[MavKikiNYC]

Originally Posted by MavKikiNYC

It's a shame that teams like the Pacers can't sue a player like Artest for damaging his trade value by making statements like this.

So the league IS fining him. Good. But it should be something like $250,000 or $500,000. Enough to at least begin to deter a punk like Artest from tying to force a team's hand so that he can negotiate a better contract later on. It's like a sabotage...a breach of contract. As if another team were tampering with him.

December 17, 2005
Union Challenges N.B.A. Over Its Fining of Artest

By LIZ ROBBINS
The National Basketball Players Association is preparing to file a grievance to protest the $10,000 fine that Ron Artest received Thursday from the N.B.A. over his public request for a trade from the Indiana Pacers.
Artest made his request during an interview published last weekend in The Indianapolis Star. The Pacers' chief executive, Donnie Walsh, said yesterday that he had received interest from many teams but that the Pacers were "not in a hurry to do a trade."


Union officials say they want to protect Artest's rights. During collective-bargaining talks last summer, the N.B.A. discussed with the union its stance against a player making trade demands to further a personal and premeditated agenda. The talks did not include specific punitive guidelines.

But the union argues that even if there were an understanding during bargaining, Artest's statements were spontaneous and did not warrant a fine.

"It certainly wasn't premeditated; he did not have an agenda," Ron Klempner, a lawyer for the union, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "The league is just piling it on right now. It's a bad precedent to set."

The union's plan to file a grievance is an example of its increasingly contentious relationship with the league over its authority. The union contends that the league has become more autocratic in its crackdown on behavior and has overemphasized image.

This week, the N.B.A. fined the Houston Rockets organization $100,000 for taking its players to Las Vegas for a day between games in Sacramento and Portland on a six-game Western Conference trip. The N.B.A. said it was a circumvention of salary-cap rules, because teams cannot provide benefits or compensation not covered by the players' salaries.

But Klempner said that the league had not followed policy before fining the team. To prove there was a circumvention of salary-cap rules, he said, the league first had to put the matter before an arbitrator.