On Sirius XM radio this week, the NBA’s king pundit made a prediction: The league’s owners will force players to make major concessions in the next collective bargaining agreement.
“I cannot wait for the owners to put their foot in (players’) a***s in the next CBA,” Charles Barkley said. “These dudes are going to do something to these players. They are going to be like, ‘You can’t make $50 million and not play half the season. Now you are just slapping me in my face, taking my check twice a month.’”
The current CBA expires at the end of this season. In December, ESPN reported owners and players agreed to push back the deadline each side has to give notice of plans to opt out of the agreement. The general feeling is that negotiations have not gotten contentious, and that a prolonged lockout can be avoided despite the simmering issue Barkley broached: players’ unavailability.
Last season, players who averaged at least 20 points per game combined to miss an average of 21 games. In 2010-11, the group of players who were 20-points-per-game-scorers combined to miss an average of just six games. What that data point indicates is that marquee players now are not suiting up as frequently as they did in the not-so-distant past.
This issue has acutely affected the Pelicans, whose pair of All-Star forwards, Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram, have combined to miss 162 games since the 2021-22 campaign began. On Wednesday, Ingram returned after missing 29 games with a left toe contusion, an extended absence that caused frustration within the Pelicans organization.
The number of games the league’s best players miss is a real issue. Yet commissioner Adam Silver has talked about adding a midseason tournament while keeping the number of regular-season games at 82. And at this point, there are no signs of friction between players and owners as they begin to discuss how to divvy up the NBA’s basketball -related income.
The money faucet the two sides drink from is only going to open up more. The NBA is in the middle of a nine-year national broadcasting rights deal with TNT and ESPN worth $24 billion, or $2.6 billion a year. With that set to expire at the end of the 2024-25 season, the NBA could get double that in its next television deal, multiple outlets have reported. Even if the NBA’s regular-season product has been watered down by player absences, it doesn’t seem that it will be detrimental in the upcoming national rights deal. So what reason is there to make waves?
“The league is absolutely in a good place,” CJ McCollum, the president of the NBA Players Association, said in December. “I think they announced we got an extension. So we’ll be able to put things on hold and talk through things and not worry about issues or stoppage this season.”
Barkley is right that the amount of games players are missing is an issue that cannot be ignored. He doesn’t seem correct in his assertion that it will cause an extended lockout, however.
“I see guys, they have a sore hip,” Barkley said. “I’m like, ‘Everybody is sore after 20, 30, 40 games.’ But I think it’s going to be interesting in the next CBA. Billionaires always win against millionaires. I think there’s going to be a strike or a lockout — however you want to phrase it. But I think (owners) are going to say, ‘OK, you guys don’t want to play. I’m going to teach y’all a lesson. We still paid y’all during the pandemic. There was nobody in the stands and we still paid y’all. And this is how y’all repay us? Making all this money and not wanting to play.’”
Ingram, by the way, was one of the players who dealt with a sore hip last season. He missed seven straight games with a hip contusion.
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