With professional basketball’s schedule paralyzed by the novel coronavirus pandemic, the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association agreed to a plan that will see 25 percent of each player’s remaining 2019-20 paychecks withheld during the league’s shutdown.
Most NBA players receive their salaries every two weeks on a 12-month cycle, even though the season typically runs from October through April with a postseason that runs from April through June. Before the agreement, players were continuing to receive their standard payments even though Commissioner Adam Silver suspended the season March 11.
Silver said Friday that the NBA has not formulated a return-to-play timeline, that it has not decided on a cutoff date for deciding whether to resume the season and that it has not “seriously engaged” in so-called “bubble” scenarios that would allow the NBA to hold games at a single-site location.
“It’s about the data and not the date,” Silver said on a conference call following the league’s annual Board of Governors meeting. “There’s too much unknown to set a timeline. There is no appetite [among owners] to compromise the well-being of our players. In terms of priorities, you begin with safety. We’re not at a point yet where we have a clear protocol and a path forward where we feel like we can sit down with the players and say we can resume the season. Human life trumps anything else you could possibly be talking about.”
The NBA will monitor new coronavirus case counts, the widespread availability of testing, the possibility of a vaccine and guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state governments as it proceeds with determining when it is safe to resume play.
Officially canceling the games would trigger the “force majeure” clause of the collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players, which would cause players to forfeit a percentage of their salaries based on how many games were lost in the event of a major disaster, such as a pandemic. The average NBA team completed 65 of 82 games this season. In a joint statement Friday, the NBA and NBPA said the new agreement will “provide players with a more gradual salary reduction schedule” to smooth the potential effect of lost wages.
Collectively, player salaries totaled more than $3.7 billion for the 2019-20 season, according to Basketball-Reference.com. The NBA’s salary cap was set at a record $109.1 million per team this season.
The cost-cutting move comes three weeks after Silver announced that he, Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum and dozens of the league’s top-earning executives would have their salaries reduced by 20 percent.
“These are unprecedented times, and like other companies across all industries, we need to take short-term steps to deal with the harsh economic impact on our business and organization,” an NBA spokesman said at the time.
Financial fallout from the pandemic has touched multiple NBA teams. The Utah Jazz announced layoffs this month, while Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta furloughed 40,000 employees in his casino and restaurant businesses.
Silver announced in February that strained relations with China following comments about Hong Kong by Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey in October had cost the NBA up to $400 million in revenue, and the NBA is facing a potential $1 billion revenue hit if the rest of this season and the playoffs cannot be salvaged. The league sought to nearly double its credit line in March from $550 million to $1.2 billion in response to the pandemic, and Silver said the NBA and its teams are responsible for 55,000 jobs, including arena workers and other personnel.
“Our revenue has essentially dropped to zero, which is having a huge impact on our team business and arena business,” Silver said. “There’s a strong recognition [among owners] that there are thousands of jobs impacted by the NBA, not just the ones the fans see. While this virus is a dire public health issue, so is shutting down the economy. I think that’s why the league sees it as our obligation, to the extent we can resume play in a safe way, to look at every potential way of doing so.”
