After all the posturing, blood issues and extreme consequences it appears that the NBA and National Basketball Player’s Association are finally getting down to the heart of the matter. There have been hints of movement, longer negotiations and even a flare-up between commissioner David Stern and Dwyane Wade.

All of that has, “set the table for [Tuesday’s] meeting,” in the words of Stern’s deputy Adam Silver.

The two sides are scheduled to meet again at noon and with the calendar staring them directly in their face, that meeting will go a long way toward determining whether there will be a full NBA season, or if we are in for a long nuclear winter. At the very least we are reaching the point where regular season games will have to be canceled unless there is a new deal.

“Each side will come in, we believe, prepared to negotiate on everything," Stern told reporters in New York. “Each side has reserved its right to be where it is, knowing that there is a heart-to-heart that will ultimately take place.”

The NBA lockout has endured since July 1 and during that time three issues have remained: the split of the revenues between the players and owners, the system and a revenue sharing plan from the league.

The last matter, which the owners have said should be separate from these negotiations, finally saw some traction after Stern said the league would triple its revenue-sharing pool next season and quadruple it by the third year of a new labor deal. That is no small thing, although the details have not yet been made public.

The revenue split has proven to be tougher, although the players have reportedly offered to come down from the 57 percent of basketball related income (BRI) they received under the old collective bargaining agreement to as low as 52 percent. The owners have reportedly stood fast at 46 percent. Each percentage point equates to roughly $40 million for a league with revenues around $4 billion.

"We're apart on the split,” Stern said. “But we know that the answer lies somewhere between where they were and where we are."

If the answer does lie between, then a split somewhere north of 50 percent would return a significant chunk of the $300 million in losses the owners have claimed from the beginning of the process. The union has disputed the owner’s claims from the outset, saying they don’t take into account ancillary benefits of ownership, among other items.

It’s about the revenue in part, but it’s really about the system and that may be the toughest nut to crack. Whether you want to call it a hard cap, a flex cap or a scally cap, the owners are pushing for a fundamental change in the way the league does business.

They have called it a competitive balance issue, where teams like the Kings can’t possibly compete in a world where the Lakers reap enormous profits and are able to spend extravagantly, but that rings false.

Paul Pierce has been an active participant in the recent round of labor meetings and it was Pierce who got it right back in July when the lockout started.

“If it’s about being competitive, let’s come up with a system we can all be competitive in,” Pierce reportedly told the owners last summer. “If it’s about money, that’s a different story.”

The system is still the great unknown and while the revenue split will shape today’s dollars and cents, it’s the system that will define the future. It’s the system the players don’t want to give up and the system the owners want to radically overhaul.

The owners want to get rid of most, if not all, of the various cap exceptions that have driven salaries and led to expensive long-term contracts for players who clog the roster and the cap. This isn’t about stars – the owners effectively put a cap on superstar max contracts in the 1998 agreement – it’s about the mid-level deals, sign-and-trades and limiting Bird rights.

The players contend that no one forced teams to sign undeserving players to extravagant mid-level deals and a more restrictive cap will force all but the stars to fight for scraps.

Say a team like the Celtics had to make a decision between re-signing Glen Davis or Jeff Green by exercising his Bird Rights while the other was forced to fend for himself in a tighter free-agent market. That’s the reality the players are facing, along with possibly rollbacks on existing contracts and a much smaller piece of the revenue.

The owners started from an intractable position – a drastically lower percentage of the BRI, a hard cap and a 10-year agreement -- and insisted the players meet them more than half-way, if not all the way. This has always been about money and the owners have effectively milked the clock before coming up with some are calling the last, best offer on Tuesday.

It better be forthcoming because a group of powerful agents are already promising doom if there isn’t significant movement.

One agent told Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski, “We're not just walking off the cliff with [NBPA chief Billy Hunter]. We're ready to take the next step and decertify. We're not going to let the league set up [Tuesday’s] meeting as a way to trap us into a bad deal.”

In a letter sent to their clients that was obtained by Sports Illustrated, the agents -- Arn Tellem, Bill Duffy, Dan Fegan, Jeff Schwartz (Pierce’s agent), Leon Rose and Henry Thomas and Mark Bartelstein – outlined what they deemed acceptable and unacceptable outcomes of Tuesday’s meeting.

Among the bullet points: Don’t accept lower than 52 percent of the BRI, retain the current system and demand “a reasonable amount of time,” to review a deal before voting. In 1998, players were give a take it or leave it mandate and had 24 hours to accept a new CBA. The same CBA that the owners are now saying is broken. How much is enough?

Like Stern’s “enormous consequences,” the decertification threat may be just that, a threat. That’s the last card the players have left to play and if it comes to that we may not see the NBA for a long time. For now it should be seen as an attempt at leverage in a high-stakes game with Stern holding the player’s paychecks in his back pocket and the start of the season already in the pot.

The time for posturing is coming to a close. The time to make a deal is now or else the threats will become very real.