The NBA's two Dec. 15ths
The focus nine days from now will surely be on all the players who now become eligible to be traded. What's happening at the same time on the labor front realistically matters a lot more
Confidence here is high that a majority share of the readership of this Substack knows what Dec. 15 means on the NBA calendar as reflexively as it understands what happens on Dec. 25.
It's a byproduct of the hyperfocus #thisleague constantly pulls in with its ever-intoxicating Transaction Game. You learn it early in modern NBA fandom: Dec. 15 = Trade Season begins in earnest.
This particular Dec. 15th we're closing in on, though, isn't merely the first day that most players who signed new contracts in the offseason become eligible to be traded. Far more crucially: Dec. 15, 2022, is also the deadline in the NBA's current collective bargaining agreement for both sides — either the league or the players — to give notice that it is opting out of the existing labor deal.
The NBA’s current labor pact runs through the 2023-24 season, but an opt-out from either side in the next nine days would sound immediate alarm bells because A) it essentially breaks the contract effective at the end of this season and B) it’s a measure that instantly makes the threat of a lockout tangible.
With the sides nowhere close to a new deal, according to sources briefed on the talks, it would appear that an extension to that deadline will have to be announced very soon for the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association to extend the runway toward hashing out a new labor pact during the 2022-23 season with any semblance of cooperative spirit.
For a good bit of this calendar year, remember, there was real hope bubbling throughout the NBA that the parties would actually have the next labor deal all hashed out by Dec. 15. After last season generated a record $10 billion in revenue for the NBA, while franchise values continue to soar based on Forbes' most recent valuations and with a lucrative new media rights contract presumed to be looming, there seemed to be way too many financial incentives in circulation for anyone on the league map to even flirt with labor strife and mess with all that momentum.
Yet here we are.
Sources say that the league's increasingly determined pursuit of an Upper Spending Limit as we revealed in October — its version of a broad Hard Cap without calling it a Hard Cap — remains the No. 1 stumbling block in recent negotiations. There are certainly other issues, such as the ongoing wrangle about the league's desire to lower the draft-eligible age limit back to 18 and (among numerous related concerns) how that would impact subsequent rookie scale contract lengths, but the USL is clearly Obstacle No. 1.
This does not appear to be the usual trial-balloon push for a hard spending limit that the NBA has been known to float in past negotiations and then suddenly drop to gain concessions in other areas. And if the league/ownership side keeps pushing vigorously for a USL, believing that a new system is needed for competitive balance to counter the wild spending outlays from the Warriors, Clippers and Nets that accounted for more than 70 percent of the NBA's collective luxury-tax penalties last season, any path to a new agreement with the players is bound to bumpy.
Remember what one source on the players' side told me in October: "There will be a lockout before there’s a hard cap."
I have long subscribed to the idea that a new labor agreement remains inevitable because business has just been way too good, on the rebound from a global pandemic, for the NBA's various stakeholders to seriously endanger it. The problem: Evidence to back that belief up, as well as the oft-cited notion that the respective league and union leaderships are as closely aligned as they've ever been, has been in rather short supply lately.
Let's close with the same two questions that capped my October piece:
1. Can Commissioner Adam Silver really afford labor discord of any type at a time of such apparent prosperity for the NBA?
2. Is an all-new union leadership tandem of NBPA executive director Tamika Tremaglio and president CJ McCollum of the New Orleans Pelicans indeed prepared for the difficult fight ahead if the Upper Spending Limit campaign gathers steam?
Let's hope we hear soon about an extension to the Dec. 15 opt-out date.
It would be a welcome signal that the sides see enough negotiating commonality to keep working on a deal — and a far better alternative to an outright opt-out from the NBA on Dec. 15 that would slam home how serious it is about holding out for that Upper Spending Limit.
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Coffee Corner
It's been a while since I posted an item exclusively focused on java pursuits, but my recent experience at San Antonio International Airport demanded breakout coverage.
