Two new trade rules in the new CBA

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Okay, we’ve already discussed the amnesty provision and the stretch exception, two new pieces of the NBA’s pending collective bargaining agreement.

Time to look a little further. Here are two cool things, especially for those of you who feast on player movement and possible trades.

1. It will be easier to make trades. Under the old labor agreement, the salaries of the traded players had to be within 125 percent (plus 100K) of each other. That will remain the case for taxpaying teams, but the new agreement also makes it muuuuch easier for non-tax teams to swing uneven trades. For those teams, it is 150 percent (plus 100K) of the salaries being traded, or the 100 percent of the salaries being traded plus $5 million. The limit on the amount of cash that can be included in a trade remains $3 million — but teams are now limited to trading $3 million in cash per season. So you can’t just dump $3 million into every trade as you could in the past.

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Heisler Column: Morning in Lakerdom: $150 mill profits, Dwight and CP3 too?

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LOS ANGELES — What was THAT about?

Chris Sheridan and I were both wrong on our predictions that the NBA would start on time (Chris), or by Dec. 1 (me).

On the other hand, actual events, which were always going to reveal the real deal, proved our basic premise:

The NBA was in far better shape than it claimed, citing $300 million annual losses, making a long work stoppage, as Spock used to say, most illogical (which in Vulcan can mean anything from foolish to out of their gourd).

I missed by 24 days, but David Stern, the sly fox, held one thing back. On the Sternian calendar, they can still play 66 games… as many as they would have starting Dec. 4 on the old schedule.

But enough about the bad old days…

*        *       *

It’s Showtime!

Or, at least, its latest incarnation hopes it still is, as a brilliant dawn rises once again over Lakerdom …

It’s not hard to tell who won this war–the owners, especially the big ones. Nor is it hard to tell which of them won the most:

That was Jerry Buss, the biggest of all.

When the NBA couldn’t get a full ban on sign-and-trades, it left his Lakers in position to pull off a coup they’re dreaming of, which would make signing LeBron James pale by comparison.

If Dwight Howard and Chris Paul wind up on the market — a safe assumption as far as I’m concerned — the Lakers could offer Andrew Bynum for Dwight and Pau Gasol for CP3, or vice versa.

Nothing says that they will be enough to land either player, but it should put the Lakers in the running for both.

(Oh, and Dwight likes the Lakers. Asked which All-Star he would most like to play with last season, he answered “Kobe Bryant.”)

Nor will finances be a problem, ever again.

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Stretch exception means bad contracts could proliferate under new CBA

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The hot topic right now in the NBA is the amnesty provision of the new collective bargaining agreement.

The next thing to take a closer look at is the stretch exception, which is a mechanism that is designed to give relief to teams that make mistakes once the new collective bargaining agreement goes into effect. (The stretch exception does NOT apply to contracts signed under the old CBA).

Here is the exact wording regarding the stretch exception from the memo that was sent to teams by the league office. Sam Amick of SI.com obtained a copy and posted it online.

“For new contracts, salary of waived players to be “stretched” for cash purposes such that the player’s remaining protected compensation would be paid over twice the number of remaining contract years plus 1 year.

“In lieu of the usual cap treatment, the waiving tam may elect to have the waived player’s salary follow the stretched cash allocation, except that stretching a waived player’s salary for cap purposes is not permitted where the portion of total team salary attributable to all waived players in any future season would exceed an agreed upon percentage of the salary cap in effect during the season in which a player is waived.”

That second paragraph basically means there will be limits to prevent teams from abusing the stretch exception.

But as a practical matter, what I see happening is teams overpaying for marginal players, knowing that they can dump a guy owed $10 million in the final year of his contract if it is only going to count as $3.33 million against the cap in the ensuing three years.

For example, let’s say there are two teams bidding for the services of Kris Humphries, who is a free agent in more ways than one. 

Team A is willing to give Humphries a three-year contract starting at $8 million. With 4.5 percent annual raises, Hump would have an offer of $25.08 million sitting on the table.

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Amnesty program includes secondary waivers

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And what, you may ask, is secondary waivers?

The details still need to be ironed out in “secondary negotiations” between lawyers from the league office and the, ahem, union, but there is going to be a bidding process for players released under the amnesty clause of the new collective bargaining agreement.

How will that bidding process work?

Something like this:

Let’s say the Orlando Magic decide to release Gilbert Arenas, who has $62 million remaining on his contract over the next three years, including $19.2 milion in the upcoming season.

Arenas would first be placed on waivers, and it is safe to say that nobody is going to claim that contract during the 48-hour waiver period. But Arenas would then be placed on “secondary waivers,” and teams will space below the salary cap would be allowed to place bids on him. If the Sacramento Kings, to use a random example, were willing to spend $6 million to acquire him, and no one else made a higher bid, then he would become the Kings’ property (and the money the Magic would have to pay him this season would be reduced by whatever Arenas’ new team is paying him.)

Remember, all teams now must spend a minimum of 85 percent of the cap (rising to 90 percent in Year 3 and beyond) , and the Kings are currently $17.5 million below the minimum. So this will give many of the under-the-cap teams (a group that also includes Denver, Indiana, New Jersey, Washington and New Orleans) to do some bargain hunting prior to the opening of training camps Dec. 9.

“That’s what the clause is in there for,” a party familiar with the impending process told Ira Winderman of the South-Florida Sun Sentinel. ‘It’s so the Lakers can’t go in and scoop up all the players.’

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Mitnick Column: What NBA Players Learned In Europe

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From FIBA-Europe

With 43 players currently under NBA contracts having suited up in Europe over the last three months, it has become apparent that the differences between NBA basketball and European basketball may be greater than many had thought beforehand. After almost the entire 2010 gold medal U.S. team at the World Championship went on to have career seasons after spending the summer playing in Europe, it appears that the European game has a number of things American players can learn that could help improve their NBA games.

Here are five things NBA players have learned about European basketball during the NBA lockout.

European basketball is a team game

To the casual fan, the NBA provides the most entertaining brand of basketball of any basketball league in the world, as the one-on-one style promoted by the NBA’s rules makes for a great number of exciting plays. With no hand checking, and a n0-charge circle in the paint, players like LeBron James and Dwayne Wade are able to provide several highlight reel dunks every game, and defenses are left with little ability to stop them. Since most NBA teams typically have two or three players who can dance their way to the basket, most teams run an offense that consists primarily of isolation plays and pick-and-rolls, giving two or three guys the majority of the touches on offense. This type of game makes top players get impressive stats, developing one or two “stars” on each team to help the league’s marketability.

In Europe, however, teams typically share the wealth in terms of overall production. Some of this may be attributed to the fact that the best players in the world play in the NBA, but, in general, this is due to the fact that European teams run very few isolation plays. Several players, such as Andrei Kirelenko, Danilo Gallinari, Nicolas Batum and Rudy Fernandez, fit right in with the European style as they get most of their offense through the flow of the game and don’t need the ball in their hands every play to be effective.

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