Updated thoughts on the CBA

By Dan T. Rosenbaum

More and more of the details of the CBA are dribbling out daily. In "How will the new NBA collective bargaining agreement and new luxury tax rules affect the free agent market?", I have included various updates. The Gilbert Arenas provision is updated, and due to conflicting reports about the distribution of the luxury taxes, I have significantly changed my assessment of this deal. I think that until we know how the luxury taxes are distributed, it is an open question how the free agent market will be affected over the life of this deal.

It fascinates me that there is uncertainty at this point about how the luxury taxes might be distributed. This issue is more important to the decision-making of teams than all but a handful of other changes to the CBA, yet it appears possible that many (if not all) teams do not know how these taxes will be distributed. What this means is that teams may not know how much free agents will cost them and for some reason are not banging down the doors of the league to find out. I talk more about this issue in "How will the new NBA collective bargaining agreement and new luxury tax rules affect the free agent market?".

Last updated: 10:30 PM, July 14, 2005