A week after the Dallas Mavericks won the NBA championship, the last professional basketball game in the foreseeable future, the owners and the players continued their labor negotiations.
NBA fans, who have every right to exhibit concern for the state of their league, saw a slight improvement in the situation as the owners decided to drop abolishing guaranteed contracts from the new collective bargaining agreement. The players, however, were not overly impressed with this gesture.
The biggest problem that the players have with this act is that it doesn't really benefit them in any way. This preserves the status quo, but guaranteed contracts were likely the first off the table for the owners. I suspect, despite the number of general managers with big-spending reputations, that front offices will begin to stop overpaying players across five or six years. But that's because contract lengths will be shortened, ultimately, to three or four years at the most. The issue of guarantees was never really at the heart of the discussions.
The two sides now stand about $700 million apart in regards to revenue sharing and polarized on the hard salary cap. Even though the issue of guaranteed contracts is no longer in play, the players and owners have a substantial gap to bridge. And fans should expect both owners and players to fight more vociferously over these two points than they did over guaranteed contracts.
While I believe that the owners and players will eventually come to terms over the new collective bargaining agreement, the sides will likely sacrifice part of the season to accomplish that.
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