With multiple reports suggesting that there’s optimism on all sides that a new Collective Bargaining Agreement can be completed in the coming weeks, the NBA and the NBPA are scheduled to meet this Wednesday to discuss a deal, according to Ian Begley and Dave McMenamin of ESPN.com. The sitdown will take place one day before the league’s annual board of governors session, the ESPN duo notes.
According to Begley and McMenamin, optimism continues to rise on both sides that the basic framework of a new CBA deal can be agreed upon as early as this month. The meeting this week between the league and the players’ union is the latest sign that negotiations are progressing positively.
Although the current Collective Bargaining Agreement runs through 2021, both the NBA and the NBPA have the opportunity to opt out of the deal on or before December 15 of this year. If either side were to opt out, the CBA would expire at the end of the 2016/17 league year, and the two sides would have to reach an agreement by July 1, 2017 to avoid a lockout.
Still, commissioner Adam Silver has expressed a belief that a new agreement can be reached before that opt-out arrives, and players who are prominent within the union, such as LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, have echoed that view. As Begley and McMenamin point out, the Knicks forward recently said that “you can feel the difference” between the talks taking place now and the ones that were happening leading up to the 2011 lockout — the two sides are in agreement on many more issues this time around, in Anthony’s view.
Veteran contract extensions, rookie-scale contracts, and the NBA’s D-League are among the areas expected to be tweaked in a new CBA.