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And there were plenty of proverbial punches Thursday, whether it was a Team Kroenke representative accusing Team STL of borderline tattling, or a Team STL representative suggesting Team Kroenke is intentionally sabotaging schedules to encourage delays in a lawsuit scheduled for a jury trial — at least for now — in late October.

A virtual counsel hearing planned by St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Christopher McGraugh to start a conversation with Team Kroenke (Kroenke, the Rams, the NFL at large and the 31 other NFL teams and their owners) and Team STL (City of St. Louis, St. Louis County and the St. Louis Regional Convention and ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Complex Authority) about the potential effects the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic could have on the case was expanded to include the consideration of two motions, one from each side.

My biggest takeaway after the nearly three-hour discussion of both was that Team Kroenke continues to lean on a playbook that consists of two plays. Delay and distortion.

Delay appears to be the call when it comes to Team Kroenke’s handling of former NFL executive Eric Grubman. Grubman was the suit with the heavy hand in relocation matters who presented himself as Mr. Neutral. That is until he called in to “The Bernie Miklasz Show� in December of 2015 to publicly discredit the St. Louis effort to build a new stadium for the Rams, a call that just so happened to come one day before the St. Louis Board of Alderman’s Ways and Means Committee planned to vote on the proposal’s financing. What a coincidence.

The aldermen eventually passed a plan to help finance the new stadium with hopes the Rams would stay. We know how that ended. It’s the reason Team STL is suing Team Kroenke for $1 billion (or more) in damages because it believes it can prove Kroenke, the Rams and the league violated the NFL’s relocation guidelines in a whole mess of ways, the biggest of which was encouraging St. Louis to fight hard and spend big in what, looking back, appears to have been a rigged relocation game.

What is not known, not even to the Team Kroenke lawyers it seemed at times Thursday, is why Grubman has gone from radio star to deposition no-show. Multiple times, he has been scheduled for a deposition with Team STL. Multiple times, he has canceled without providing a reason. This has become a theme since the lawsuit was first filed in 2017.

A scathing motion presented Thursday by Team STL lawyer Chris Bauman asked Judge McGraugh to compel Grubman’s testimony and consider sanctions against the defendants after what Team STL believes to be a continued pattern of counter-attacks on its attempt to build evidence.

“Since the case was filed, it has taken repeated motions and the Court’s Orders to compel Defendants to answer simple interrogatories and produce responsive documents,� wrote Bauman in a motion. “Even after the Court’s Orders, Defendants have repeatedly asserted frivolous challenges or simply refused to respond. Mr. Grubman’s unilateral refusal to appear for his deposition without explanation is only the latest in Defendants’ multi-year string of discovery abuses.�

Jerry Carmody, a lawyer representing the NFL, said COVID-19 was the reason Kroenke and Chargers owner Dean Spanos had to cancel and reschedule earlier depositions. Benjamin Razi, a lawyer speaking on behalf of Grubman, gave his word that Grubman would eventually sit for a deposition. But after Razi was excused to determine when that might happen, he returned without an answer from Grubman.

In other words, another successful delay, and another day of deposition schedules scrambled for Team STL.

Which brings us to that second Team Kroenke play call: Distortion.

Team Kroenke’s motion to make St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission president Kitty Ratcliffe and chairman Andrew Leonard sit for a deposition at some point in the future was successful, but it came with a predictable warning and a rather surprising admission.

Time and time again, as evidenced in everything from the failed push to steer this lawsuit toward closed-door arbitration to Thursday’s comments, Team Kroenke has attempted to expand the scope of the lawsuit to include the details of the lease the Rams agreed to in 1995 to play at The Dome, and the years of back-and-forth about the Dome upgrades that lease required before the Rams won an arbitration hearing about the matter in 2013. The story, Carmody argued again Thursday, begins in 1995. To stop Team Kroenke from exploring that, he argued, would be, “cutting us off at our knees.�

The problem for Team Kroenke is, this lawsuit has nothing to do with that time period, as both Judge McGraugh and multiple appellate courts have agreed.

“Defendants attempt to relitigate, for at least a third time, issues that have already been decided by courts throughout Missouri and beyond,� wrote Bauman in a motion opposing the depositions of Ratcliffe and Leonard. “When Defendants filed a motion to compel arbitration, this Court held that the 1995 Stadium Lease concerning the Dome and the arbitration it led to were not in dispute in this action. The Court of Appeals agreed, stating flatly: ‘Plaintiffs claims are independent of the 1995 lease . . . Defendants attempted to take their arguments to the Missouri and U.S. Supreme Courts but were unsuccessful. This is the law of this case.�

What Team Kroenke seems to be ignoring is that this case is not about old history. Instead it is very specifically about how the Rams’ departure did not follow the league’s relocation guidelines, and how that induced St. Louis to spend a lot of time and money on a plan to keep a team that relocated.

Even as Judge McGraugh approved eventual depositions of the third-party CVC officials, he warned Team Kroenke that answers from those depositions about old history, like the 1995 lease and the 2013 arbitration hearing, would likely be impossible to resurface as evidence due to the narrow scope of the lawsuit.

It made you wonder how much Team Kroenke will have to stand on when the delays and distortion end.

Perhaps only kneecaps.