FISHER: NO TIME WASTED

HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – For those of you that think negotiating up until the lockout deadline was some sort of wasted effort on the part of the NBA and the NBPA, Derek Fisher says otherwise.

Fisher, the NBPA president, spoke out about that and much more in an interview with John Ireland and Mark Willard from 710 ESPN and ESPNLosAngeles.com (Fisher comes on at the 18:00 mark of the interview).

Fisher’s answers to several pointed questions regarding the lockout provides some quality insight into the thinking on at least one side of the divide as we head into the thick of the summer:

Even though the two sides couldn’t reach an agreement, was the time spent the last month or so used wisely and are you optimistic going ahead?:

FISHER: “Yeah of course. When you’re trying to solve as big of a problem as we’re trying to solve, the more time you spend at it the better. Even if you don’t make considerable amounts of progress or measurable progress, there’s still a lot that happens in our meetings that I think has laid the groundwork for the continuation of the process. That’s what we’ll focus on, still trying to get a fair deal done over the course of the summer.”

Has there been any progress in the last month or so?:

FISHER: “Like I just stated, progress is made the more times you have the opportunity to sit down and work with each other. Progress isn’t always similar to the game of basketball. … Trying to just tell how somebody played based on their stats or how many points they scored isn’t always the true value of that person’s game. In this process, just because we don’t have a deal done right now, doesn’t mean the months that we’ve put into this process prior to now have been wasted.”

What do you say to fans who want to know why the players wouldn’t accept a $2 billion guarantee, which would be a small cut but would still leave them the highest-paid union in professional sports?:

FISHER: “It’s tough to respond in a vacuum. … Our position would still remain the same in terms of it’s not always just the economics, it’s the system within how those economics fall. The difference between being guaranteed a certain amount of pay but under a certain system, players aren’t guaranteed that amount of money individually. On a collective it’s one thing and on an individual basis it’s another. The amount of money that players make in the NBA or in most professional sports situations is always tied to the revenue that the sport is bringing in. … Players’ salaries don’t just increase to this arbitrary, astronomical level without the revenues matching that growth. … It’s not so much just the number. If you look at the 10-year deal that they are proposing, there isn’t an industry in the world that would agree to a 10-year wage freeze.”

Can the players agree that something needs to change in terms of players on the bench making big bucks with long contracts?:

FISHER: “It depends on how you look at that, what your perspective is on players sitting on the bench and having a particular contract or certain amount of money that they’re owed. At some point, the contract that player signed, a team on some level felt that he was worth that amount at some point and maybe there was a coaching change or a management change or something that changed that player’s value to that team. So, is that just because the players can’t perform anymore, physically, or is it about a change in coaching style or management style. … In reality, there are very few of those compared to the other scenario where you have players like a Derrick Rose or Kevin Durant, guys that come in and in those first three, four or five years, far outpace what they’re being paid initially in their rookie contracts. It cuts both ways.”