Salary Cap discussion dominates Saturday’s labour dispute meeting – NBA Lockout Update
The NBA owners met the National Basketball Players Association on Saturday in a marathon 7 hour session to discuss the labour dispute. Both sides, which have been locked in the dispute for over a year now, are believed to have
focused on the ‘Salary Cap’ issue as they plan to take the process ahead step by step.
The NBA season is scheduled to start on November 1st, and the training camps have already been cancelled. Now, there is a real danger that the start of the league will be delayed as NBA owners and players are still not
able to come to terms over a new Collective Bargaining Agreement or CBA.
The most contentious issue between the two sides is believed to be the split of BRI - Basketball Related Income. In the previous CBA, the players got 57 percent of BRI, but owners want to trim that down to 46 percent for the next
ten years.
As the sides wanted to make some quick progress with time winding down so fast, they decided to keep the BRI off agenda during Saturday’s meeting, focusing their combined attention instead on the Salary Cap debate.
Yet, so different are their views on the matter that they weren’t able to move forward despite long deliberations. NBPA President Derek Fisher revealed after the meeting that both sides are still committed to working hard in order
to resolve their differences. He did however; also admit that the situation is not very encouraging because the BRI issue hasn’t really even been touched yet.
"I can't necessarily characterize things as we made progress and that I'm somehow more optimistic than I was yesterday,'' union president Derek Fisher of the Los Angeles Lakers said. ``The reality is we still have an extremely
long way to go. Even with the exchanges that we made today, there's still huge gaps in what we've proposed compared to what they've proposed, and then obviously we still have the economics that are just kind of sitting out there waiting for us to tackle. So
there's a lot of work left to be done, but we'll keep at this.''
Currently, the NBA has a soft Salary Cap which governs player wages for individual NBA teams. Teams are allowed to spend a pre-set amount of money on player contracts by the NBA. If a team spends more than the amount, it is charged
with a luxury tax.
The owners want to remove the soft salary cap and replace it with a hard cap, one that won’t allow teams to cross the pre-set limit in any circumstances. NBA players view that as detrimental to them getting longer, guaranteed contracts.
It will also result in a less open market and could affect the overall income they rake in.
They have thus dubbed it a “blood issue” and are dragging their feet over the matter.
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