Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl

The NBA has canceled the remainder of the preseason and will wipe out the first two weeks of the regular season if there is no labor agreement by Monday.

Commissioner David Stern and deputy commissioner Adam Silver made the announcement after owners and players met for about four hours Tuesday but came no closer to an agreement.

“We were not able to make the progress that we hoped we could make and we were not able to continue the negotiations,” Stern said.

No further meetings are scheduled. “Today was not the day to get this done. We were not able to get close enough to close the gap,” union president Derek Fisher said Tuesday, speaking ahead of Stern.

The owners and the players, who have been locked out since July 1, had hoped to make significant progress and save the 2011-12 NBA season. But the two sides could not close the gap between their financial positions, and Fisher said he expects the remainder of the NBA preseason to be canceled.

But Stern said regular-season games are now at risk.

“By Monday, we will have no choice but to cancel the first two weeks of the season,” he said.

The players, who received 57 percent of basketball-related income in the last year of the expired agreement, said they made a new proposal of 53 percent of BRI on Tuesday — a concession which they said would have given owners back more than $1 billion over six years.

According to the players, the owners countered with 47 percent, a slight increase from the 46 percent they had previously offered.

When the owners offered 47 percent, “that pretty much ended (the meeting),” executive director Billy Hunter said.

The two sides, in what Stern called a “very very small group,” discussed whether a 50-50 split of basketball-related income was possible — and that if so, both sides would go back to their constituencies with that plan.

“While we were in the process of doing that … we were advised by the players that that would not be acceptable to them,” Stern said Tuesday. “At that point it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to continue.”

Would the owners have accepted a 50-50 split? “Adam and I felt comfortable and confident we could report to the players we could move to the next subject,” Stern said.

Stern said the league is about to take a $200 million hit from missing the preseason. “There’s an extraordinary hit coming to the owners and the players,” he warned.

“We’re long past the point where we’re trying to get 100 percent of what we were looking for,” Silver added. “We haven’t made a secret of the fact that we’d very much like to make a deal.”

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WRITTEN BY ESPN.com TrueHoop writer Henry Abbott and The Associated Press contributed to this report & FULL STORY HERE