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One More For Larry Bird?  It’s hard to believe Pacers’ president Larry Bird has been in the NBA for 31 years. It’s even stranger to think that Bird - at 54 years of age – is ready to call it a career.

Bird and his staff in Indiana signed new contracts this off season, but as Bird explains, his personal deal with Herb Simon in Indiana is a year-to-year agreement and he is a lot closer to hanging them up than hanging around.

“It’s a handshake deal,” Bird said to Julian Benbow of The Boston Globe. “I don’t want a [long-term] contract.”

“It’s at a point now in my life where I think it might be time to really reconsider and see how long I want to do this,” said Bird. “They asked me to stay another year through the lockout season, the owner did, for a favor. I was leaving, but he asked me to stay, and I will and I’ll get the job done.

“I just think the franchise is in a good position right now, and I want to leave it in a good position for the next guy to do some good things. Sometimes you just look at it and say, ‘Hey, I’ve done enough. I’ve got it in the position I want to get it in,’ and you move on. I’ve got another year here and I’m going to try to do the best I can to get this team back to winning.”

The Pacers are positioned well regardless of the outcome of the labor fight between the players and owners.

As things sit today the Pacers have $37.6 million committed to their ten core players which includes $884,000 in non-guaranteed money to guard A.J. Price. Regardless of where the salary cap falls the Pacers should be big free agency players.

As part of Larry Bird’s deal, he has turned more and more of the day-to-day operational control over to Pacers’ General Manager David Morway.

The Pacers have yet to formally announce their next head coach, but sources close to the situation say Frank Vogel has already been awarded the job, he is finalizing his coaching staff and will be announced at some point in the next few weeks.

Kings Love Them Some Jimmer:  The Sacramento Kings got their man. It took a trade and some convincing, but at the end of the day Jimmer Fredette is a Sacramento King and the Maloof family which owns the franchise couldn’t be happier.

“I tell you, I was impressed,” Gavin Maloof said to Sam Amick of SI.com. “He’s money on the road. It was so loud at this arena that I was like, ‘Man, how is this guy going to make his shots?’ And he just destroyed them. And then when we saw him in the [Mountain West Conference] tournament [in Las Vegas, where the Cougars fell to San Diego State in the championship game before making a Sweet 16 run in the NCAA tournament] … he just elevated his whole team.”

There had been talk leading up to the draft that the Kings’ owners pushed hard for Jimmer amid push back from the basketball operations side. The basketball guys wanted Kawhi Leonard or Jan Vesely. They wanted a small forward to round out the roster. They wanted a defensive presence at the three spot, but ownership pushed hard for Jimmer, with some saying it was all about ticket sales, something the Maloofs deny.

“I don’t think [Jimmer's business appeal] played any part, to be honest with you,” Gavin said. “We don’t bring up marketing to Geoff Petrie. If you bring up a player and you say it’d be great for marketing, what Geoff will tell you is that winning is great for marketing. It really didn’t come into play.

“We looked at his talents on the court. We needed a point guard. We needed shooting. I think what everybody realized throughout the playoffs and the Finals this year is that shooting beat defense. I know defense wins championships, but this year the Mavericks had all those shooters and Miami couldn’t compete with them.”

The Kings are now loaded with offensive firepower with third-year stud Tyreke Evans finally healthy. DeMarcus Cousins has proven to be a beast in the paint and if the Kings can return high volume gunner Marcus Thornton, who is a restricted free agent, Fredette becomes the icing on the cake.

“I just told Geoff, I said, ‘Just get us some shooters. I don’t care what you do. Just get us someone who can shoot the darn ball.’ Now we’ve got all these weapons, and our first priority when there’s free agency is to re-sign Marcus Thornton. Priority 1A is to get a big-time free agent.”

The Kings have just $30.01 million in salary commitments next season which includes at $1.05 million Qualifying Offer to Marcus Thornton and at $788,000 non-guaranteed contract to Pooh Jeter. Regardless of where the new salary cap gets set in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement, the Kings look to be the team with the most cap space to offer and they say they will be extremely active in trying to add a major free agent.

Don’t Agree At All:  Hawks’ forward Etan Thomas is a really good guy. He is incredibly smart. He is very thoughtful and articulate and he is very passionate about a long list of things.

In addition to writing the occasional blog for our brothers over at HoopsHype, Etan also serves on the NBA Players’ Association Executive Committee, and recently shared his thoughts on where the talks stand, and while everyone in this process has their own view of the situation there are things that the Players continue to say that are simply not true.

The NBA’s economic system is fundamentally broken. There are more teams losing money than making money despite record revenues and interest in the game.

{AUTHOR_BOX}Everyone involved should be swimming in profits, yet 22 teams are losing significant amounts of money.

More teams enter the season with no conceivable shot at winning a championship than do.

That is a broken system.

There is a middle ground to be achieved and it’s not going to happen totally at the Players expense, but the Players have to realize they played a big part in getting it this far.

