Does Delayed CBA Decision Hurt Chances of NBA Return?

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Publish date:

May 11, 2020

Video Rating:

TV-PG

Video Duration:

2:07

SI's Rohan Nadkarni and Michael Shapiro discuss the latest development regarding the NBA and the Players Association deciding to extend the CBA termination deadline.

Read the Full Video Transcript:

Madelyn Burke: The NBA and the Players Association have agreed to extend the window for the league's right to terminate the collective bargaining agreement until September. The NBA had the ability to terminate the CBA under the force majeure provision for 60 days starting on March 11th when the season was suspended. Joining me now is SI NBA writer Rohan Nadkardi and SI staff writer Michael Shapiro. Rohan I want to start with you here. What is actually the benefit of pushing back this deadline? And can you explain what's going on here?

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Rohan Nadkarni: Without a doubt. I mean, I think right now the league is in a position where it needs to evaluate all its options and this decision just buys them more time to do that. So one of the options they had when the season was suspended is we can scrap the CBA and then kind of start from scratch entirely to kind of figure out how do we handle this moving forward. This just buys them some more time. I think we'll be very surprising if the CBA was terminated in its entirety. I think they're going to work with the players union to figure out how do we manage a revenue shortfall moving forward, how do we deal with the salary cap moving forward? You know, logistics like that, it can be very complicated to figure out. This just gives the NBA another option in dealing with that and it gives them more time to decide how exactly they want to deal with it.

Madelyn Burke: As challenging as it is to negotiate a CBA in normal times I'd imagine, it would be that much harder to renegotiate a whole new one during a pandemic. But Michael, when you look at this, how will this affect future free agency potentially?

Michael Shapiro: You know, I think in the near future, it's going to have a pretty significant impact. We saw kind of a free agent frenzy in 2019. I don't think we'll see that in twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, which is a big class row. I mentioned the revenue shortfall. There's a lot less revenue from the league. There's a lot less money for each ticket to dole out and free agency. I think you could see star players signing short one or two year contracts waiting for revenue to rise again, then striking it big with these four or five year contract down the line.