2011 NBA Lockout: Full Coverage Of League’s Labor Dispute

The NBA Board of Governors on Thursday ratified a new 10-year collective bargaining agreement, clearing the way for the official end of the 2011 lockout. Commissioner David Stern told reporters that the owners voted 25-5 to approve the deal.

Earlier on Thursday, players had ratified the deal by a wide margin, though fewer than half of the union membership elected to vote.

We are just baby steps away from the NBA lockout officially ending and a new collective bargaining agreement being approved by both sides. The NBA players have reformed as a union and have voted to approve the new CBA, according to a report by CBS Sports’ Ken Berger.

The owners are also expected to finalize a new revenue-sharing plan shortly, according to Berger. The major parts of the new CBA had been approved a while ago, with only a few procedural and B-list items left to resolve this week. Evidently, they have been resolved.

The minimum age for players seeking to enter the NBA Draft will not rise as a result of the NBA lockout deal crafted by negotiators from the players’ union and league over the last two weeks, reports CBS Sports’ Ken Berger. The age minimum will remain at 19 years old and one year removed from high school, as it has been since 2006.

Berger also reports that teams can now assign their own players with three or fewer years in the NBA to their D-League affiliate; assignment had been to players in the first two seasons previously. In addition, veterans will have the opportunity to be assigned to the D-League for injury rehab, though it must be a mutual decision between the team and player.

In a surprise move, the NBA announced on Tuesday that while free agency won’t begin until December 9, teams can begin talks with agents about free agent players beginning on Wednesday. The league that no deals can be offered or accepted -- even verbally -- until December 9, but that communication can begin.

It’s unorthodox by NBA standards. In a normal NBA offseason, teams cannot have conversations with agents of free agent players from other teams until the stroke of midnight on July 1, the traditional start of free agency. By the time that the sun rises on July 1, there are usually a couple of verbal deals wrapped up.

Billy Hunter sent a memo to players on Monday outlining the good points of the NBA lockout deal reached Saturday, reports SI.com’s Sam Amick. (The memo was, in fact, longer than two paragraphs.) In the memo, which Amick made available online, Hunter outlines the path toward ratification of the deal, which includes finalization of the lawsuit settlement agreement, re-authorization for the union to represent players in collective bargaining and negotiation of the smaller CBA issues like the age minimum and drug testing. Hunter said that ratification could come next week.

With free agency and the start of training camps scheduled for December 9, time is of the essence.

After all of that -- two years of precursor scares and five months of head-numbing stick-waving -- the NBA lockout ended quietly at 3 a.m. during Thanksgiving weekend with the celebratory press conference held in a law firm’s nondescript meeting room. The lockout was like a bad thriller: it built to a crescendo with increasingly wild threats, fevered drama and the promise of more blood. Then, suddenly: roll credits.

No one is complaining. I’m surely not complaining. But the abrupt, sober end of the lockout begs the question: why now? What happened? Here’s a reading from someone who has read too much about the labor struggle over the past couple years.

The most important question facing fans in the wake of the NBA lockout deal reached Saturday morning is pretty basic: how does the deal affect my team? As it turns out, given that clubs have similarities with others based on top-level considerations, we can boil the impacts of the deal down based on the class of teams we’re looking at.

We’ve broken the 30 NBA teams into seven groups of varying membership levels to assess the deal’s impact on the clubs’ futures. Then we note any specific considerations facing each team, the “I am a special snowflake” impacts that will affect, say, the Pacers but not the Bucks.

The NBA schedule will be released within days, and it’s unlikely it will at all resemble the version that the league presented in August. Cutting 18 games from every team will tend to do that.

In the interim, the league has announced what form that schedule will take, confirming reports from the New York Times Sunday that indicated the NBA would shrink the interconference slate in favor of more games against in-conference opponents.

The NBA lockout is over, and fans everywhere can look forward to actually seeing some basketball again. We understand that there’s a natural instinct to never wanting to think about the NBA lockout again. Let’s move forward, you say. While we understand that sentiment, the fact is that the 149-day lockout featured so many twists and turns, so we felt it was worth laying it all out, for history’s sake.

So for those wondering how we got here, this NBA lockout timeline will answer your question. Here now are all of the important events of the 2011 NBA lockout.

The NBA amnesty clause agreed to in the lockout deal reached Saturday is even crazier than once believed. Sam Amick of SI.com published the memo officially outlining the deal for teams, and Cowbell Kingdom’s James Ham noticed something in the amnesty rundown previously undisclosed.

This is a pretty incredible wrinkle for everyone involved. These things could turn out like blind baseball trades.

In the lockout-shortened 2011-12 NBA season, teams will play most opponents from the opposite conference just once, according to a report by the New York Times’ Howard Beck.

The five-month lockout forced the league to shrink its normal 82-game season to just 66 games. In a normal season, teams play opponents from the other conference twice each (home and away), intra-division opponents four times each (twice home and away) and intraconference opponents outside the division 3-4 times.

The NBA lockout is over with a tentative deal reached Saturday morning. But questions remain. Most will be answered in short order, and more will arise. But for now, here are the 20 most vexing queries for this recovering lockout addict, separated by topic.

A decision on whether to increase the NBA’s age minimum could be put off, preserving the quality of the 2012 NBA Draft, reports Yahoo!‘s Adrian Wojnarowski. The age minimum was among the so-called B-list items to be agreed upon as a part of an NBA lockout deal. The league is believed to prefer an age-20 minimum, increased from the current age-19 rule implemented in 2005.

