Source: Lachlan Cunningham / Getty
Late Saturday night, NBA insider and ESPN staffer Adrian Wojnarowski announced that the league and the National Basketball Players Association reached an agreement on a new seven-year collective bargaining agreement.
Within the new deal is a mid-season tournament and a $17.5 million salary cap that makes rounding out rosters a bit tougher.
However, the most fan-positive negotiated bullet point is that players will have to appear in at least 65 games to be eligible for the top individual awards, such as Most Valuable Player and All-NBA teams.
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That means that the load management era will look a lot different if players are vying for some regular-season hardware.
NBA
commissioner Adam Silver has been pining for players to appear in more games or lessen the number of games.
“It’s something that I don’t think we’re approaching in an adversarial way with the players association,”
Silver said during his annual news conference amid All-Star weekend. “We’re working collectively, together with our doctors, our data scientists, and trying to see if there’s an optimal way for player performance. If it means at some point we conclude that we’re better off elongating the schedule … that’s worth looking at. If we thought it made sense to reduce the number of games we would.”
While players might have to participate in more games, the new labor agreement did rule in their favor in one specific way; marijuana.
According to
The Athletic, weed will be removed from the NBA’s drug testing programs, and players will no longer be penalized for its use. The NBA previously discontinued random marijuana testing in 2021 amid
COVID-19, but now it’s gone for good.
See how Twitter is reacting to the game-playing minimum and marijuana approval — which starts with the 2023-24 season– below.
