The NBA avoided another lockout. Here are 7 reasons why.

The NBA and its players’ union have a new collective bargaining agreement. This means that the league will avoid yet another lockout, pending the ratification of the new CBA.

Many (including yours truly) feared that very scenario. Instead, the two sides came together early and achieved labor harmony well before the current deal expired.

How? Here are some theories.

The former commissioner was ruthlessly successful in achieving his goals for the NBA. He was also acerbic. That personality trait became more evident as he aged, but it was there all along, and Stern ran the NBA for 30 years. That’s a long time, and it’s incredibly difficult to prevent at least some calcification when the boss has that much tenure.

The fact that the NBA and union had the smoothest labor negotiation in at least two decades in the first labor negotiation after Stern’s retirement is ... interesting.

Did Stern’s deep-seated (and usually accurate) belief that he knew what the NBA needed prevent easy compromise? Did his rough talk with those he considered inferior entrench the other side? I’m reminded of the point during the heated 2011 talks when Dwyane Wade reportedly told Stern to stop talking to him as if he was a child. How many incidents like that went unreported over previous negotiations?

It’s not just Stern.

Billy Hunter led the players’ union since 1996. He was a co-star of all that labor drama in 1998, 2005, and 2011. Hunter had a pretty incredible resume before taking over the players’ union — he’d been an NFL wide receiver and a federal prosecutor.

But history won’t look kindly on Hunter’s legacy at the union. The players lost money and power in every labor deal he negotiated. By the end of his tenure, he’d been accused of mismanagement and nepotism. The players fired him with a unanimous vote.

By most accounts, the players’ union was a mess for a long time under Hunter. A leadership vacuum allowed player agents to confuse the message, and Hunter’s inability to recruit top-flight players to the cause hurt the union’s ability to scare the league and pull public sympathy.

Hunter clearly did not work well with the elected president of the union, Derek Fisher, during the last negotiation. How do we know? Hunter leaked a conspiracy that Fisher was in cahoots with the league while negotiations were ongoing. Fisher led the charge to can Hunter after the lockout ended, and then Hunter sued Fisher and the union.

Clearly, a fresh start was needed. Hunter’s dismissal had a positive effect on relationships within the union and likely helped the league feel more comfortable dealing with the players’ association, even if Hunter’s replacement was just as fierce as he’d been.

There was real and obvious animosity between Stern and Hunter, between Stern and some players, between Hunter and some players. Their removal from the process helps.

Adam Silver is arguably the most popular sports commissioner in America. The NFL’s Roger Goodell is a walking receptacle of inbound hate, the NHL’s Gary Bettman is cursed by lockout taint, MLB’s Rob Manfred is new and frankly rather anonymous, and the NCAA’s Mark Emmert is forever weighed down by the sins of faux-amateurism.

Silver, meanwhile, solved the explosive Donald Sterling situation deftly (with some help from the Clippers’ players and corporate America) and has generally stayed away from controversy elsewhere. The handling of athlete protest hasn’t always been smooth, but the biggest hiccups came from the WNBA, and they were resolved.

Lockout hawks have been turned off by some of Silver’s financial claims, and those of us who consider the age minimum abominable continue to find room for disagreement. But ask the average fan, the average team owner, and the average player about him, and you’ll find that Silver is pretty popular.

Do you know what is not popular? Canceling sports.

The NBA is clearly not in dire need of a drastic financial makeover. There don’t appear to be NBA owners beating down Silver’s door demanding a bigger revenue cut, and the players aren’t pushing hard for a greater split. With relatively little at stake (as much as that can be said for a $6 billion industry), there’s no upside to taking this to the brink.

When Roberts took over the union in 2014, she came in with fire. She railed against the age minimum and maximum salaries, while warning doubters not to test her will. This all led to the impression that she would fight tooth and nail to claw back some of what the players have lost over the years.

Instead, she listened to the players, she cleaned up the union infrastructure, and she found common ground with the NBA. She worked with Silver on the protest issue to try to keep some semblance of peace (you might not consider this a plus.) Under her stewardship, Roberts has been able to get the top players in the league involved in the union without turning the whole thing over to the superstars and their agents.

