What the hell happened with the NBA players' union in 2023?
Did a blip forever alter the NBA's team-building paradigm?
Did a blip forever alter the NBA's team-building paradigm?
Good morning. It's Friday. Thanks for bearing with the quiet, tired Thursday without a newsletter. Let's basketball.
Michele Roberts served as the NBA players' union's executive director for eight years. The league had labor peace during her time, though that could have been as much about the retirement of David Stern as Roberts' presence given that Roberts was much more of a firebrand than her predecessor Billy Hunter, who led the union through multiple work stoppages and close calls. Roberts left the union in 2022, having mostly held the line in her big collective bargaining showdown in 2016 and ensuring players got paid just about everything owed during the pandemic.
Roberts was replaced by Tamika Tremaglio, who came in from a business background. She was with the union for just under two years. During that time, the union and league had one collective bargaining showdown. It resulted in the league adopting – with the union's sign-off – what has effectively become a hard salary cap, the very thing Hunter and Roberts had been fending off for years.
There was no stoppage in 2023 when the union signed off on the new collective bargaining agreement. Frankly, the situation didn't get that close: the NBA was threatening to opt out of their labor agreement around the end of 2022, which would have put additional pressure on negotiations during the 2023 NBA playoffs. But the parties kept pushing out the opt-out deadline, which indicated progress on a deal. A deal was reported at the end of March 2023 and formally announced in April, three months before a potential stoppage. Notably, the NBA worked hard to get the deal done before it had to announce its new media rights deal in summer 2024. (The collective bargaining agreement had a 2024 end date with a mutual opt-out in 2023. The union apparently wanted to let the deal ride until 2024. The NBA refused; hence the negotiations in late 2022 and early 2023.)
In other words, the players' union had a good deal of runway left to fight the league's push for a harder cap. They did not go to the barricades, which either means that union leadership thought the deal would get worse over time or the union leadership did not think this deal was all that bad, that the apron system wasn't worth fighting hard against.
Well, here's new players' union executive director David Kelly on the harder cap.
National Basketball Players Association executive director David Kelly criticized the NBA's salary cap and luxury tax system on Friday, arguing that the newly implemented "second apron" must be "softened" or removed.
"We are not fans of the second apron," Kelly said. "We did not propose the second apron. We should have done a better job of fighting back against the second apron. In the future, we will have a much more unified union, and we will do a better job of fighting back. ... We're seeing [the apron system] decimate teams and force decisions to be made that are not basketball decisions."
This question has been nagging at me: why didn't the union fight back stronger against the second apron? And is it related to why Tremaglio stayed only two years of a 4-year contract, leaving almost immediately after the deal was ratified? When the union announced Tremaglio's departure in November 2023, outside opportunities were cited. I can't find any sign of Tremaglio taking up a high-profile opportunity befitting her position and career until July 2025, where she joined a consulting firm.
What actually caused her to leave in November 2023? Was it a realization from union leadership on the player side that she botched the 2023 labor deal and handed owners the hard cap they'd been seeking for decades without a fight? It's telling that Andre Iguodala become the interim executive director in Tremaglio's wake, with Iguodala having been a player rep on the union board for years at that point and fresh into his own retirement. If players were upset once they realized they'd given up a bedrock principle of their labor agreement without real threat of a stoppage, it would make sense that they would turn to a recently retired player to fight back. And it's telling now that Kelly, who worked in the Warriors' front office before the union hired him early this year, succeeds Iguodala given that Iguodala played for the Warriors while Kelly was there.
Without additional explanation of what happened at the union in 2023, it looks like Tremaglio gave up a crown jewel of the NBA players' union – the soft cap – and then got fired when everyone realized what she'd done. And poof! Just like that, the NBA is forever changed because of perhaps a bad hire, a bad strategy, a bad situation for the union.
Perhaps it's not the single biggest change to the NBA's labor deal over the decades – the agreement to move from players taking home a collective 57% of basketball-related income to 50% in 2011 probably still wins that due to the sheer amount of money transferred back to owners in the years since – but it's a huge deal, and it came without any sort of apparent fight. The union lost months off the season in 2011-12 before caving and agreeing to Stern's final deal. Adam Silver got the union to cave on the hard cap months before the existing labor deal expired!
No wonder Silver seems to be positively giddy about the new reality. Everyone is starting to catch on to what he accomplished in 2023.
“It’s certainly not an unintended consequence,” Adam Silver said when speaking to the media after the NBA Board of Governors meeting in Las Vegas on Tuesday. “When you have a salary system in place as we do, every general manager is going to need to make mixed basketball and business decisions. Frankly, they make them regardless of whether you have a cap. You see that in other sports. People manage budgets. People recognize that you can’t — at some point, you can’t have unlimited resources, whether it’s for a team or any business....
“The purpose of the system is ultimately to create competition throughout the league, and from that standpoint, I think the system is working incredibly well."
What the hell happened at the players' union in 2023? How did they let this happen?