Wojnarowski reports that the league could create a joint committee with members of the players’ camp to study the issue in the coming year and make a decision that would affect the 2013 draft. That would mean that star freshmen like Anthony Davis, Andre Drummond and Austin Rivers would remain eligible to enter the draft in 2012, joining Harrison Barnes, Perry Jones, Jared Sullinger and John Henson at the top.

The most punitive measures created by the NBA lockout to tamp down high team payrolls won’t come into effect until 2013, according to CBS Sports’ Ken Berger.

The one major change that will restrict those teams’ ability to spend in the immediate is a restriction on the use of the full mid-level exception. Those teams will be forced to use a smaller mid-level exception tailored for luxury tax teams unless they drop to within $1 million of the threshold.

Why? The criteria to be eligible for a second contract with a starting salary capped at 30 percent of the salary cap instead of the normal 25 percent is to win an MVP award, get voted into the All-Star Game as a starter twice or to be named to two All-NBA teams (any level) within the player’s first four seasons.

The difference is about $3 million per season. Jerry Reinsdorf is no doubt thrilled.

Under the NBA lockout deal reached Saturday morning, players with six or fewer years of service in the league can sign contracts with a maximum first-year salary equal to 25 percent of the salary cap, or roughly $14.5 million for the 2011-12 season. But if that player has already made the All-Star or All-NBA team, he can sign a deal that pays him 30 percent in the first year of his second contract, which is also the max for players with more than six seasons of service.

This will affect young players signing their second contracts, usually following their third seasons. (This contracts go into effect after the players’ fourth season.) In the immediate, it will come into play for Derrick Rose, Kevin Love and Russell Westbrook, each of whom have finished three seasons and have All-Star appearances on their resumes.

Teams will now have three days to match offer sheets signed by their restricted free agents under the NBA lockout deal tentatively reached early Saturday, reports Yahoo!‘s Adrian Wojnarowski.

In the old collective bargaining agreement, teams had one week to match offer sheets. In the meantime, the team with which the player signed an offer sheet had the cap space used in the offer locked up in a cap hold. This created a bit of a hostage situation where the players’ original team could string out the process for seven days, disallowing the offering team from making other major moves in the interim.

In the last public NBA lockout deal proposal presented by the league, the minimum team salary rose from 75 percent of the salary cap to 85 percent for the 2011-12 season and 90 percent in 2012-13 and beyond. Reports suggest that has remained in place in the final deal reached Saturday morning.

As a result of Saturday’s NBA lockout deal, the salary cap for the 2011-12 season will remain flat instead of decreasing substantially. That compromise was present in the NBA’s last public proposal on November 10. In the new deal, the players’ aggregate salary -- which determines the salary cap level -- will drop to 49-51 percent from 57 percent of the league’s revenue. That would have dropped the salary cap 12 percent, to roughly $51 million. But the compromise keeps the $58 million cap for the 2011-12 season and possibly the 2012-13 season.

Salaries will, of course, be pro-rated to adjust for the shortened season. The NBA will play a 66-game season, dropping 20 percent of the regular season schedule. As such, actual salary paid out will be about 20 percent less than the cap figures would amount to.

A NBA lockout deal has been reached, but team officials can’t exactly reach out to their players just yet. ESPN’s Ric Bucher reports that communication rules established by the league remain in effect for at least the next few days as a lawsuit settlement is finalized. Team personnel have been forbidden from contacting players since July 1, when the NBA instituted the lockout.

The league has allowed some exceptions, for instance allowing coaches and team employees to attend player weddings when cleared in advance. But team employees have been shut out of the exhibition games played all over the country, and front offices have been unable to keep tabs on players’ workout plans and nutrition. (Shawn Kemp famously came back from the 1999 lockout overweight; that worry no doubt weighs on some executives.)

One of the biggest issues holding up an NBA lockout deal over the past few weeks was whether teams over the luxury tax threshold would be able to use the full mid-level exception to sign free agents and round out their rosters. Zach Lowe of SI.com reports that a compromise was reached, leading to the deal agreed to early Saturday morning.

Under the compromise, teams over the salary cap can use the full mid-level exception -- worth a starting salary of $5 million and a maximum term of four years -- so long as it does not take the team more than $4 million above the luxury tax threshold (which is roughly 20 percent higher than the salary cap). If the mid-level would take the team over the tax line,, the team will not be allowed to re-sign its own free agents using Bird rights.

And then the world asked what was next.

Here’s an early reading on how things will shake out from here:

Among the myriad “minor issues” still to be negotiated as a part of the NBA lockout, the players and owners must decide whether to alter the draft age minimum. In the 2005 deal, the league implemented a requirement that players must be one year removed from high school and 19 years old to be eligible for the draft. It was been widely reported that the NBA sought to boost those requirements to two years out of high school and 20 years old in a new collective bargaining agreement.

But the lockout negotiations have largely dealt with economic and player movement issues, with none of what David Stern has called the “B-list items” able to make or break a deal. If the owners do implement a higher age minimum, they would likely concede another issue to the players in a bit of horse-trading.

The NBA lockout is over, opening the league for business (soon). With free agency slated to begin on December 9 and the regular season on December 25, that means that trade movement will be compressed, the volume will be turned up and everything will sound like twee.

Except in New Orleans and Orlando, of course, where the two biggest subjects of trade rumors currently play.

In the deal that ended the 2011 NBA Lockout, it was the league who conceded on several sticking points to get a handshake, reports Chris Sheridan.

We still don’t know exactly what happened to the dispute over use of the full mid-level exception for teams over the luxury tax line, which seemed to be one of the bigger sticking points in the final negotiations. The way the escrow mechanism will work is also still unknown.