Report: Owners Move Off Demand for Hard Salary Cap, Sort Of at BetLM

Report: Owners Move Off Demand for Hard Salary Cap, Sort Of

For the NBA play­ers union, the idea of a team-by-team hard salary cap — as is seen in the NFL and NHL — was a “blood issue.” They saw it as a way own­ers were try­ing to keep down salaries and force more non-guaranteed con­tracts. Some own­ers were insis­tent on a hard cap, and that has report­edly stalled out past negotiations.

But with the 11th hour to save the start of the sea­son approach­ing, the own­ers report­edly have moved off their hard cap demand. Well, technically.

Adrian Woj­narowski at Yahoo Sports broke the story (which has since been con­firmed by others).

The own­ers pro­posed at Tuesday’s nego­ti­at­ing ses­sion an idea sim­i­lar to the cur­rent sys­tem that allows teams to pay a lux­ury tax for going over the cap. Only, now there would be ultra-punitive mea­sures against higher-spending teams. The cur­rent sys­tem has teams pay a dollar-for-dollar tax for exceed­ing the cap….

The own­ers’ pro­posal on Tues­day “would still have the affects of a hard cap,” one source with knowl­edge of the talks said.

This is some­thing sug­gested ear­lier to PBT by some­one close to the talks — there are ways to call some­thing a “soft cap” but essen­tially make it a hard cap by mak­ing the penal­ties for going over it so severe.

In the pre­vi­ous labor deal (the most recent year), the salary cap was $ 58 mil­lion but the lux­ury tax was set at $ 70 mil­lion and teams had to pay a dollar-for-dollar tax. That didn’t deter teams like the Lak­ers, which had a pay­roll in excess of $ 91 mil­lion before the tax kicked in.

A sys­tem could be set up where the tax gets grad­u­ally higher — $ 2 for $ 1, $ 3 for $ 1, etc. — the more a team spends, in effect putting in a much harder cap.

The two sides went their ways to think about this, and it could poten­tially be a break­through on the ques­tion of the next salary cap system.

There seems to be a sense that Wednes­day could be a big nego­ti­at­ing ses­sion (although we’ve heard that before). If the two sides fail to find a lot of com­mon ground on the sys­tem, this could fall back to an ugly stale­mate for a while.

Even if there is some agree­ment on the cap sys­tem, on the big­ger issue of how to deal with the split of “bas­ket­ball related income” (BRI) the two sides remain far apart, Woj reports.

The own­ers didn’t budge on a desire to change the basketball-related income per­cent­age (BRI) to a split that takes the play­ers from 57 per­cent to the mid 40s, sources said. The play­ers had offered to drop from a 57–43 split to 54–46 at a meet­ing last week in New York.

That is the big­ger issue, the big­ger stick­ing point. And until one side moves sig­nif­i­cantly on that issue, there will be no labor peace in the NBA.

Related Posts:

• Report: Michael Jor­dan Again Stays Quiet Dur­ing Labor Talks After Lead­ing Own­ers’ Hard Line Away From the Table
• Matt Forte Responds to Report About Knee Concerns
• Five Teams We’d Like to See on HBO’s ‘Hard Knocks’
• Atlanta Fal­cons Pass on HBO’s ‘Hard Knocks’ to Focus on Game
• Ver­dasco, Melzer Move on at Monte Carlo

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