NBA, NBPA Will Push Back CBA Opt-Out Deadline

The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association have agreed to extend the deadline to opt out of the league’s current Collective Bargaining Agreement, reports ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski (Twitter links).

The NBA and NBPA have been engaged in negotiations on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, but will need more time to find common ground on all the issues being discussed.

The current CBA, which went into effect in 2017, runs through the 2023/24 season. However, the league and the players’ union hold a mutual option to terminate that agreement at the end of the ’22/23 league year. The deadline for either side to exercise that opt-out clause had been next Thursday (December 15), but it will be pushed into the new year, according to Wojnarowski.

Sources tell ESPN that the new opt-out deadline is expected to land sometime in February. The exact date will be finalized at next Wednesday’s Board of Governors meeting, Woj adds.

As Bobby Marks of ESPN notes (via Twitter), when the two sides negotiated the current CBA back in 2016, they postponed the opt-out deadline by nearly a month – to January 13, 2017 – despite reaching an agreement in mid-December, since it took some time to ratify the new deal. So if negotiations continue into February, it’s possible another extension would be necessary.

Although the NBA and the players’ union have been widely expected to work out a new agreement without any sort of work stoppage, the league has reportedly been pushing harder this time around for the implementation of an “upper spending limit,” which would function like a hard cap. The players’ side has been adamantly opposed to the idea.