Regular readers surely know by now that, on top of my various coffee obsessions, I'm also an Anglophile in the extreme. So I could scarcely restrain my excitement when I discovered two Costa Coffee machines as I was flying out of the Alamo City.
I will do anything I can to avoid Starbucks' offerings, at home and especially abroad, but I've found both Costa Coffee and Caffè Nero to consistently deliver a higher-grade product on my many trips to England. So stumbling upon a sign that promised a Costa machine near my departure gate in a near-empty terminal on a Sunday night ... I was looking around for the cameras from one of those practical-joke shows.
Only adding to the anticipation was my most recent experience buying machine-dispensed Costa Coffee in England. It was on a frosty away-day trip with Manchester City to Aston Villa about a year ago and I was pleasantly surprised by how good the coffee was out of a Costa-branded supermarket vending apparatus that we happily gravitated to so we could escape the cold for a bit.
The taste this time didn't quite reach those same levels with my San Antonio serving, but I was beaming nonetheless to discover what I later learned is called a BaristaBot. Nothing beats a real-life barista preparing a freshly crafted jolt in an actual coffee shop, but the reality is that everything closes earlier than it used to at the airport (and, realistically, everywhere else) given the struggles so many businesses face as we all continue to rebound from a global pandemic. This, then, was a very pleasant surprise.
Subsequent research turned up that Costa Coffee has two types of machines all over the place in the States — including a few where I live in Dallas. I legit had no clue.
I once had a similar experience in Boston a few years back when I stumbled upon a Caffè Nero there. I've since read that there are more than 30 such locations in the States and that Costa has likewise opened its first two brick-and-mortar stores in Georgia.
Not quite sure how all this has escaped me until now, but league sources say this traveler intends to aggressively play catch-up.
Numbers Game
🏀 13
My recent piece on the uptick in traveling calls leaguewide this season noted that the single-game high thus far was 11 whistles for traveling when Miami visited Toronto on Nov. 16. A new single-game high was duly registered two days after my story was published: 13 traveling violations in the Cleveland-at-New York game Sunday.
🏀 8-2
Some standings talk after Sunday night's games:
🏀 4
There were just four teams ranked in the top 10 in both offensive and defensive efficiency entering Tuesday's play: Cleveland, Dallas, New Orleans and Phoenix.
🏀 5
Anthony Davis' 55 points in Washington on Sunday marked the fifth 50-point performance of the season. There were four last month: Philadelphia's Joel Embiid (59), Phoenix's Devin Booker (51), Cleveland's Darius Garland (51) and Golden State's Stephen Curry (50).
🏀 19
There were 19 games last season, produced by 14 different players, that crossed the 50-point threshold — including 60-point games for Brooklyn's Kyrie Irving and Minnesota's Karl-Anthony Towns.
🏀 785
LeBron James on Friday moved past Magic Johnson for sixth place on the all-time assists list with his 10,142nd career dime. Leave it to my pal @MicahAdams13 to count it up and figure out that no teammate has been set up more by James than Zydrunas Ilgauskas, recipient of 785 assists from LeBron.
🏀 3
Another gem from Adams: Only three times in LeBron's 20-year career has a teammate reached the 50-point threshold with James on the floor. Anthony Davis has done it twice after Sunday's 55-point outburst in Washington and Kyrie Irving had a 57-point game in San Antonio in Cleveland's overtime victory there in March 2015.
🏀 15,377,000
Fox Sports reported an audience of nearly 15.4 million for its recent England/United States World Cup broadcast, establishing a new record for a men's soccer match in the U.S. Can we get away with pretending that our recent video preview of the game for The Sporting News was at least a small factor?
Costa bought out Briggo in the US a couple of years ago, so that's probably why it is different. Those machines (I see what at the Austin airport) seem to be the same as they were branded Briggo.
https://www.worldcoffeeportal.com/Latest/News/2020/October/Costa-Coffee-enters-US-market-with-Briggo-acquisit
Tre Stelle in north Dallas is one of my two favorites (boy and bear in redondo beach is also great). Cool story with Tre Stelle too. if you haven’t been there, gladly buy you a drip there anytime.