NBA Lockout Officially Ends As Owners, Players Ratify Deal With Commanding Margins

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 players’ NBA lockout lawsuit has been settled by lawyers for each side, reports SI.com’s Zach Lowe. A set of players had filed anti-trust litigation against the league after the union disclaimed interest in representing players in collective bargaining. That lawsuit didn’t make much progress in the courts, but about 10 days after it was filed the players and league had negotiated a deal to end the lockout.

Next up: players need to authorize the union to negotiate on their behalf by returning signed authorization cards. Once that is complete, the union and league will hammer out the final details of the collective bargaining agreement and put it up for a ratification vote. If all of that happens on schedule, free agency will begin on December 9 as planned and the regular season will commence on December 25.

The NBA age limit is one of the more discussed topics when it comes to issues still not hashed out in the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, but the current plan seems to be that the league will stick with 19 for now. That doesn’t mean that other options aren’t being presented, however.

The NBA would like to extend the NBA’s age limit to only allow players who are out of their teens to play professional basketball in the best league in the world -- the NBA Development League’s age limit is still 18 -- but ESPN’s Ric Bucher reports that the Association will likely remain with the current rule for at least the next two years.

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.

During the 150-day NBA lockout, there were times when it really did start to look as though a season was never going to get played. Both sides seemed to be pretty dug in and neither seemed inclined to give. Perhaps filled by the Thanksgiving spirit a deal was finally struck on Nov. 26, meaning an abbreviated season will be played after all.

This news elicited a cacophony of responses from around SB Nation’s basketball blogs. Most of them were understandably very happy about this news, but at least a few of them couldn’t help but share some level of caution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wondering why there are no details yet from the deal that eventually ended the NBA lockout after 149 days? That’d be because the league and players are purposefully keeping them under wraps while lawyers from each side work out a settlement to the players’ anti-trust lawsuit against owners. At that point, the National Basketball Players Association will be reformed and the collective bargaining agreement will be ratified.

Somewhere in there, the details will spring out. We already know that players agreed to a revenue split centered on 50 percent -- that means that players’ aggregate salaries will be 50 percent of the league’s basketball-related income. In the old deal, that figure was 57 percent. The actual mechanics of how the split will be determined remains unknown; a 49-51 band has been discussed in the past, which would allow players to earn a bigger aggregate figure if the league’s revenue exceeds projections.

The NBA lockout is over, and no one is eager to do this again. The next labor stoppage could be determined by the length of the new collective bargaining agreement. As of now, that remains under wraps. We do, however, have some indications based on the previous set of negotiations as to where the endpoint will land.

The league had been pushing for a 10-year deal taking the league up to 2022. The belief is that with growing revenue and the expected windfall from a new national TV deal in 2016, the concessions won in this deal will allow the league to reach profitability soon and carry it through.

Yahoo!‘s Adrian Wojnarowski reports that Fisher has considered the issues, and will rejoin talks on Friday with the hopes of getting a deal done. Players filed antitrust lawsuits about 10 days ago. And already Fisher is willing to put the legal play in danger because he thinks that a) a deal can get done, and b) he needs to be there to get it done.

It’s an amazing leap of faith, really, to think that an NBA negotiating team that has dragged this lockout all the way past Thanksgiving will see reason this time. There have been threatening noises from the league (through predictable media channels) that without a deal to save the Christmas slate of games -- that’d mean a deal by the end of the weekend -- that the NBA would cancel the entire season. That’s lunacy. Christmas is nice, and 66 games sounds better than 50, or 44. But so long as the league can hold a season that allows for a full playoff schedule, a season will remain on the table. The playoffs are the true gold mine the NBA can’t easily abandon. We’ve seen what opening night means in the context of this stoppage (very little, as the league didn’t move too much to save it). We’ve seen what all of November means. Now we’re seeing what Christmas means; the act of negotiating itself lends some import to the slate of games, but until the league moves on the sticking points, it’s empty concern.

The NBA lockout negotiations are continuing through the weekend, with Players Association president Derek Fisher back in the fold, and many are once again predicting that the end of the work stoppage is near. The players have decided, though, that they want to see more changes before agreeing to a deal that would allow them to play basketball on Christmas.

Along with Fisher, the players will bring attorney Jeffrey Kessler -- either by phone or in-person, according to Sports Illustrated’s Zach Lowe -- and a handful of proposals that would allow them to feel more comfortable about accepting any sort of deal, according to ESPN’s Chris Broussard.

NBA lockout talks have restarted for what seems like the 2,000th time as the league tries to save its season in time to play games on Christmas. But the players’ side of the negotiating table has some new faces, reports Howard Beck of the New York Times.

Beck reported Wednesday that if a deal can be reached this weekend, a 66-game season would start December 25. That would result in the playoffs and NBA Finals being pushed back about a week; the Finals would then end in the third week of June at the latest, with the NBA Draft a week later, free agency beginning a week after that, and 2012 Olympics’ preparations beginning almost immediately for a number of the league’s players and coaches.

If an NBA lockout deal can be reached this week to preserve the league’s traditional Christmas slate, the 2011-12 will include 66 games per team, reports the New York Times’ Howard Beck.

NBA commissioner David Stern pitched a 72-game season starting on December 15 if players would accept the owners’ proposal a week ago. Instead, players held out over salary cap system issues, dissolved their union and filed anti-trust litigation.

David Stern is quietly surveying a number of owners to see whether there’s an appetite to concede limitations on the use of the full mid-level exception by luxury tax teams in a potential NBA lockout deal, reports ESPN’s Marc Stein. The league’s proposal to make a smaller mid-level exception available to taxpayers is one of the sticking points holding up a new collective bargaining agreement with players.

Multiple outlets, led by Yahoo! Sports and the New York Times, reported on Wednesday that the two sides are again talking about a potential deal. Reaching a handshake agreement by Friday would seem to allow enough time to handle the formalities, a free agency period and an abbreviated training camp before games slated for Christmas Day, December 25.

NBA lockout talks picked back up on Tuesday after an idle 10 days, reports Yahoo!‘s Adrian Wojnarowski. Representatives from the players’ side and league got together outside the view of the media on Tuesday and were expected to meet again Wednesday with hopes of reaching a deal before NBA commissioner David Stern was forced to kill the traditional Christmas Day slate of games.

Stern has said the league needs 30 days from handshake to tip-off, making Friday the apparent deadline to get a deal and preserve the Christmas schedule. The league has already cancelled games through December 15; there is little chance (if any) that there will be even 70 games per team on the schedule if a deal is reached this week.

A harder cap will probably not improve the league’s parity, but it will do something else, something the league could very well trumpet to gain fan support and media sympathy. Something that very obviously hurts just one group of actors in this whole thing, a group of actors no one would be surprised to learn the league was willing to hurt: the players.

There are a few facets to the league’s push for a pay-for-production paradigm.

In an open letter published by the New York Times, longtime director of the NBA Coaches Association Michael H. Goldberg pleas for the owners and players to re-open NBA lockout negotiations.

“The upcoming NBA season must be saved,” Goldberg wrote. “To do otherwise will cause a self-inflicted economic blow to an enterprise that over the years through the hard work of players, team owners and the League Office has become a great global brand, but, like every business operating in today’s fragile economic landscape, one that is more susceptible to ‘decline and fall.’”

Now that NBA players have filed multiple antitrust lawsuits against the NBA, commissioner David Stern has asked the owners to participate in a conference call on Thursday to discuss their next steps in the lockout, according to Yahoo! Sports.

The call had been scheduled earlier in the week by the NBA’s labor relations committee.