NBA and NBPA have agreed on a labor pact that could include a new seasonal tournament as early as November, according to reports

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The NBA and the NBPA have agreed on a new collective labor agreement ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. The deal, which will last for seven years with a mutual opt-out after the sixth, comes after the two sides agreed to extend a critical deadline in the negotiation process. The previous collective bargaining agreement was due to expire after the 2023-24 season, but both the NBA and NBPA had the option to opt out after the 2022-23 season. While the full deal has not yet been made public, here are some noteworthy deal points according to Wojnarowski, Bobby Marks and Tim Bontemps:

  • The long rumored in-season tournament could start as early as next season. Pool play would be baked into the regular season schedule starting in November before the top eight move into a single-elimination tournament. The final four would be played at a neutral venue, with Las Vegas as the early lead. The winning team would receive a cash prize, with players earning $500,000.
  • There will now be a second salary cap – $17.5 million on top of the current platform – that will help curb the spending of the league’s most expensive teams. Any team that crosses that threshold loses access to the mid-level taxpayer exception.
  • Individual player prizes now have a minimum of 65 games to qualify. This includes honors such as All-NBA.
  • Restrictions restricting veterans’ contract renewals have been eased. Where most players were previously limited to 120% of their previous salary in the first year of a renewal, those players can now earn as much as 140% of their previous salary at the start of a new deal.
  • Players are no longer banned from using marijuana, according to The Athletic’s Shams Charania, as it has been removed from the anti-drug testing program, a process that began during the 2019-2020 season.
  • Teams can sign three two-sided players instead of two.

The deadline to waive, which had been postponed several times, was midnight on Friday. However, with the two sides close, they agreed to extend it one more time to finalize a new collective bargaining agreement. The NBPA previously stated that he would not opt ​​out, but NBA commissioner Adam Silver suggested that the league intended not to reach a new deal.

Fortunately, that possibility has now disappeared and the two sides have averted the small possibility of a lockout. This is the second consecutive collective bargaining agreement negotiated by Silver that did not require a work stoppage, and the first by new NBPA Executive Director Tamika Tremaglio, who recently replaced Michele Roberts, who led the players in the 2017 collective bargaining negotiations that in effect since then. The NBA has lost games to a lockout only twice in its history, in 1998 and 2011. The league has enjoyed 12 years of labor peace since then, and with this new deal, that peace will last for some time to come.

Now that the collective bargaining agreement is in place, the NBA can turn its attention to its next major financial milestone. The league’s current national media rights deal with Disney and Turner expires at the end of the 2024-2025 season. The league would certainly prefer to make a new television deal well before then, and reports suggest the league hopes to make three times the $24 billion it got in its last deal.

That money motivated both parties to reach a collective bargaining agreement before there was a serious threat of a work stoppage. League revenues have soared that both sides would risk billions of dollars if they failed to strike a deal. Now that deal has been completed and the NBA can play basketball unhindered in the coming period.





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