The NBA’s latest labor rules have already pushed one championship roster into the blender, and now the Players Association wants the league to rethink the whole setup.
That’s not hard to understand after what happened in Boston. Jaylen Brown, Jrue Holiday, Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis were all central pieces of the Celtics’ 2024 NBA Championship team, and each has, in one way or another, become a casualty of the penalties tied to the league’s collective bargaining agreement. Boston’s decision to trade Brown with financial “optionality” in mind sent a message across the league loud and clear: overspending now comes with a brutal price.
The ripple effects are already showing up. This past weekend, San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama signed a rookie extension at 25% of the cap for five seasons rather than 30%, a move worth $50 million less.
The logic is obvious enough. Wembanyama can see that doing so helps San Antonio keep enough room to pay Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle when their own extensions come due.
That’s exactly the kind of flexibility the NBPA says the system should allow without forcing players to sacrifice money to keep a team intact.
“Our position would be that the system should not require a player to carry all that burden,” incoming NBPA executive director David Kelly told reporters at his introductory press conference Friday. “It should not put a player in a position where he has to carry the burden in order to keep a team together. A system that does that, we have a problem.”
Kelly also pushed for changes that would make it easier for teams to hold onto their own players while still preserving movement around the league.
“We actually think that makes sense around certain issues around the second apron, whether it’s drafted players, whether it’s a Bird exception for certain players,” Kelly said. “The ability to keep teams together, I think, will help fan interest and will still allow for player movement, but allow players to have the decision of staying where they want to stay.”
And yet, even with that argument making plenty of sense, there’s still a case for waiting before anyone rushes to overhaul the system. Boston has already been forced into painful decisions, and the author of the source piece makes it clear that more teams need to feel that same pressure before the league changes course.
The examples come fast and ugly: Oklahoma City trading Chet Holmgren to the Sacramento Kings for De’Andre Hunter and a first-round pick because it doesn’t want to pay him later. Denver sending Jamal Murray to the Memphis Grizzlies for Jerami Grant and D’Angelo Russell.
Jaylen Brown for Paul George, two first-rounders and two seconds. Kristaps Porzingis for Georges Niang.
Jrue Holiday for Anfernee Simons.
Those kinds of moves are exactly the sort of second-apron fallout Boston has already lived through. The Porzingis and Holiday deals were direct responses to those penalties, and the Celtics also had to let Al Horford walk because they couldn’t put together a competitive contract without tightening the budget.
The concern is that the league may be overcorrecting before enough teams have been pushed into the same corner. The source piece points to the Philadelphia 76ers as the next obvious stress test, noting that Brown, Tyrese Maxey, Joel Embiid and VJ Edgecombe are all set to have their contracts expire at the end of the 2028-29 season. Under this CBA, there’s no clear path to paying all four.
And if the league somehow swings so far the other way that Philadelphia can simply hand Brown the supermax extension Boston was reluctant to offer, the source makes its stance plain: that would be too much.
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