[The Athletic] NBA, NBPA progressing in talks on reaching new CBA

The NBA and National Basketball Players Association are progressing in talks on reaching a new collective bargaining agreement, multiple sources with knowledge of both sides of the discussions tell The Athletic.

The sides have extended their mutual opt-out deadline during the process and currently have a March 31 deadline to reach an agreement on a new CBA, have one party opt-out or once again extend the process. Sources say that there’s been significant progress made in recent weeks on key issues and it’s given the hope that a deal is within grasp in the coming weeks.

The NBPA has informed the league office that it is their intention and goal to complete a deal in March, according to sources.

“We want to finish this deal soon and certainly want this wrapped up before the (March 31) deadline,” one high-ranking source involved in the players’ negotiations, who was granted anonymity so they could speak freely, told The Athletic. “It’s close — we need to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.”

The NBA and NBPA are in the midst of a typical negotiation, with the sides extending the deadline multiple times. However, it’s been clear the parties — led by commissioner Adam Silver and union executive director Tamika Tremaglio — are motivated to complete a deal and are working thoroughly to find an agreement.

Among the most critical issues, the NBA and NBPA are negotiating new luxury-tax tiers and rates to increase the lower tier and make it more viable for teams to spend money into the tax. As salaries continue to increase across the league, increasing the lower tax bracket tier allows the tax tiers to match up with the money being spent.

Currently, for between $0 and $4,999,999 over the cap, the tax rate is $1.50 for every dollar over the cap. For teams between $5,000,000 and $9,999,999 over the cap, the tax rate is $1.75 for every dollar over the cap. The NBA and NBPA are attempting to identify where the tax bracket tiers should be set — while maintaining the punitive state of the upper tax levels.

Since everything about these dividing lines is completely up for negotiation in a new CBA, the two sides can redo them to make a small dip into the tax more manageable and then step up the charges for those franchises willing to dive head first into the tax. Increasing each of the thresholds that make up the luxury tax (often called “bands”) that lead to steeper tax payments also makes sense with a league that has much higher revenues and thus a much higher salary cap than they did in previous agreements.

The NBA currently has a seven-year CBA that expires after the 2023-24 season.

For the NBA, the issues of load management and resting among players and teams are core concerns, as well as the Diamond Sports’ Regional Sports Network and its economic model being able to sustain the broadcasting of 16 of the league’s teams.

The sides are also discussing several other core issues:

• Lowering the age eligibility for the NBA Draft to 18 years old, which would effectively end the one-and-done system in college basketball. The NBA and NBPA have momentum on an agreement to terms that would lower the age to 18 for the draft, but sources say the union is pushing for conditions that would facilitate veteran players providing tutelage and orientation to the high schoolers entering the league. The players union wants to maintain the presence of veteran players and not allow newcomers to replace them, especially in the cases of teams with high school prospects who enter the NBA.
• Increasing the contract extension limits, which would add flexibility and have significant effects incredibly quickly. Under the current CBA, teams and players can only increase the player’s salary by 120 percent in the first new year of the extension unless that player qualifies as a designated player/rookie or makes well below the league’s average salary. Shifting that 120 percent to potentially 140-150 percent as the sides have discussed, according to sources, opens the door a lot more for players who signed contracts that eventually become below-market deals to get enough of a raise to commit ahead of time, a group that potentially includes O.G. Anunoby, Domantas Sabonis and Lauri Markkanen over the next few seasons.
• Smoothing out the process by which the salary cap rises instead of allowing the cap to spike, which occurred in 2016 and led to several overpriced contracts.

 

so much for all the talk about how a lockout is 100% gonna happen and the players are gonna pay dearly because of the actions of guys like AD, Harden, Ben Simmons, and Kyrie

 

I agree, but u had many people swearing up and down that the players were about to get screwed because “player empowerment has gone too far”

at this point, star trade demands bring interest and drama to an increasingly uninteresting regular season…I bet most fans love it as long as it’s not their team

 

NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday afternoon that there has been progress made toward striking a new collective bargaining agreement with the National Basketball Players Association, and that he can "foresee" a potential new deal being agreed upon between now and Friday night's deadline to opt out of the current agreement.

