Hoopinion: NBA Basketball Tentatively Coming Soon

[Hawksquawk]

There's a handshake deal in place for a labor agreement that would result in a 66-game season beginning on December 25th. Players and owners must still vote to approve the deal.

The players should vote for the deal because professional basketball careers are short and it's better to be paid under an owner-friendly CBA* than not paid at all. The owners should vote for the deal because they've won hundreds of millions of dollars, annually, from the players and because, by cramming 66 games into the schedule the quality of play may be sufficiently degraded to achieve some semblance of competitive balance.

*It remains a fair question as to whether the NBPA should have recognized their collective lack of leverage and the extreme hard-line positions of a sizable minority of owners and decertified the union far earlier in the process.

As the deal gets approved or not, as practical applications of the new CBA's provisions become clear and as free agency approaches on December 9th, the focus on team-specific concerns will return to this space, like the approaching season, in concentrated form.

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