NBA season canceled? Union chief Billy Hunter predicts season will be lost

If Kevin Durant and John Lucas III keep lighting up summer games, this won’t be cataclysmic news until next winter, but Billy Hunter, executive director of the NBA Players Association, thinks the upcoming season will be canceled.

If he “had to bet on it,” Hunter said Wednesday that he’d wager that all of the 2011-12 season would be lost to the lockout.

“We’re $800 million apart per year,” Hunter said, via the Baltimore Sun, in a seminar at a National Bar Association conference in Baltimore. Hunter said the problem lies with a faction of hard-line owners.

“The circumstances have changed among his constituency,” said Hunter said of Commissioner David Stern. “In the last six or seven years, there is a new group of owners to come in who paid a premium for their franchises, and what they’re doing is kind of holding his feet to the fire.”

Asked whether there would be a season, he said: “If I had to bet on it at this moment, I would probably say no.”