Ready for some good news?
Yeah you are.
I’ll be leaving for vacation soon, probably, I think.
Oh, and there’s a growing sense on some level within the NBA that there won’t be another lockout in 2017, when both the owners and players have the opportunity to opt-out of the current deal that expires in 2021.
Grantland’s Zach Lowe, as per usual, has the pertinent deets:
There is a rising tide of optimism among ownership sources, player agents, union officials, and other stakeholders that the league might avoid the once-assumed lockout of 2017. Everyone knows the league is doing phenomenally well. The NBA generated more revenue than projected in 2014-15 for the second straight season, and the new national TV megadeal, which will pay the league an average of $2.7 billion per season, doesn’t even kick in until 2016-17. Total league revenues, which recently hovered just south of $4 billion per year, will leap past $7 billion by 2017-18. Players don’t get as much of that as they used to, but their 50 percent share, down from 57 percent under the prior CBA, will still net them enough that the average player salary will shoot up to about $8 million in a few years.
Making predictions this far in advance, especially when the relationship between players and owners has been turbulent over the years, is difficult. But there’s one thing everyone can agree on, from the players and owners, to you and me and Dupree: The NBA has never been more stronger, more popular.
The league will enjoy an unprecedented cap bump after next season, followed by another in 2017. There’s talk of LeBron James becoming the NBA’s first $40-million-per-year player, and at this rate, we should start wondering if Anthony Davis or the heirs to his generation (Andrew Wiggins, Karl-Anthony Towns, etc.) could be the first $50-million-a-year players.
NBAPA executive director Michele Roberts is on the record entertaining the idea that the NBA could become more popular than soccer, or futbol. This is all happening. Actually happening.
It’s of little surprise, then, that Roberts has apparently been speaking with NBA commissioner Adam Silver about the matters at hand, per Lowe. They both know what’s at stake, not only just for the side they represent, but the sport itself, and what that in turn means for the side they represent.
More popularity equates to more money, and the NBA is rolling in both these days. Putting their profit and popularity margins in jeopardy would be asinine unless there really, truly, wholly are issues that can only be resolved via a work stoppage.
For now, though, it doesn’t look like the league is in store for another lockout. Both sides, each armed with new chiefs, seem to be better prepared and more bent on avoiding a work stoppage altogether.
And, based on the sporadic batches of intel that trickle out of sources somewhere, that additional preparation, this extra dialogue, sounds like it will be one of the driving forces behind sparing the basketball world at large from another millionaires vs. billionaires staring contest.
