Erica Barris

Like when just the lawyers were in the room talking without them.

What did you do when you waited?

Did anyone from the hotel come in and be like, why are you all screaming so loudly?

Yeah, no deal.

By day six, the hotel had given the players cozy blankets and pillows so they were comfortable.

But the negotiations were stalled, especially on the most important stuff, the money.

Alicia's journal entry.

That's when Alicia and her team of negotiators started really considering their own hard bargaining tactic.

Maybe the biggest, hardest, bargainiest tactic yet.

That's after the break.

Sitting at that big rectangular negotiating table in their Fifth Avenue hotel, Alicia Clark and Breonna Turner were thinking more and more about a hard bargaining tactic of last resort.

One they really didn't want to use, but they had also planned for.

They were basically asking the players for their version of what experienced negotiators call BATNA, Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, meaning what will you do if you don't reach a deal?

We don't know what's going to come, but we want to be prepared.

And so, jump forward to March, six days into their negotiations, they're sitting around the hotel lounge, wrapped in blankets, waiting and waiting for a satisfying response to their proposal.

Let's buckle up.

And this time, it was the players who gave the league a hardball deadline.

You have till 9.30 p.m.

The league, for their part, is going to lose even more money if there's a strike because there will not be games.

And if it goes on long enough, they could fully lose fans, lose momentum.