Talks between the NBA and the players' union over a new collective bargaining agreement have broken off, enhancing the possibility of a lockout when the season ends.
In a statement released yesterday, the league said the union reversed its position on several issues in the past week, leading to an impasse. The current collective bargaining agreement, the set of rules which governs player contracts, expires on June 30 -- two days after the NBA draft.
During the all-star break in February, Commissioner David Stern and National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Billy Hunter sounded optimistic that a deal would be struck before the season ended. Stern said he was "hopeful" last week that the two sides would reach an agreement. Yesterday he told a group of reporters that "it looks bad."
"You may recall in Denver, I said, 'We're not going to do a bad deal.' That's my mantra: We're not going to do a bad deal," Hunter said after appearing yesterday at a congressional subcommittee hearing on steroid use by athletes. "If that means the result is we've got a lockout, then we've just got another lockout. But we are not going to do a bad deal."
The statement came one day after the league canceled a meeting to discuss the collective bargaining agreement on Tuesday in New York. Hunter said the league informed the union that the meeting was canceled on Saturday, just two days after the union submitted its proposal. "If we give something we expect something back in exchange," Hunter said. The league claims the union changed its position on the length of long-term contracts (current rules allow a maximum length of seven years), the size of annual raises in long-term contracts (current rules limit those increases to 12.5 percent annually for players who re-sign with their teams; 10 percent for players changing teams as free agents), and changes to the escrow and luxury tax systems designed to limit salary growth and penalize the highest-spending teams.
"At the conclusion of a bargaining session on Sunday, April 17, we thought we were very close to a deal, with only a few items remaining to be compromised," NBA deputy commissioner Russ Granik said in a statement. "On April 19, a day after the Players Association met with a group of player agents, we were informed that the Players Association could no longer agree to a previously-committed five-year rule on length of contracts. Then, last week, after promising a written proposal to form the basis of a new agreement, the union instead advised us orally that it needed to backtrack on several other essential terms that had already been resolved."
He also said that no further meetings are planned. Granik and Stern both suggested that player agents pressured Hunter to back off some of the concessions they had made since the sides began discussions in February. While Hunter admitted he met with a group of the league's most powerful player agents last month, they merely confirmed the position of the union. Hunter said the union, not player agents, is in control of the situation. "If anybody thinks otherwise, they're deluding themselves," he said.
The league has offered such concessions as raising the salary cap and lessening the impact of the luxury tax by distributing escrow funds to all teams equally, but Hunter said he didn't think that too many changes needed to be made from the current agreement.
"My position is that the [current] deal is working," Hunter said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
