When he was first hired as an intern for the New Jersey Nets in 1996, Bobby Marks was tasked with ferrying new head coach John Calipari around the team’s home base of East Rutherford. After proving his mettle with such menial jobs, Marks told me, he was eventually given a different but no less innocuous assignment: spend time brushing up on the NBA’s collective-bargaining agreement.
Commonly referred to as the CBA, the multi-hundred-page document is the bible that governs all aspects of the league, legislating major topics such as how the owners and players divide the league’s revenue, and continuing down to outlining punishment for minor infractions. When Marks entered the league, NBA franchises were lean organizations by modern standards, and keeping abreast of every clause and bylaw within the CBA wasn’t necessarily an in-house responsibility. Before giving the job to Marks, the Nets had simply outsourced this work to a law firm, he told me.
This scholarship would prove fortuitous when Marks, who eventually rose to the position of assistant general manager, left the Nets in 2015. He began posting regularly about basketball on X (then Twitter), leveraging his insider expertise to amass a small following, and worked his way up to a job discussing the NBA for ESPN, the largest sports-media organization in the world. Today, Marks’s face and voice are ubiquitous across the company’s coverage of the NBA. Where he once translated the financial intricacies of the NBA for executives inside the league, he now does so for those outside it. Marks is something of a pioneer, but he is far from alone—mainstream NBA analysis is now awash in breakdowns of how teams are handling their finances while maneuvering around the CBA’s gargantuan number of legal technicalities.
Why, exactly, does the basketball-adoring public need to hear from analysts whose specialty could reasonably be described as a form of code breaking? The easiest answer is that over the course of the past decade, NBA fandom has become strangely complicated. Closely following the sport now requires fans to have a passing knowledge of a 676-page labor agreement, an expansive vocabulary of business jargon, and a deep memory bank of contractual concepts. You can still enjoy the league passively, happily tuning in to big games and catching up on highlights through social media. But to love the NBA these days is to be drawn into a world where such simplicities, upon which sports fandom was founded, have begun to disappear.
To explain why a labor document has a stranglehold on the NBA, you would need to travel back to July 4, 2016, when Kevin Durant, one of the biggest names in the sport, announced that he was leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder and signing with the Golden State Warriors. This type of high-profile defection had happened before, in 2010, when LeBron James infamously left the Cleveland Cavaliers for “South Beach” (in actuality, the Miami Heat). But Durant’s switch went a step further. Unlike LeBron’s team in Cleveland, Durant’s Oklahoma City teammates were a group of young stars on the rise—and the Warriors were a loaded unit that, the season before Durant joined them, had won a record-breaking 73 games. Suddenly, the deck had been stacked in favor of one franchise, leaving fans across the country feeling like something was existentially wrong with pro basketball.
Whereas scorned supporters could protest Durant’s decision only by lighting his jersey on fire, the league’s owners were able to fight back as they and the players’ union renegotiated the CBA later in 2016. (Like many collective-bargaining agreements, the NBA’s is ratified for multiyear periods, and must be renegotiated before the current contract’s expiration.) The owners’ main goal was to ensure that if a team like the Thunder did end up drafting a player like Durant, they would have a built-in advantage when trying to keep him. In order to do this, they instituted a clause colloquially referred to as the “supermax,” which allows teams to offer a select number of their own players more money than their competitors. Because these deals can be signed years before a player’s current contract expires, this meant that nearly all of the NBA’s best players were taken off the open market.
Instead, when attempting to acquire a household name, teams now must typically resort to trading for one. This can become a problem because the NBA employs a draconian set of rules surrounding trades, often turning the process of swapping a few players into the equivalent of sorting out a 1,000-piece puzzle set strewn across a table. The league does not allow a team to trade its first-round draft pick—which provides access to the most talented amateur players in a given year—in consecutive seasons. Modern-day franchises have figured out how to get around this stipulation by resorting to something called “pick swaps,” which allow a team to exchange its own pick with that of a team that ends up having a better one on draft night. Over time, teams have graduated to the practice of swapping swaps, essentially passing around the potential rights to possible future picks among one another. Chains of custody—simply knowing which teams control which draft picks—have become nearly impossible to follow.
In July, for instance, the Brooklyn Nets completed a trade with the rival New York Knicks that was nominally about sending the star forward Mikal Bridges across town. But the trade had a secondary function for the Nets, in that it also allowed them to reacquire draft picks and draft swaps they had previously traded to the Houston Rockets. At The Athletic, the veteran writer John Hollinger, who previously worked as the vice president of basketball operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, could go only so far when dissecting the trade; his breakdown brought to mind crisscrossed threads connecting photos and Post-its plastered all over a police evidence board. “The Rockets exchanged a 2025 pick swap with the Nets for a more complicated (and less alluring, I should say) pick swap that likely will let them swap Oklahoma City’s 2025 first (which they already own) for Phoenix’s,” he wrote. After noting this “swap of swaps,” Hollinger asked his readers, in a parenthetical, “You following this?”—a rhetorical question, one assumes, because the one possible answer is “Well, not really.”
