NBA Owners Reportedly Drop Demand For End Of Guaranteed Contracts

Jun 17 5:42p by Tom Ziller

NBA owners, league officials, players and union officials continue to meet to negotiate a new labor deal before the current agreement expires June 30. A nearly five-hour session in New York on Friday resulted in at least one bit of progress, according to reports by New York Times' Howard Beck: the NBA has dropped its demand for the end of guaranteed contracts in the new deal.

The guaranteed contract has long scarred the records of NBA GMs; currently, contracts can be signed for up to six years, and most are fully guaranteed until, in some cases, the final year. Unlike the NFL's salary system, NBA teams have no way of excising payroll without a mutually agreed upon buyout (rare) or trade. Recoveries from bad contracts tend to be slower in the NBA; one bad contract (or injury) can handcuff a team for years.

The NBA had sought to eliminate the very idea of the guaranteed contract in the league, but reportedly gave up that chip. But the league is still working toward ways to diminish the risk involved with long-term contracts: by shortening the maximum length of contracts, by diminishing the share of revenue from its current 57-43 split that favors players, by instituting a hard cap. Those are still major obstacles to a deal. Ending the guaranteed contract was the most outrageous concept in the NBA's proposal; to see it gone 13 days before the deadline is good news, but not quite enough yet.

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A couple of questions in case anyone knows

Does the 57% of the Basketball Related Income which belongs to the players constitute their actual salaries? If so, what about the majority of the teams which exceed the cap, doesn’t that accumulatively surpasses that 57% in the league?

Bleeding Black and Purple 6710 miles South East of Sacramento.

by ZenBaller on Jun 18, 2011 8:51 AM EDT reply actions

Bad contracts are bad

also because players are paid for their potential a lot of times, especially with big men (Eddy Curry?), and one injury can make what looks like a great contract a bad one, like Grant Hill.

The best way to mitigate this is to have an absolute maximum player cap every year like the NHL, where no salary can hit above a certain percentage of the hard cap, no exceptions. For NBA players, I propose that no one player can eat up more than 30% of the hard cap any year, period.

by thewiz06 on Jun 21, 2011 5:56 PM EDT reply actions