In the NBA's defense against the lawsuit he filed Tuesday on behalf of NBA players, David Boies will likely see the NBA make some of the same arguments he made representing the NFL against NFL players just a few months ago. 

This is from Boies' brief defending NFL owners against the antitrust lawsuit that NFL players filed after they decertified their union:

“The law is not so easily manipulated. One party to a collective bargaining relationship cannot, through its own tactical and unilateral conduct, instantaneously oust federal labor law or extinguish another party’s labor law rights. A union cannot, by a tactical declaration akin to the flip of a switch, transform a multiemployer bargaining unit’s lawful use of economic tools afforded it under labor laws into an antitrust violation giving rise to treble damages and injunctive relief.”

Later in that same brief, Boise argues:

“When federal labor policy collides with federal antitrust policy in a labor market organized around a collective bargaining relationship, antitrust policy must give way. Accordingly, employees confronted with actions imposed lawfully through the collective bargaining process must respond not with a lawsuit brought under the Sherman Act, but rather with the weapons provided by the federal labor laws.”

The key to the success or failure of Boise's argument on behalf of NBA players will be whether or not the court finds that collective bargaining had completely ended. The complaint filed Tuesday uses Stern's threats of returning to a far worse 'reset' proposal to support the players' claim that any further negotiations with the league would have been futile.