NEW YORK — NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday afternoon that there has been progress made toward striking a new collective bargaining agreement with the National Basketball Players Association, and that he can “foresee” a potential new deal being agreed upon between now and Friday night’s deadline to opt out of the current agreement.
“I think both sides understand that this is a window of opportunity that we should try not to miss,” Silver said during his news conference at the conclusion of this week’s meeting of the league’s board of governors in midtown Manhattan. “Because, if we don’t have the deal done this Friday, the next real deadline is June 30, but that’s the very end of the season.
“The whole idea behind these early deadlines [is] to try to avoid going right up to the line.”
Silver said the league and the NBPA have separated the various issues on the table into different groups, from player health to systemic issues with the league to various economic discussions, and said both sides can “acknowledge we’ve come closer together.”
Still, he said, there is a “gap” between where things currently stand and where he believes they will need to go in order to get a new deal done ahead of Friday night’s deadline for discussions.
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One thing that seems unlikely to happen, however, is that the two sides will go into next season operating under the current agreement. While there have been discussions for the better part of a year over getting a new deal done, the current one allows both sides the opportunity to opt out of the final year of the deal, or to let it run through the 2023-24 season.
Asked whether he would be all right with it running through next season and then expiring, Silver said he would not be, saying several things have changed since the deal began in the 2017-18 season.
“It’s part of this collective bargaining agreement that this opt-out existed, so we wouldn’t be acting outside of the collective bargaining agreement by exercising it,” Silver said.
“[But] certain dynamics have changed since we negotiated this collective bargaining agreement. I won’t go through the list, but media is one of them. We think there are necessary changes that we would like to make in the current collectively bargained relationship that take into account the realities of what media, the media world looks like now as opposed to what it did in 2017.”
Silver, though, maintained the same position that sources on both the league and union sides have taken since these discussions began: that the talks between the two sides, led by Silver and NBPA executive director Tamika Tremaglio, have been positive, and pointed to the negotiations between the two sides to put together the NBA’s bubble to successfully conclude the 2019-20 season during the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of the way they have worked together previously.
“This word never gets old, but becomes often used in these negotiations, with the goal being let’s just make sure it’s still fair,” Silver said. “Sometimes in partnerships, you have to fall back on words like ‘good faith’ and ‘fairness.'”
On several occasions during queries about the CBA negotiations, Silver referred to the changing media landscape around the sport — and, specifically, the ongoing issue with Diamond Sports, the regional sports network company that has the rights to more than 40 professional sports teams (including 16 in the NBA) that filed for bankruptcy earlier this month.
Silver said there would be no issues with broadcasting the remainder of this regular season and the first-round playoff games, and that there have been discussions about a partnership between the two sides moving forward.
“We’re in what I view as very constructive discussions about an ongoing relationship,” Silver said. “They [Diamond Sports] still have some restructuring to do.”
He also said this is just one piece of a larger shift in the overall media ecosystem — one the NBA is studying closely, as its current television agreement is set to run through the 2024-25 season — with a particular focus on the streaming end of things.
“You’re clearly seeing an evolution or a morphing of media moving continually to streaming services, and whether it’s with our existing partners, Disney [the parent company of ESPN], Warner Bros. Discovery, they are very focused on streaming services, as well,” Silver said. “Obviously other entrants in the market would potentially be interested in the NBA, and at the same time, they are still, when you include the virtual carriers, along with traditional cable and satellite, they are still in 75 million homes. That’s still a mainstay of how people are obviously watching our games now, and I think will watch our games for the foreseeable future.
“What makes this so interesting is most likely we’re going to continue to have a hybrid way of distributing our games. I’ll just add, it’s interesting that just to show things go full circle, when I came into the league in the ’90s, there was a lot more local broadcast exposure, and now what we’re seeing is a lot of those broadcast stations in our teams’ local markets are coming back to the table and expressing interest in once again broadcasting our games. That’s terrific news because obviously broad reach in those markets, too, if you’re on over-the-air television.”
Other topics Silver discussed included:
• Asked about Michael Jordan announcing he could potentially sell his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets, Silver said the NBA legend has informed him he will remain at least an alternate governor moving forward, assuming a sale does come to pass, and that he will continue to be involved with the league.
“One thing Michael has told me is that whether or not that transaction gets done, he will remain governor in the league, technically maybe the alternate governor instead of the governor, so he’ll still stay very involved,” Silver said. “He’d still continue to have an interest in the league.
“I recognize that over time, people’s interests move on to other areas. He’s not living in the market right now, etcetera. So, completely understandable. But the good news is I think regardless of his ownership status, he will remain part and parcel of everything that this league continues to do. I have no doubt about that.”
• Silver said that in his discussions with Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant before suspending him for eight games earlier this month, both he and Morant agreed what’s important is how Morant goes forward from here, and how successful he’ll be in modifying his behavior.
“I think [Morant] understood that while I appreciated his full cooperation, his expression of complete remorse and his acknowledgment of not just how dangerous any activity involving a gun can be but given the nature of his stardom, the millions if not tens of millions of kids who could possibly be influenced by his conduct, what I think we both understood is that what’s going to be most important is what happens going forward and how successful he’ll be in modifying his behavior,” Silver said.
“I have every sense that he took the meeting with me and the discipline enormously seriously, and even putting aside anything that I did or within the power of the league that, at least my sense is that it was one of those moments in his life where he realized things could have been so much worse, putting aside, again, any punitive actions from the league, that when the mixture of alcohol and guns is so terrible that something terrible — something truly horrific could have happened to him or someone else, and even still there’s some person out there who could copy something he did.
“My sense was he felt the full gravity of that, but I think where we both ended was, ‘Good luck to you, and the most important measure will be how you, again, choose to live your life going forward.’ Not to say I didn’t believe and feel that everything he was saying to me was genuine, but the measure is going to be how he lives his life going forward.”
• Silver also dismissed the idea of replacing Bob Iger as the CEO of Disney, after a recent report said he was under consideration to succeed Iger atop the company.
“I love my job at the NBA,” Silver said. “I have no intention of going anywhere.”