NBA’s New CBA Appears Aimed At Increasing Leaguewide Parity

Building a championship contender in the NBA was already hard enough. The league’s new collective bargaining agreement might make it even more difficult.

The NBA reached an agreement with the National Basketball Players Association on a new CBA early Saturday morning. While both sides still have to ratify it, details have already begun to emerge about some of the major changes coming as soon as this offseason.

In totality, the league seems to have strived to increase parity by limiting the financial flexibility of the highest-spending teams in favor of teams with smaller payrolls.

Perhaps the biggest change in that regard is the addition of a second salary-cap apron set $17.5 million above the luxury-tax line, according to multiple reports. Teams that exceed said threshold lose access to the taxpayer mid-level exception, can’t send cash out in trades, can’t trade a first-round pick seven years in the future, can’t sign players on the buyout market and can’t receive more salary in a trade than they send out, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.

This season, six teams sit above that new second apron: the Los Angeles Clippers, Golden State Warriors, Milwaukee Bucks, Boston Celtics, Dallas Mavericks and Phoenix Suns. Of that group, the Mavericks are the only ones set to miss the playoffs, and they employ a rising superstar in Luka Doncic and a multi-time All-Star in Kyrie Irving (for now, anyway). Meanwhile, rebuilding teams such as the San Antonio Spurs, Indiana Pacers, Charlotte Hornets, Orlando Magic
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and Detroit Pistons sit toward the bottom of the league’s current spending totals.

One league source told longtime NBA writer Marc Stein that the goal of the second apron was to “make the high taxpayers feel the pain of losing roster flexibility.”

It’s unclear whether teams above the second apron will face any additional restrictions beyond what’s already been reported, but those restrictions are already onerous on their own. Depth is often what begins to wither first on a superteam, and these rules will only make it harder for deep-pocketed franchises to reload on the fly.

Meanwhile, “the new CBA focuses largely on increasing opportunities for the vast majority of teams—both above and below the salary cap,” Wojnarowski wrote. “There will be new spending and trade opportunities for teams at the middle and lower spectrum of payrolls, including larger trade exceptions and new and expanded exceptions to the salary cap. Also, there’s a less punitive system for teams at the lower end of the luxury tax.”

According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, the non-taxpayer mid-level exception will increase by 7.5 percent in the new CBA, while the room mid-level exception will increase by 30 percent. That should push the room MLE above the value of the taxpayer MLE, which will give players even more financial incentive to sign with teams below the tax threshold.

While the NBA can’t mandate parity, it must keep the interests of all 30 teams in mind. If deep-pocketed owners like Steve Ballmer of the Los Angeles Clippers and Joe Lacob of the Golden State Warriors can routinely build championship contenders simply by outspending their counterparts, that further reduces other teams’ margin for error. By imposing more financial restrictions on teams that soar well beyond the luxury-tax threshold, the NBA is seemingly aiming to level the playing field a bit.

The stretch run of the 2022-23 campaign might be the NBA’s platonic ideal as it seeks to restore meaning to the regular season. The Eastern Conference playoff teams are largely set—they’re only jockeying for seeding at this point—but the Western Conference postseason picture has been a tightly bunched jumble for basically the entire year. With less than a week left in the regular season, only four games separate the No. 5 seed Los Angeles Clippers from the No. 11 seed Dallas Mavericks. Every game between two teams in that range takes on far more significance than a typical late-regular-season outing.

Dynasties like Magic Johnson’s Los Angeles Lakers, Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics, Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and Stephen Curry’s Warriors are often what fuel interest in the NBA, but that’s a tough sell to the rest of the league’s teams. The NBA wants every team to have a legitimate shot at fielding a championship-caliber roster. Although the team-building life cycle of necessitates a rebuild or a retool from time to time, the league’s chances in recent years—from flattening the draft-lottery odds to the implementation of the play-in tournament—have been geared toward dissuading tanking and incentivizing competitiveness.

There’s no guarantee that the new CBA will prevent superteams from becoming dynasties in the future. Teams that draft well and retain their own stars could still go on multiple championship runs. They’ll just have fewer financial tools at their disposal to maintain their superiority over the rest of the league, which could open the door for more parity.

Unless otherwise noted, all stats via NBA.com, PBPStats, Cleaning the Glass or Basketball Reference. All salary information via Spotrac or RealGM. All odds via FanDuel Sportsbook.