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Creating a healthier, more functional N.B.A. players union will require deeper involvement from its members, but especially from its most famous members, according to perhaps the most famous member of all.

Kobe Bryant, acknowledging that the union “looks like a mess,” said it was time for the N.B.A.’s stars to take a stronger role as players deliberate the fate of Billy Hunter, the embattled executive director, and the direction of the union.

Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers star, included himself in that mandate and said it was an issue he had been discussing with Chris Paul, the Los Angeles Clippers guard, since the 2011 lockout.

“We might want to grab the bull by its horns, so to speak, and lead the charge a little bit,” Bryant said Tuesday morning.



At the time of the lockout, Paul was the only All-Star on the union’s executive committee, which was otherwise stocked with bench players and players out of the league. The committee has since lapsed into virtual irrelevance, with seven of the nine seats open, because the union has not held an election amid infighting between Hunter and Derek Fisher, the committee’s president.

Hunter was placed on leave and stripped of all duties last week by a special committee led by Fisher. That move came in response to an audit that found Hunter guilty of questionable business and hiring practices.

A number of high-profile players and agents are now calling for Hunter’s dismissal, or at least a vote on the matter, when the union meets next week in Houston during All-Star weekend. At least 11 teams — including the Nets, the Lakers and the Celtics — are believed to be strongly in favor of firing Hunter. Sixteen votes are needed to remove him.

Steve Blake, the Lakers’ player representative, said the team had not yet held a vote to determine its position. But given Fisher’s long tenure with the Lakers, and his close relationship with Bryant, it is considered certain that the Lakers will stand with him.

Asked if suspending Hunter was the right call, Bryant said, “I think so.” But he declined to make any public judgment on Hunter’s fate, saying he had yet to digest the 469-page audit.

“I don’t know where that’s going,” he said. “I haven’t spoken to Derek to get any insight and see what he knows from his vantage point of what’s going on. But it just looks like a mess right now.”

The players union has a history of deep involvement by its star players, from Isiah Thomas to Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning. But the leadership jobs — both at the executive committee and player representative level — have generally fallen to the league’s middle class for the last 10 years.

Bryant named himself, Paul and Kevin Durant — “the guys who are the face of the league” — as stars who needed to take a greater role now. At the same time, he conceded what many others have: that players in general have been too detached from the union’s day-to-day workings, and too busy with their careers to get involved. It is that laissez-faire environment that some players and agents contend set the stage for Hunter’s alleged malfeasance.

Fisher flagged a number of these issues last spring, but he received little support from the membership as a whole, and had the rest of the executive committee turn on him. Now that the audit has documented the union’s problems, Bryant said, “I think it might help some of the other guys see the light, so to speak.”

Asked if his peers are bothered by the revelations, Bryant said: “They should be. They should be.”