NBA Lockout Continues, Owners Insist on Hard Salary Cap

The NBA lockout has just entered its 82nd day, and there has still been no movement toward a new collective bargaining agreement. That could seriously affect the NBA training camps, which were supposed to get started during the first week of October.

According to ESPN, there will be a small meeting between the two sides, potentially leading to further negotiations. Those in attendance will be NBA commissioner David Stern, Adam Silver (deputy commissioner), Spurs owner Peter Holt (head of owner's committee), players' union chief Billy Hunter, and union president Derek Fisher. There will also be a handful of lawyers and economists for both sides, with the hope being that some kind of movement takes place in this stalemate.

ESPN also reported that one of the biggest hurdles to get over in these negations is a hard cap. With a hard salary cap, teams are allowed to spend only a specific amount on salaries each season. An example would be if the hard cap were set at $60 million, then every team would have to spend less than that amount. Currently the NBA has a soft cap, meaning teams are supposed to stay around the maximum number. If a team spends more than the salary cap, it is forced to pay a luxury tax of $1 for every dollar spent that exceeds the cap.

This is a situation where the owners are trying to fix a system that was broken by overpaying for role players. Many teams now have salaries that are higher than the revenues coming in to the team, and that just doesn't work in the economics of basketball. When the salary cap is around $60 million and the Los Angeles Lakers are spending $91 million on salaries, there is something that needs to be addressed.

With the NFL season in full swing, many sports fans now have the choice of caring about yet another lockout or simply sitting down to watch some football. This is why the players aren't going to find much sympathy during this work stoppage, even though it is the owners who have decided the current method of paying players doesn't work. Asking the players to take a huge pay cut might seem understandable to those who don't make millions, but there probably aren't many average Americans in the work place who would take kindly to a cut of their own pay.

If the players aren't willing to accept a hard cap and the owners are going to force it upon the league, then it seems like a situation that could lead to canceled games very soon.