Nba To Announce 9-year, $24 Billion Tv Deal With Espn, Turner

Good news, and this raises the salary cap right?

 

With all that money, they really need to improve the quality and features available with NBA league pass. It's such a disappointment every year after using NFL Sunday Ticket.

 

This will definitely increase the salary cap, by how much though remains to be seen.

 

My mind has been spinning in a lot of directions regarding the salary cap implications with this new TV deal. We thought we would have ample cap room for max money slots and now we possibly could have another 15+ million available. What a blessing this might be for us being that we are already projected to be under the lower cap!

That being said I am not one to put all my hopes on some open salary cap. As we have seen the last couple years, just because you have a max slot doesn't mean a max player wants to come play here! But I do feel like this puts us in a great position to add talent to our roster.

 

You have a point, but having 1-2 max slots versus 2-3 max slots in 2016 makes a huge difference. Easier to sign a 3rd guy when you have two studs already.

Regarding the deal very glad to see that they didn't try to split it 3-way between ESPN, Turner & Fox. I definitely want as much of Inside the NBA as I can possibly get.

 

Yup. You just cant replace those personalities

 

The new CBA can't renegotiated until 2016, right? And that in turn means that's when the salary cap will go up...if that's the case, I'd throw money at an RFA next year, maybe even Max money...the cap will go up in 2 years and what will be max money next year won't seem as bad with that new CBA is in place.

 

The nine-year, $24 billion broadcast and digital rights agreements that the NBA announced Monday put the sport in a new economic stratosphere. They also set the stage for a fascinating negotiation on how the massive windfall will change the dynamic when it is baked into the owner-player split in the coming years.

With TV and digital revenue more than tripling over the eight-year, $7.4 billion agreements that expire after the 2015-16 season, the financial landscape of the sport will be forever transformed. According to team executives who have crunched the numbers, the windfall could result in a $91.2 million salary cap in 2016-17 -- when LeBron James and Kevin Durant are due to be free agents. That's up from $63.065 million for this coming season and $58.679 million in 2013-14.

That's right, the cap jumped 7.5 percent for 2014-15, indicating that the league has been making more money that expected under the 2011 CBA even before the lucrative new TV deals were finalized.

Basketball-related income -- the revenue pie that determines player salaries -- could jump to $6.7 billion in '16-'17, league sources said. That's up from an estimated $4.5 billion this past season and a $4.7 billion projection for 2014-15.

Individual max contracts for players with 10 or more years of service would start at $28.2 million in 2016-17 based on these projections and calculations negotiated in the 2011 CBA. This explains why James signed a two-year deal with a player option for 2015-16 when he returned to the Cleveland Cavaliers as a free agent this past summer. James' current max deal pays him $20.64 million this season. Other prospective free agents such as Kevin Love, LaMarcus Aldridge and Marc Gasol are expected to take the same approach to maximize their earnings under the new TV deals.

"Our game has never been better," commissioner Adam Silver said in announcing the new agreements.

Quite a contrast from the rhetoric of the 2011 lockout, when Silver hammered the owners' talking points that the NBA could not continue to operate without a massive reduction in the players' share of revenue. The players' guaranteed share of BRI -- which totaled $3.8 billion in 2010-11 -- went from 57 percent under the previous collective bargaining agreement to a cap of 51 percent under the current labor deal.

"There's never been a better time to be an owner of an NBA team," said Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis, chairman of the owners' media committee.

Whether the NBA's ongoing financial windfall has been the direct result of the new economic system established in 2011 or is merely a sign that such dramatic reductions in the players' share wasn't necessary will depend, of course, on which side of that table you find yourself sitting. Both Silver and Leonsis dodged the question of whether all 30 teams are expected to be profitable by the time the owners and players can opt out of the current CBA in 2017.

"I'm sure both sides will be studying this new deal and seeking to assure that it remains a fair deal to both sides," Silver said.

Regardless, everyone will benefit from the NBA's success and lucrative new broadcast deals -- the players, the owners and everyone remotely involved with either side. But figuring out how to satisfy everyone, as usual, will be intensely complicated.

All of these calculations are merely estimates based on the additional revenues and current methods for calculating the salary cap, luxury tax levels and player salaries. League sources say the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association are expected to discuss a phasing in of the projected TV windfall starting in 2015-16. The future revenues would be applied in advance to avoid a massive, year-to-year spike in cap room and player salaries in 2016-17.

For example, if the NBA and union agreed to phase in $800 million of future TV and digital revenues into the 2015-16 BRI calculations, the cap for that season would jump to $75.8 million and would still increase dramatically in '16-'17 -- though the effects would be cushioned by the phase in.

Beyond that, the very formula by which player salaries are calculated -- for max players, mid-level players, rookies, etc. -- could be revisited in the next CBA given the massive inflow of revenues. For example, the new landscape could be a boon to a vocal component of the agent community that has long argued that capping individual player salaries for the league's biggest stars was a mistake.

If the NBA is worth nearly $2.7 billion annually to ABC, ESPN and Turner Sports, what is LeBron James worth? It's a very important discussion for another day -- such as July 1, 2017, when the owners and players could find themselves staring across the bargaining table at each other once again.

http://www.cbssports.com/nba/writer...-enters-new-stratosphere-with-massive-tv-deal