Top officials from the NBA and the players' union will meet Monday for the first time since the league's owners instituted a lockout on July 1. Derek Fisher, Los Angeles Lakers point guard and the president of the union, told reporters at his youth camp on Friday that he hopes the sides will put off the great economic battle for now and focus on other issues that need to be worked out to get a new collective bargaining agreement in place.
NBA Lockout Bargaining Sessions On Monday Could Focus On Non-Economic Items
“I don’t know if there’s going to be any major movement on Monday,” Fisher said Friday outside of his camp at Roybal Learning Center. “I think we’ve agreed maybe to table some of the economic issues and really focus on the system issues and non-economic items that are still extremely important to rounding out a collective bargaining agreement. Hopefully we can get some of those things done on Monday.”
Of course, everything comes back to the economics: negotiating the firmness of the salary cap means little without some discussion about how high that cap will be and how it will be determined. Contract length is an issue that could be discussed without getting into revenue-expense talk, as well as bumping up the age minimum and restructuring roster size (which the union will always be in favor of increasing).
See More:
