NEW YORK – For the bleakest days of these labor talks, David Stern chose the Lowell on 63rd Street and the corner of Lexington Avenue. The hotel has a sparse lobby, unable to manage a small pack of reporters covering the NBA labor meetings. The commissioner won’t use ballrooms for news conferences, refusing to drape the background with the NBA logo. And when it was time again for one of his lockouts to cost regular-season games, he chose a small swath of sidewalk under the hotel canopy to deliver his damning proclamation.

Stern’s always wanted the glory of the commissioner’s seat, but never the light that comes with his failings. This labor fight is the championship series of Stern’s career. He’s overseeing the ultimate owners’ hustle to shut down the sport because they think they can squeeze far more money than they need to simply stabilize financial losses and bring the league better competitive balance.

he owners want it all, and Stern’s forever been the man to bully people to their knees. This is a mission to make his richest owners even richer, ultimately allowing him to reap the bonuses and rewards that come to a union-breaking CEO. Yes, Stern and the hardliners shut down the NBA season Monday, and still Stern didn’t have the stomach to stand with the NBA logo in the background. The most sanctioned, most scripted event of his life, and he still couldn’t own it.
As much as anything Stern wants his professional shame in the shadows, narrowing the scope, the coverage. For Stern, the strategy is simple: Step out of the way, and let the players impale themselves in the public eye. Two weeks of the regular season are gone, more promise to be wiped away, and Stern will feed that public desire to tear apart his star players and feed into all the worst stereotypes. Only, this lockout will eventually end, and he’ll need to repair those images to make the NBA thrive again.

Stern is the master manipulator, and that’s never been easier to see. Throughout these talks, he’s had the Players Association leadership on a string. His agenda, his deadlines, his conditions to meet. One minute, the union’s calling for player meetings in Miami and Los Angeles, urging players to get on planes. Emails went out with locations and times, players purchased airline tickets. And then Stern says he wants to negotiate more, pushes back artificial deadlines of his creation, and soon the union is hastily canceling the player meetings and retreating back to his bargaining table.

[Related: David Stern cancels the first two weeks of the NBA season]
Sometimes, the players union makes it so easy for the NBA. Before the talks fell apart without a deal on Monday, Players Association president Derek Fisher(notes) had an idea: Let’s flood people’s Twitter timelines with pointless catch phrases and hashtags, a plan born from the NFLPA and “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.” “Let us play,” Fisher told the players to post, forgetting that the public’s response – besides un-following his Twitter account out of sheer annoyance – was to tell the players to simply take the deal the owners were offering.
This wasn’t an idea out of the union’s smartest PR mind, Dan Wasserman, but one of the consulting pockets of the Players Association that do nothing but waste the players’ dues. Before you know it, there was Kenyon Martin(notes) calling for his “haters” to die of “full-blown AIDS,” and inviting everyone else giving him a hard time on Twitter to send along a home address, so he could come to your house and “kick your ass.”
Martin isn’t the norm, but he’s who many people want to believe populate this NBA. And why give them the chance on Monday, when the players could’ve let Stern have the bad-guy stage all to himself?
For better or worse, NBA players will never win public sympathy. They have every right to this labor fight, but it is their fight and their fight alone. It isn’t shared with the fans, the arena workers, no one. The sooner they understand that, the easier this will go for them. Forget the PR fight – just win the fight.