Since Saturday’s announcement of a tentative labor agreement between the NBA owners and players, details of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement have begun to surface. To save you from searching for the important details yourself and to hopefully reduce the number of CBA tweets that @LarryCoon has to respond to, I’ll list what I consider to be the five most significant points in this agreement, in terms of what you should care about as an NBA fan. These points are taken from this eight-page “Summary of Principal Deal Terms”, which you can view as a Google Doc.
1. The Amnesty Provision – Each team is permitted to waive one player prior to any season of the CBA (only for contracts in place at the inception of the CBA) and have 100 percent of the player’s salary removed from team salary for Cap and Tax purposes. A modified waiver process will be utilized for players waived pursuant to the Amnesty rule, under which teams with Room under the Cap can submit competing offers to assume some but not all of the player’s remaining contract. If a player’s contract is claimed in this manner, the remaining portion of the player’s salary will continue to be paid by the team that waived him.
What this means: Teams over the cap won’t be able to snatch up waived players with minimum contracts if another team with cap room bids on that player with a higher offer. You can safely assume that the Miami Heat are not a fan of this rule.
