Despite their disappointments the fans said the absent players would be welcomed on their return.
As a result of the absent players, Melvin said: "We have not been nearly as good as a team.
And letters were read from absent players, including Jack MacDonough, a retired Miller Brewing Company chief executive who is on the Green Bay Packers boardd.
It is a sentiment that should be remembered just as much as his other warning that, from a cricketing perspective, the absent players risk losing a place to a hungry understudy.
The absent players were as significant a symbol as the 17 new, recuperated and invigorated ones who were preparing for training camp, which begins Tuesday, as the Nets seek to throw off the burden of last season's 26-56 debacle.
Absent players, ever-improving opposition, alien conditions, crowds wishing them the worst, the suffocating – if superb, and inescapable – security detail and some overemotional aggro all popped up at one stage or another.
But Woodson knows he cannot simply point to absent players as an excuse for the team's less inspired play, and he strongly hinted Wednesday that he might alter the starting lineup.
The absent players will join the training camp on 4 July.
Club president Rinat Akhmetov had suggested the six absent players, five of them from Brazil with Ferreyra hailing from Argentina, were using the conflict to agitate for a move elsewhere.
