David Stern blamed player agents for attempting to push their clients to decertify.

"By some combination of mendacity and greed, the agents who are looking out for themselves rather than their clients are trying to scuttle the deal," Stern said in a phone interview. "They're engaged in what appears to be an orchestrated Twitter campaign and a series of interviews that are designed to deny the economic realities of the proposal."

Stern believes the deal is fair for the players.

"No one talks about the rise in compensation under the deal, no one talks about the amount of money being spent," Stern said. "I just think that the players aren't getting the information, the true information from their agents, who are banding together, sort of the coalition of the greedy and the mendacious, to do whatever they can not to have fewer opportunities for the agents to make money."

Stern says decertification won't improve the leverage of the players in getting a better offer from the owners and that it would likely mean the 11-12 NBA season would be lost.

"Yes, I am worried," Stern said, "because they're talking up this thing called decertification which is not a winning strategy on the one hand. On the second hand, it'll take three months to teach them it's not a winning strategy, which would not augur well for the season.

"The agents misunderstand it and all it does is delay things. They themselves think that if the players decertify, then the league will change its offer. And that will not happen as a result of decertification. It's a losing strategy for them."