Second day of talks on CBA between league and player’s union ends without any progress - NBA Update
On Wednesday, officials from the NBA players’ union and the team owners, met for the second day in a row in a Dallas hotel to discuss the ongoing NBA labour dispute. The league owners were accompanied by representatives from the
National Basketball Players Association, including NBA Commissioner David Stern but the two sides seemingly sticked to their demands.
A third day of talks, which was a possibility earlier, will not take place on Thursday. Instead talks are planned to be held next week in Miami, or in New York. The Collective Bargaining Agreement, or CBA, which is the cause of
the dispute is set to expire on June 30. If a new CBA is not decided upon before that time, then the NBA will go into a lockout which could have far ranging consequences.
On the face of it, both the owners and the players want to avoid that, but neither party seems to be willing to concede ground to the other. The NBA says that 22 out of 30 teams in the league will suffer losses this season and
the owners want their expenditures to come down. Their proposal includes lower salaries, a harder salary cap and non-guaranteed deals for the players. However the players are in no mood to, basically, take a collective pay cut.
Commissioner Stern did not have many words of encouragement coming out of the meeting,
“We remain very far apart… I’d say we’re apart on everything, despite both sides having moved.” David Stern said.
Derek Fisher, point guard at the Los Angeles Lakers and president of the players union, also said he did not see any progress being made in the talks so far. He went into a little detail about what exactly was achieved so far,
and that was very little.
“No change at all. What has changed is maybe the mechanism, the system somewhat in maybe how we get there. We tossed around some ideas in that regard, but there is no hiding the fact that the main components of what we originally
received in their proposal have not changed at all,” Derek Fisher said. “So from that standpoint, there hasn’t been much of a negotiation because that really hasn’t changed.”
The biggest issue in the talks is bound to be BRI - Basketball Related Income. This basically includes money from television rights and ticket sales among other stuff. The owners want a bigger portion of the BRI. Currently, the
players get 57 percent of it, leaving 43 percent for the owners. The owners want more and the players don’t want to give it to them.
If the two sides cannot find common ground before July 1, the league could go into lockout and the dispute to a court.
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