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Many of us have proposed locking the NBA owners and the players' association in a room until a deal was finished. On Tuesday, Federal mediator George Cohen met with both sides for a 16 hour session that began at 10 a.m. and lasted until 2 a.m. ET.
Unfortunately not a lot of progress was reported with the meeting being described as a "building blocks" type of meeting for Wednesday when the two sides are scheduled to get together once again. The two sides left Tuesday's meeting adhering to Cohen's request to not speak to the media but reports by CBS Sports' Ken Berger and Yahoo Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski cite unnamed parties in the meetings.
Berger reports that Cohen is trying to make each party focus on bridging the gap instead of their own individual agendas:
Cohen, a presidential appointee and the top federal mediator in the country, was at least able to do something that the two sides had been unable to do during a recent flurry of negotiations: focus on bridging the gap between them as opposed to concentrating on their own, still widely divergent positions, a source said.
Perhaps that could bode well for Wednesday's meeting when Cohen is likely to press hard on both sides to make some progress.