"I think both sides understand that this is a window of opportunity that we should try not to miss," Silver said during his news conference at the conclusion of this week's meeting of the league's board of governors in midtown Manhattan. "Because, if we don't have the deal done this Friday, the next real deadline is June 30, but that's the very end of the season.

"The whole idea behind these early deadlines [is] to try to avoid going right up to the line."

Silver said the league and the NBPA have separated the various issues on the table into different groups, from player health to systemic issues with the league to various economic discussions, and said both sides can "acknowledge we've come closer together."

Still, he said, there is a "gap" between where things currently stand and where he believes they will need to go in order to get a new deal done ahead of Friday night's deadline for discussions.

One thing that seems unlikely to happen, however, is that the two sides will go into next season operating under the current agreement. While there have been discussions for the better part of a year over getting a new deal done, the current one allows both sides the opportunity to opt out of the final year of the deal, or to let it run through the 2023-24 season.

Asked whether he would be all right with it running through next season and then expiring, Silver said he would not be, saying several things have changed since the deal began in the 2017-18 season.

"It's part of this collective bargaining agreement that this opt-out existed, so we wouldn't be acting outside of the collective bargaining agreement by exercising it," Silver said.

"[But] certain dynamics have changed since we negotiated this collective bargaining agreement. I won't go through the list, but media is one of them. We think there are necessary changes that we would like to make in the current collectively bargained relationship that take into account the realities of what media, the media world looks like now as opposed to what it did in 2017."

Silver, though, maintained the same position that sources on both the league and union sides have taken since these discussions began: that the talks between the two sides, led by Silver and NBPA executive director Tamika Tremaglio, have been positive, and pointed to the negotiations between the two sides to put together the NBA's bubble to successfully conclude the 2019-20 season during the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of the way they have worked together previously.

"This word never gets old, but becomes often used in these negotiations, with the goal being let's just make sure it's still fair," Silver said. "Sometimes in partnerships, you have to fall back on words like 'good faith' and 'fairness.'"

On several occasions during queries about the CBA negotiations, Silver referred to the changing media landscape around the sport -- and, specifically, the ongoing issue with Diamond Sports, the regional sports network company that has the rights to more than 40 professional sports teams (including 16 in the NBA) that filed for bankruptcy earlier this month.

Silver said there would be no issues with broadcasting the remainder of this regular season and the first-round playoff games, and that there have been discussions about a partnership between the two sides moving forward.

"We're in what I view as very constructive discussions about an ongoing relationship," Silver said. "They [Diamond Sports] still have some restructuring to do."

He also said this is just one piece of a larger shift in the overall media ecosystem -- one the NBA is studying closely, as its current television agreement is set to run through the 2024-25 season -- with a particular focus on the streaming end of things.

"You're clearly seeing an evolution or a morphing of media moving continually to streaming services, and whether it's with our existing partners, Disney [the parent company of ESPN], Warner Bros. Discovery, they are very focused on streaming services, as well," Silver said. "Obviously other entrants in the market would potentially be interested in the NBA, and at the same time, they are still, when you include the virtual carriers, along with traditional cable and satellite, they are still in 75 million homes. That's still a mainstay of how people are obviously watching our games now, and I think will watch our games for the foreseeable future.

"What makes this so interesting is most likely we're going to continue to have a hybrid way of distributing our games. I'll just add, it's interesting that just to show things go full circle, when I came into the league in the '90s, there was a lot more local broadcast exposure, and now what we're seeing is a lot of those broadcast stations in our teams' local markets are coming back to the table and expressing interest in once again broadcasting our games. That's terrific news because obviously broad reach in those markets, too, if you're on over-the-air television."