those might not be all that is lost, Commissioner David Stern warned, without real headway toward a new labor deal.
“All I’d say to that is that there are enormous consequences at play here on the basis of the weekend,” Stern said Wednesday. “Either we’ll make very good progress, and we know what that would mean — we know how good that would be, without putting dates to it — or we won’t make any progress and then it won’t be a question of just starting the season on time, it will be a lot at risk because of the absence of progress.”
Talks between negotiators ended after two days Wednesday so they could return home before summoning their respective bargaining committees to New York for the most important stretch of the lockout. They will meet Friday and are prepared to talk through the weekend if progress toward a new collective bargaining agreement is being made.
There hasn’t been enough of it so far, with the lockout nearly three months complete.
Both Stern and union president Derek Fisher of the Lakers said they are not close, with the Nov. 1 season opener a little more than a month away, and Fisher added the commitment to block out multiple days this weekend “points more toward the calendar than actually being able to measure progress.”
“It points to the realities that we face with our calendar and that if we can’t find a way to get some common ground really, really soon, then the time of starting the regular season at its scheduled date is going to be in jeopardy big-time,” he added.
Training camps already have been postponed and 43 games scheduled for the first week of the preseason have been canceled. The league has said it will make decisions about the remainder of exhibition play as warranted, and those could come shortly.
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