National Basketball Association

Report: NBA nearing agreement with union to avoid a lockout in 2017

Published Nov. 15, 2016 2:59 p.m. ET

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The NBA and the union for the players are nearing agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement, according to a report from Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports.

Both sides are able to opt out of the current agreement on Dec. 15, which would set the stage for a potentially lengthy negotiation in the summer of 2017 that could result in a lockout. But this report states that there is optimism a deal could be finalized before the opt-out date.

During several months of discussions, NBA commissioner Adam Silver and NBPA executive director Michele Roberts, as well as their respective committees and staffs, have agreed upon many of the significant collective bargaining issues, league sources said. Much of the remaining talks are centered upon smaller elements of the CBA, league sources said.

The NBA's new broadcast rights deal (worth a reported $2.66 billion) begins this season, and with so much money available, it would have been a hard sell to the public for the league to miss any time due to a prolonged contract negotiation with its players. The NBA lost 16 games because of a lockout in 2011, and a revised 66-game regular season schedule didn't start until Dec. 25.

The specifics of what the new agreement may include are unclear at this time, but Wojnarowski reports that "a significantly higher" rookie contract scale would be one of the expected changes. Currently, rookie scale contracts are set at a specific dollar amount, whereas maximum level contracts are set at a percentage of the salary cap, which increased more than 30 percent last summer thanks to the influx of revenue from the broadcast rights deal.

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