Kobe mulls China offer; teams, players start talks

MANILA, Philippines - Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant is engaged in far more substantive contract talks with teams in China than he is Turkish team Besiktas, league sources told Yahoo! Sports.

Besiktas coach Ergin Ataman tweeted Sunday that the team made an official offer to Bryant last week and plans to meet with Bryant’s agent in Los Angeles this week. However, a source close to Bryant said he hasn’t had conversations with the Turkish team in two weeks, and labeled Bryant’s chances of playing with Besiktas at “zero percent.”

Bryant, sources said, is still listening to offers to play overseas during the NBA’s lockout, and considers China a more likely option. He has exchanged proposals with Chinese teams, and one source said it’s unlikely Bryant would accept any deal that pays him less than $1.5 million per month. Bryant would be free to rejoin the Lakers as soon as the lockout ends.

For his part, NBA scoring champion Kevin Durant of Oklahoma City said he is about “50-50” on playing overseas if the NBA lockout lasts, according to an AP report.

Durant, however, hopes the work stoppage is settled in time for a full season even as he stressed “I’ll have to think about” playing elsewhere if that doesn’t happen.”

He said that he has been working on his game during his time off, but took a break from that to attend the WNBA game between Tulsa and Chicago Thursday. Speaking at halftime, he called himself a “basketball fanatic” who enjoys watching the women’s game.

In New York, the warring parties in the NBA lockout are scheduled to meet Monday in Manhattan for the first time in 32 days, according to Yahoo! Sports.

Training camps for the 2011-12 NBA regular season, if they were to start on time, would open on or around Sept. 28.

Most insiders, however, don’t expect the negotiations of a new collective bargaining agreement between the NBA owners and the players’ union to get serious.

“It’s been long but it’s been weirdly quiet,” said Derek Fisher, the LA Lakers guard and union president, in an interview with ESPNLosAngeles.com. “To push as hard as we did in the month of June to see if we could get a deal done prior to July 1, it’s essentially been crickets since then.”

The owners and players, after exchanging a few proposals over 18 months in advance of the June 30 expiration of the last CBA, met on May 31 and once or twice weekly through June in Miami, Dallas and New York. By the most recent session, they still sat on opposite sides of a vast chasm: The owners are seeking a hard salary cap, a significant reduction in the current 57/43 split of basketball-related income and shorter contracts.

The players, still skeptical over the league’s report of $300 million in losses for last season, want to maintain the current soft salary cap. They offered to reduce their share of BRI to 54.3 percent for what they said would be $530 million in salary givebacks over a six-year deal. NBA commissioner David Stern called that proposal “modest” while outlining a 10-year proposal that would guarantee players at least $2 billion in compensation annually (the 2010-11 figure was $2.17 billion) but exclude them from fully sharing in anticipated growth.