One Way Or Another, NBA Seems Headed For A New CBA In 2023-24

The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association are hurtling toward a key deadline in their negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement.

Both sides can opt out of the current CBA by Friday, which would cause it to expire at the end of the league year on June 30. If neither side exercises its right to opt out, the CBA is set to run through the 2023-24 season.

During a press conference Wednesday after a Board of Governors meeting, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver made it clear that the league plans to have a new CBA in place ahead of the 2023-24 season one way or another.

“If we don’t have a deal by this Friday night and nothing else were to happen, yes, it would be our intention to opt out of the current deal,” Silver told reporters. “It doesn’t therefore mean, though, that the deal will sunset at the end of June, because we will still have April, May and June to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement.”

NBPA executive director Tamika Tremaglio said in a statement that the players do not intend to exercise their opt-out right if the Friday deadline passes without a deal in place, per ESPN’s Tim Bontemps.

“The March 31st deadline is an important benchmark, and we are doing everything in our power to reach an agreement with the league,” she said. “If we don’t have a deal and the league decides to opt out, it will be disappointing considering all the work both sides have put into the negotiations, and the fair nature of our requests.”

Silver said the two sides have made progress over the past few months. But from the league’s perspective, he said “there is still a gap, though, between where we feel we need to be in order to get a deal done.”

The two sides have already extended the opt-out deadline twice, from mid-December to early February to March 31. Silver floated the possibility of another extension if they don’t have an agreement in place by Friday, although he framed it as a hypothetical rather than a likely outcome.

“We’ve extended the deadline twice,” he said. “You could extend. Nobody’s talked about that yet. I don’t think that’s likely. But it’s just us two parties to this contract. I could imagine if it came midnight Friday night and we were having a productive discussion and somebody said, ‘We could use a few more days,’ we would agree to a few more days. But that’s more of a hypothetical. It’s not a discussion we’ve had with them.”

The two sides have repeatedly pledged not to negotiate publicly, so it’s unclear which issues are among the biggest hang-ups. Silver didn’t divulge any specifics on Wednesday, although he mentioned the ongoing financial issues of Diamond Sports Group—which manages the local broadcasts of 16 NBA teams—as one of the reasons why the league wants a new CBA in place as soon as possible.

“Certain dynamics have changed since we negotiated this collective bargaining agreement,” he said. “I won’t go through the list, but media is one of them. And 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 the media world looks like now as opposed to 2017.”

Silver mentioned macroeconomic issues such as “higher interest rates, recessionary pressures and bank defaults” as other concerns for the league as it works through CBA negotiations. “Some of what we’re negotiating with the players association are mechanisms in the contract for dealing with some of those situations,” he said.

External issues may be complicating the NBA’s long-term financial outlook, but it has plenty of internal obstacles to overcome, too. The league initially pushed for an “upper spending limit”—another term for a hard salary cap—but the union deemed it a non-starter. Instead, the two sides appear far more likely to tweak the luxury-tax system.

“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,” Shams Charania of The Athletic reported in late February. “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.”

Charania added the two sides were “attempting to identify where the tax bracket tiers should be set—while maintaining the punitive state of the upper tax levels.” With teams like the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers racking up nine-figure luxury-tax bills, the league appears to be looking to level the playing field between deep-pocketed owners and their smaller-market brethren.

Among the other issues on the table are potential changes to the league’s extension rules and removing the “one-and-done” rule that prohibits prospects from declaring for the NBA draft straight out of high school, according to Charania. The two sides are also discussing a cap-smoothing proposal ahead of the league’s new national TV contracts, which will take effect ahead of the 2025-26 season.

Silver said there’s “still a lot to go” in negotiations and predicted it “will go down to the very end.” When asked whether he could foresee reaching an agreement by Friday, he hedged his bets.

“I certainly can foresee one getting done, and I hope we do get one done,” he said. “Because obviously I’m only one side of the negotiation, it’s difficult for me to place odds on whether or not that’s going to happen.”

As the 2022-23 regular season winds down, the ongoing CBA negotiations will be just as important to track as playoff seeding. Some of the proposed changes could have massive ramifications for team-building strategies moving forward.

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.