The NBA’s Board of Governors approved Commissioner Adam Silver’s return-to-play plan on Thursday, but the NBA Players Association still has some issues that it wants to discuss before the plan is finalized.
At least, that was the unmistakable message that Michele Roberts, Chris Paul and the rest of the union’s leadership sent on Friday.
Late in the afternoon, it was learned that the players tentatively approved the proposal set forth by the league, however, the statement issued by the union let it be known in certain terms that there were more issues to discuss.
For the most part, sports media outlets have taken the NBPA’s tentative approval of the plan as meaning that the league is certainly going to return to play on July 31, and that’s a fair assumption.
With the amount of money at stake and the league’s players having been engaged with the commissioner’s office since the league suspended play on March 11, things will ultimately be figured out.
But it doesn’t seem that we are there just yet.
That conclusion can be drawn from the press release issued by the players association on Friday.
The Board of Player Representatives of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) has approved further negotiations with the NBA on a 22-team return to play scenario to restart the 2019-20 NBA season. Various details remain to be negotiated and the acceptance of the scenario would still require that all parties reach agreement on all issues relevant to resuming play.
The statement itself mentions that the union feels that it needs to have “further negotiations” with the NBA and that the return to play requires that the parties reach agreement on all of the issues.
A fair assumption to draw from that language — based on a report from ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski — is that the union isn’t too keen on the league’s proposal to begin the 2020-21 season on Dec. 1.
Under the current proposal, the NBA Finals would likely conclude somewhere in the first two weeks of October, with training camps expected to convene in mid-November. That’s much quicker than the normal three months players have between the conclusion of the Finals and commencement of training camps.
The New York Times’ Marc Stein also opines that some of the smaller details, including quarantining and contact tracing, could be points of contention for the players.
Without question, for those looking forward to the return of the NBA this summer, the approvals of both the Board of Governors and the NBPA are steps in the right direction.
But, based on the very language issued publicly by the NBPA, there are still some issues and details that need to be ironed out.