Such analysis, if you do want to know the context of why important moves in the NBA are being made, is vital. But it also carries a distinct air of absurdity, trapping the reader inside a hall of mirrors.
At ESPN, it is Marks’s job to play navigator not just for the network’s audience, but also for its journalists. One of his duties includes maintaining a spreadsheet with crucial information on each NBA franchise, such as an accounting of player salaries spanning current and future years, and which draft picks are owned by—and owed to—each team. Marks compiles the document by talking to his contacts across the league; his sourcing is so strong, he told me, that he regularly publicizes information on contracts and trades before some teams become aware of what their competitors are up to.
“I’m able to have access to information that maybe other people don’t have,” he told me. “There’s some teams that say, I have somebody who works in our front office, who basically collects all of your tweets and your information, and we have a meeting about it.” He compared his position to an election analyst, someone like NBC’s Steve Kornacki. During hectic times of the NBA schedule—such as the beginning of the offseason, when players are first changing teams—Marks often appears on ESPN in front of a large touch screen, drilling down on a team’s balance sheet in the same way Kornacki might with a Wisconsin swing district.
Some on this beat, such as the ESPN reporter Tim Bontemps, believe that the broader landscape may be different in the new few years. In an interview, Bontemps stressed to me the degree to which the coronavirus pandemic affected team finances. Nearly all NBA contracts are based on built-in, year-to-year raises for players. This structure is meant to mirror the upward movement of the salary cap, which determines how much teams can spend before incurring financial penalties. The league’s revenue typically rises every year—and the salary cap, by design, increases along with it. But the pandemic halted this gravy train: ESPN has cited sources saying that the league lost more than $1 billion in the 2019–20 season, which depressed the salary cap in the following years. This meant that teams were paying their players more than they had been, while also having less money available to improve their rosters.
This untimely convergence of the pandemic with the latent desire, on the behalf of team owners, to crimp the flow of player movement around the league has “created a world where there hasn’t been a lot of free agency,” Bontemps told me. The question of whether cash flowing back into team coffers will act as a league-wide decongestant will “be one of the bigger long-term questions to watch” over the next few years. If free agency again becomes a viable method for players to move around the league, teams would be able to improve their rosters without resorting to the elaborate, and often desperate, machinations we’ve seen in recent headline trades.
In the short term, though, the NBA may only get more mystifying for fans, who are now watching star players be shuffled around the league because owners are afraid of their hefty longterm salaries. The latest CBA, ratified last April, features even tighter trade restrictions and its harshest-ever penalties for the biggest-spending teams, including the dreaded “second aprons” that have already started distorting the motivations of the NBA’s best teams. The Minnesota Timberwolves, coming off their best season in decades, traded Karl-Anthony Towns—a homegrown star they’d signed to a supermax in 2022—because his contract was suddenly going to become onerously expensive. The Dallas Mavericks recently shocked the sporting world by trading Luka Dončić, widely agreed to be one of the best young players the NBA has ever seen, in large part because of a belief that his poor conditioning made an impending $345 million contract extension untenable for the franchise. Bontemps was one of several commentators who pointed out that trading a player of Dončić’s caliber, in his mid-20s, mostly because of future financial concerns, had never happened in league history.
The NBA is far from the only sports league where owners are pressing their teams to do more with less. The concept of Moneyball—cribbed from Michael Lewis’s best seller about the cash-strapped and efficiency-obsessed Oakland A’s—has long since permeated pro sports. Still, the problem may be most acute when it comes to the modern NBA, which is nearing the end of a golden age fueled by megawatt personalities such as James, Durant, and Steph Curry. Winning teams with marketable stars are what captures the public’s imagination, yet the league is unintentionally kneecapping successful, and thus expensive, teams. It is doing so while engaged in an unprecedented fight for attention among not just competitor sports, but also emergent entertainment across various streaming platforms: not just TV shows and movies, but live sporting events like the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight. As the NBA fights this battle, it’s hard to stomach the notion that a player such as the Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards, one of basketball’s brightest young players, must stand by and watch his team be made worse purely for preemptive financial reasons.
Some journalists appear to be concerned, at least on behalf of the sport’s fans. Last summer, at a press conference in Las Vegas, league commissioner Adam Silver was asked whether the new CBA, with all its attendant jargon, was making the league too difficult for the layman to follow. “Life is complicated, and the systems become inherently more complicated,” he said. “But we’re paying a lot of attention to it, and we’ll see.”
Sports fans seeking fewer complications in their life may choose to seek more easily digestible fun elsewhere. On a November episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Kirk Goldsberry, an NBA analyst at The Ringer who also spent years working for the San Antonio Spurs, lamented the CBA’s role in the Wolves’ trading of Towns, referring to the labor agreement as “the boring character” we’re stuck with in the ongoing “saga” that is the NBA. This character has always affected the league, but it is now hogging the spotlight, nudging established stars to the side of the stage. The question now is how long fans must wait until it’s put back in its rightful place: behind the curtain, unseen and unheard.
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