The NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is determined to keep strong and confident on the long-term future of the Association. The salary cap, the collective bargaining agreement. All the long-term things that will shape the NBA for the next few years. It’s a shame that Silver and the NBA Players Association can’t get on the same page. But Silver is now going for the guilt tactics. Saying that the cap smoothing proposal that the NBAPA rejected, is actually slowing down the process of changing the Draft Lottery.
“A new wrinkle is the fact that we’re not going to have smoothing and so this is a new issue for the league office and the teams,” Silver said in his first comment about the relationship of the union decision and the draft lottery revisions. “There’s clearly a consensus that we need to change and make an adjustment to existing draft lottery- the majority of teams voted for that last board meeting. It just requires a super majority.
“Now what I am hearing from some of the general managers in the league is that because it’s unclear how the cap will operate with a massive amount of cap room in ’16 and ’17 and potentially in the year after that it may be premature to change the lottery until we have a better understanding of what the changed behavior will be so it’s something we are going to continue to look at.
“I think it’s obviously a question of when we make a change. The expectation of the league office that we were going to have smoothing, we turned out to be wrong and I accept that. Therefore we have to study what that means because the lottery is just one aspect of a larger draft and free agency so we have to look at all those moving parts together.”
This is one big mess. I really hope that they get this sorted soon because I am seeing a lot of hot air here. And at this rate. The talk will far outweigh the action. If we don’t have a lockout. I consider all this a success.