The union has done some really cool things, including offering up health benefits to retired players. Roberts has also reportedly held the league accountable by finding some places where portions of basketball-related income — money that is supposed to be split between teams and players — was not being accounted.

Many feared Roberts’s arrival would trigger a new era of war between the league and players’ union. It’s been the opposite. Silver and Roberts are building a smart, trusting relationship, which can only benefit the NBA and its players for years to come.

LeBron James is in the No. 2 position of power within the union, behind Chris Paul. It has been well-established that were it not for the individual maximum salary, he’d be worth at least $50 million per season, if not more. Instead, James makes $30 million a year, and before this season’s cap boom, his salary was closer to $22 million. LeBron would see a direct financial windfall if the individual max were abolished. Fellow union leaders Paul, Steph Curry, and Carmelo Anthony would likely also see benefits from a removal of the individual max.

But apparently the union hasn’t fought the individual max as much as expected. Those veteran stars will be able to cash in again with the new CBA raising the age threshold for long-term max deals from 36 to 38 years of age. Otherwise, the individual max remains largely the same.

What the individual max does is ensure there is a robust, well-paid middle class in the NBA. The individual max keeps the average NBA salary high (in the neighborhood of $7 million annually) and boosts the share of players making $10 million or more per year.

This was always Hunter’s gambit: he was the executive director who would serve the majority of players who aren’t LeBron, CP3, or Steph. They are the Derek Fishers and Roger Masons. Hunter groomed those players to take leadership roles, and ushered in NBA policy wins that limited what stars could make, knowing that money would be distributed among lesser players due to the revenue split.

Roberts has brought stars into leadership roles. But she hasn’t pushed them toward self-interested battle lines and they haven’t really gone there. Had killing the individual max been on the union’s agenda, we could be hurtling towards a lockout. That we aren’t is a credit to the superstars in union leadership positions, and to Roberts’ smart stewardship of those star leaders.

Seriously, why ruin a good thing? NBA ratings are booming, revenue is soaring, the league is without major scandal, there’s an ascendant class of exciting young stars, and the sport is at the center of the cultural zeitgeist. There is some evidence that the NBA is actually making up ground on the NFL. A lockout would have ruined all of that.

There are real issues at stake when any union bargains with management, and those can’t be given short shrift. But when everyone comes in excited for the future and feeling positive about where things are headed, the negotiations take on a different tone.

This is different than 2011, when the recession coupled with structural league issues made things seem more bleak than they necessarily were. Some owners were hurting due to non-NBA issues, and weren’t in the mood to hold the status quo. The recovery has been slower than some would like, but it is a recovery, and it’s been particularly good to the wealthy. A labor negotiation can be just like presidential elections where fundamentals affect moods and decision-making. Financially, things are better now than they were six years ago.

Silver, Roberts, the owners, and the players know the NBA is on the upswing. Reaching greater heights will be more lucrative for everyone. They all made an implicit pact not to ruin that.

There’s truth in all of these theories, no doubt, but this is the crux of the issue. There is so much money in the NBA right now, and no one is asking for more of it. That makes this all much easier.

Do you know why we had a lockout in 2011? Because the owners were demanding the players fork over at least $300 million in collective salary per year. Of course the players fought! The owners knew they could win some amount because of their structural power advantage in a labor stoppage. They knew that because they leveraged that structural power advantage to win one-sided concessions in 1998 and 2005.

(In 2005, the owners only went to the brink of a longer lockout before reaching a one-sided deal that admittedly didn’t go as far as the 1998 or 2011 deals).

The NBA famously experienced a massive revenue boom due to a new national television broadcast deal in 2016. That new deal added $28 million to each team’s bottom line and boosted combined player salaries by roughly $835 million per season. If that increase were spread evenly over the roughly 450 NBA players, it’d mean about $2 million a year.

After winning $300 million per season in player salary concessions in 2011 and taking a net boost of $835 million per season due to the new TV deal, the league decided not to push for more player concessions. After seeing non-All-Stars sign for $30 million in the summer, players decided not to attempt to claw back some of the revenue split lost in 2011.

The NBA and players’ union decided the money they are getting right now is enough, and that a fight for more just wasn’t worth it. It may really be that simple.