When the NBA and NBAPA left today’s negotiation session, all they spoke of was doom and gloom, but as CBS Sports’ Ken Berger writes in his excellent column about the status of the negotiations, things aren’t as bad as they seem.

The only thing both sides agreed on after this latest round of posturing and semi-negotiating was that the players had come to the table with economic concessions the owners and NBA negotiators could live with — or at least could envision writing into a new CBA. Though no written proposals were formally exchanged, hidden amid all the rhetoric and doomsday prognosticating was something extraordinary for how lost it became: the NBA and its union are on the verge of solving the biggest dispute between them, as in how much money each side gets.

Great, right? Well, sort of. The issue now is that the owners are demanding a hard salary cap and the players aren’t going to go for it.

The owners want significant salary concessions, which they’re on the verge of receiving, and they want a more restrictive cap system to go with it. They can’t have both, say the players. It’s straight out of the cake-and-eat-it-too negotiating handbook.

“We don’t want a system where players come in, they have no security and you have two or three marquee players who get a guarantee — and not a full guarantee as they have proposed, but a limited guarantee — that everybody else would not have,” Hunter said. “And these guys would be on one- or two-year deals and at any whim of any given owner or GM or whatever, they’d be out the door. And so we’re saying, ‘No way.'”

I’m in favor of a hard cap because it encourages parity and allows small market teams to compete on equal footing with teams in New York and Los Angeles. But Berger argues that revenue sharing can fix that issue. I supposed that’s true, but the level of revenue sharing has to be high enough to allow the small market teams to spend as much as the big market teams. (For example, if the hard cap is $20 million over the soft cap, then the small market team needs to receive $20 million in revenue sharing to make things equal. That’s not going to happen.) High profile free agents already prefer to play in a big market because of the impact it has on their Q Rating — a soft salary cap only exacerbates the advantage that the big market teams have over their competition.

People will point to the San Antonio Spurs, the LeBron-era Cleveland Cavaliers and the Oklahoma City Thunder as small market teams that have managed to compete year in and year out, and it’s true, those teams have done a fine job, but they all have one thing in common — they were fortunate enough to have a #1 (or #2) pick in a year when a no-brainer superstar was available at the top of the draft. Without lucking into Tim Duncan, LeBron James or Kevin Durant, the Spurs, Cavs (R.I.P.) and the Thunder would be no better off than the T-Wolves or the Bucks.

Granted, the T-Wolves and the Bucks (and Bobcats, Raptors, Pacers, Grizzlies and Kings) had their chance to land a superstar with their lottery pick(s), but a small market team shouldn’t have to make mistake-free personnel decisions to compete. If the big market teams screw up, all they have to do is slash salary and then they’ll eventually be able to lock up a superstar — just look at the Knicks.

Anyway, Berger thinks the two sides are closer than they seem and wonders if they’re willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater in their pissing match over a hard cap.

Are the owners, having essentially received the economic concessions they were seeking, really willing to sacrifice $4 billion of revenues (roughly half of which they’d get, depending on how the deal ultimately is written) in order to impose a hard cap that may or may not allow Charlotte Bobcats to make the conference semifinals?

Are the players, having fought back the owners’ quest for what Hunter called Tuesday “total capitulation,” willing to cut off paychecks for more than 400 players for a year so that Corey Maggette can make more money than he deserves until his contract finally can be dumped into a voodoo-math NBA trade at some future deadline?

These are good questions.