The Players often say, we don’t control the checkbooks of NBA teams. We don’t hand out contracts, which on the surfaces is true, but the reality is the system that governs free agency is slanted heavily in the Players favor more times than not and it has driven prices up because there is a land grab for talent.

Ben Gordon didn’t deserve five years and $55 million, but that’s exactly what it was going to take for the Pistons to land him back in 2009.

Players set the price. If you won’t pay it, someone else will.

Teams have one choice, meet the crazy price or lose the player.

Sure teams can try and force incentives and non-guaranteed clauses into the current system; however because of the way the system works, if teams try and cover themselves too much, Players simply opt for a team that won’t require as much.

Take Amar’e Stoudemire. The Phoenix Suns would have given him a $100 million contract, however they wanted to cover themselves because of Stoudemire’s knees, opting to insert a minutes played provision.

The Knicks were willing to fully guarantee the deal and the Suns lost Amar’e to the Knicks.

How exactly did the system protect the Suns? It didn’t, it allowed for the price to be driven up in Stoudemire’s favor. What happens when Amar’e knees give out in year three of his deal? The Knicks will be on the hook for $30 or $40 million.

How about Eddy Curry? Curry was viewed at the time to be one of the best free agent centers on the market. The Knicks felt like they stole him from the Bulls. Injuries and a bad work ethic ultimately ended the dream quickly and again there was no mechanism to hold Curry accountable.

The Players love the current deal because it gives them all the leverage to maximize their earning potential – and good for them – but to believe the current system works is flawed thinking.

There is going to be $4.3 billion in revenue this year and the owners are willing to guarantee at least $2 billion of it to the Players for the next 10 years. How is that a bad deal?

The Players constantly bemoan the idea of guaranteed profits for the owners, yet they themselves have guaranteed profits in their own deals.

The Players bemoan a hard salary cap, but in fact there is a hard cap now. The current labor deal guarantees 57% of basketball related revenue is paid to the Players. They currenlyt contribute 8% of their checks to an escrow system to insure they are never paid more than 57% – we just don’t call it a hard cap, because teams are not held accountable to spending.

That too has to change.

The Players talk a lot about revenue sharing, saying they need to understand that component in order to reach a deal.

I would liken that to your kids wanting to see your checkbook when debating how much their allowance is going to be. Not sure the subjects are related.

Not to suggest the NBA Players are children looking for scraps, they are partners in this and understanding where the dollars are makes it easier to think openly about how to split them, but have you noticed how much emphasis is on the owners’ finances and not fixing what’s clearly a broken a system?

There will be revenue sharing in the NBA next season, however that deal is tied directly to the labor deal, not the other way around and neither is mutually exclusive of each other.They go hand-in-hand at solving this problem.

Revenue sharing is about profit sharing. Every team has to be able to turn a profit in order for there to be profit sharing. There is no way Lakers’ Jerry Buss is going to agree to prop up Orlando’s losses. The only way that works is if more teams than not are turning a profit.

Revenue sharing should be about covering a bad season or a rebuilding year, it shouldn’t be a life line to keep a bad economic structure in place.

There have been comments from the Players regarding recent franchise sales, pointing to the Warriors that sold for $450 million, the Pistons are believed to have closed for $400 million, saying if the league is broken how can teams be sold at such values.

The fact the Players are missing on these deals is that all of the franchises sold recently were sold on the low side of their projected valuation because those buyers are betting on David Stern to change the labor expense and jump start profitability, which in turn will boost franchise values.

Those new owners banked on major change and they have an increasingly larger voice in this process.

Thomas made a comment in his most recent blog suggesting the Owners list of demands read like his son’s Christmas wish list. He then goes on to say he dismissed the wish list as unreasonable and offered that he come back with a more reasonable list.

The fact in this logic is that the current deal is up. It’s over. It’s time to make a new deal and the Owners has made it clear for two years the current system is broken and needs to be radically overhauled.

Because you don’t like it does not make it unreasonable.

What’s unreasonable is to believe things can at some point be as they were. It’s unreasonable to believe the economic environment that produced the current deal can ever exist again.

The NBA Players love the current deal because it benefits them far more than anyone else in the equation and a one side deal either way is a bad deal.

The NBA Board of Governors will meet today in Dallas, it’s expected they will vote to authorize the Labor Committee to lockout the Players at 12:01am on July 1st if they do not have a workable framework for a deal.

There is a deal to be made. The Owner’s latest offer is not a bad one, and as one NBA executive pointed out conversationally – a $62 million hard cap is unreasonable, but a $65 million hard cap is open for discussion. It just comes down to the money line.

At the end of the day there is a better NBA on the other side of this labor mess, and while the Players may not like the changes being proposed, they are very necessary and to believe the system as constructed works and is balanced and makes the league is better is not only naive, its self-serving.

Let’s just hope the Players understand that… but based on what’s coming from their side, it does not seem like they do and that means a really long summer.

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