Thoughts on the pending NBA labor strife and ideas about a new Collective Bargaining Agreement via basketball authority site hoopshype.com and Matt Tolnick a sports agent for Kauffman Sports. You can follow Kauffman Sports on twitter @KauffmanSports. And hoops hype @hoopshype:
During collective bargaining talks, NBA ownership will likely seek to reduce what it perceives to be waste. This is likely to include a reduction in long, guaranteed contracts, which have often paid massive amounts of money to players who are injured, over-the-hill, or otherwise unfit to contribute. There has been talk of shorter length maximum contracts and there has even been talk of scaling back already committed (and “guaranteed”) salary.
One approach by the NBA might be to push for the reduction of existing maximum salary deals to fall in line with new, lower salary maximums, as enunciated by a new CBA. Another and far more extreme stance could be for the NBA to insist on reducing all existing player contracts by a given percentage.
Such a proposal would be particularly unfair to certain types of players. For example, some players and their agents negotiated long-term contracts (contracts extending beyond the 2010-11 season) that they felt were for less than their present, fair market value in light of the expectation that, under a new CBA, salaries might be even further depressed. If these players’ contracts were scaled down further by a new CBA, they would be forced to play for a salary to which they never would have agreed, preferring instead to play with a different NBA team or to play abroad.
