NBA, NBPA Officially Push Back CBA Opt-Out Deadline To February

The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association originally had until Dec. 15 to opt out of the league’s collective bargaining agreement. It’s currently set to run through the 2023-24 season, but if either side opts out, the CBA will expire on June 30.

Last Friday, the two sides agreed in principle to push back the opt-out deadline until February, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. On Wednesday, they announced that they had “mutually agreed” to move it back to Feb. 8.

The biggest point of contention in negotiations thus far appears to be the NBA’s push for an “upper spending limit“—in other words, a hard salary cap.

Under the current collective bargaining agreement, teams can exceed the salary cap using certain exceptions such as Bird rights or the mid-level exception to sign or re-sign free agents. The only way for teams to get hard-capped—i.e., they cannot cross the luxury-tax apron at any point for the remainder of the league year—is by signing a player using the non-taxpayer mid-level exception or bi-annual exception or acquiring a player via a sign-and-trade.

Specifics of the NBA’s proposal have yet to leak, so it’s unclear whether the proposed upper spending limit would be equivalent to the current luxury-tax apron or set at a higher (or lower) amount. Regardless, it appears to be a non-starter for the NBPA, as it has been in past CBA negotiations as well.

As Sports Illustrated‘s Howard Beck noted in late October, the NBA typically floats some sort of a hard-cap proposal early in CBA negotiations, only for the union to shoot it down. However, longtime NBA insider Marc Stein recently wrote that this time around, “it does not appear to be the usual trial-balloon push for a hard spending limit that the NBA has been known to float in past negotiations and then suddenly drop to gain concessions in other areas.”

With the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Clippers and Brooklyn Nets racking up nine-figure luxury-tax bills, some team ownership groups are reportedly expressing concern about their ability to keep up with their deep-pocketed counterparts. A hard cap could theoretically help even the spending playing field between big- and small-market teams, although there’s no guarantee that it would play out that way.

“Beyond the NBPA, there is also skepticism among smaller NBA marketplaces who worry that an upper spending limit would fail to create the competitive parity the league is hoping to achieve, instead causing well-constructed smaller-market teams to have to break up cores of contending talent despite a willingness to enter into the luxury tax,” Wojnarowski reported in October.

While the hard cap might be the biggest stumbling block between the two sides, it likely isn’t the only one. The NBA is “working on a ‘smoothing’ plan to incrementally add in the windfall escalation of revenue in the league’s looming media deal, which would avoid a repeat of the cap spike in 2016 that disproportionately rewarded one class of free agents and selected teams,” according to Wojnarowski.

The NBA’s current TV contracts with ESPN and Turner Sports are set to expire after the 2024-25 season. Last March, Jabari Young reported for CNBC that the league was seeking a “75 billion rights package, up from its $24 billion deal, which pays $2.6 billion per year.”

Before the current TV deals kicked in, the league proposed artificially lowering the salary-cap amounts and distributing the excess basketball-related income evenly among all players. The NBPA rejected that proposal, which led to a historic $24 million cap spike that enabled the Golden State Warriors to sign Kevin Durant and helped prolong their dynasty.

The Warriors and Durant weren’t the only ones to benefit from the cap spike, though. Nicolas Batum (five years, $120 million), Hassan Whiteside (four years, $98.4 million), Harrison Barnes (four years, $94.4 million), Chandler Parsons (four year, $94.4 million), Ryan Anderson (four years, $80 million), Joakim Noah (four years, $72.6 million), Luol Deng (four years, $72 million), Bismack Biyombo (four years, $70 million) and Timofey Mozgov (four years, $64 million) were among the free agents who signed contracts that became albatrosses before the ink was even dry.

While the 2016 free-agent class cashed in, free agents in future years found the market to be far chillier. Even though the salary cap increased each year, teams went from handing out 12 contracts worth $80 million or more in 2016 to only six in 2017 and five in 2018. Gordon Hayward (Utah to Boston) and LeBron James (Cleveland to L.A. Lakers) were the only two of that group to switch teams over the 2017 and 2018 offseasons.

Smoothing out the cap effects of the new TV deals makes sense from an equity perspective, but the players’ union pushed back on the original proposal back in 2015.

“The proposal that the league submitted … would artificially deflate the salary cap,” then-NBPA executive director Michele Roberts told ESPN’s Brian Windhorst at the time. “And that, of course, meant that players’ salaries would not increase as much as they would otherwise were it not for smoothing.

Having seen how the ensuing offseason played out, perhaps the NBPA will be more amenable to a smoothing proposal this time around. However, the players’ union might seek to extract a concession from the league elsewhere in exchange for accepting that.

The two sides are also discussing whether to end the “one-and-done” rule, which prohibits players from entering the NBA draft straight out of high school, according to Wojnarowski. In addition, the league wants to find “mechanisms to incentivize top players participating in more regular-season games, creating crisper competition and greater value in the league’s media rights deals,” per Wojnarowski. (The two sides should also tweak the league’s archaic extension rules, particularly with the salary cap expected to soar over the next half-decade.)

The league office and the NBPA have “vowed to clamp down on leaks” regarding CBA negotiations, according to Windhorst, so details may be sparse until the two sides reach an agreement. Teams will have to factor in the long-term uncertainty about any potential changes to the league’s rules into their trade deadline plans.

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