LAS VEGAS — The second apron has swiftly changed the shape of the NBA. It has forced champions to break up in the blink of an eye and even convinced stars to take hometown discounts.
Depending on who is asked, its impact ranges from improving the league to eroding the NBA at its core. The National Basketball Players Association’s new leadership says it’s time for a change, even if it’s just a small tweak. But commissioner Adam Silver pushed back Tuesday.
“One person’s tweak is another person’s overhaul to the system,” Silver said at a news conference following the league’s board of governors meeting in Las Vegas.
At his introductory news conference last week, NBPA executive director David Kelly kicked off his tenure with conviction, laying the groundwork for a campaign against the second apron as it was constructed under the current CBA.
“I think it needs to be addressed,” Kelly said Friday. “Depends on whether or not the league feels it needs to be addressed and they feel the same sort of pressure that it needs to be addressed that they felt around the draft because of the tanking issue. We will come with our ideas, and there often are midterm negotiations in which things get tweaked. If we can get some tweaks, that would be fantastic.”
But when his counterpart was asked about coming back to the negotiating table over the second apron during this CBA, Silver was not interested.
“I think at the time we sit down to negotiate the new collective bargaining agreement, there will be things that the players will want and, as usual, there will be things that the teams want,” Silver said. “And, once again, we’ll look at all those issues in totality and see what makes the most sense. But, as I always have, we’ll begin by stating our objectives. Our objective here is to have a system financially that makes sense for the league and fairly rewards the players.”
Silver reiterated that the second apron was put into place to ensure that the playing field was level regardless of ownership’s ability to spend big. Introduced in the 2023 CBA, it is a payroll threshold (about $222 million this season) that comes with a slew of drastic short- and long-term roster-building restrictions. It eliminates many free-agency exceptions, constrains trade flexibility and handcuffs draft picks far into the future. It is essentially designed to give teams two years to send the payroll high into the second apron territory before making moves to get out of it.
It is forcing teams to be more prudent with their contract decisions, especially with who gets max deals. When the designated rookie and veteran supermax extensions were first introduced, they were designed to give teams an advantage in retaining their players by paying them more. But in a league where All-Stars always push for the max, the supermax is having the opposite effect in some situations.
The second apron is forcing teams to be even more judicious with handing out max contracts, particularly as the league has shifted from hunting star trios to building depth around an elite player. One potential amendment to the second apron is to have max players who meet the supermax criteria still only count for the standard max (25 percent for rookie extensions, 30 percent for veteran extensions), which Kelly supported as a tweak to renegotiate in the near term. But Silver was not open to renegotiating early.
“We actually think that makes sense around certain issues around the second apron, whether it’s drafted players, whether it’s a Bird exception for certain players,” Kelly said. “The ability to keep teams together, I think, will help fan interest and will still allow for player movement, but allow players to have the decision of staying where they want to stay.”
Two players are shaping the discourse around the second apron during summer league. On one hand, Jaylen Brown was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers weeks before he became eligible to sign a two-year extension worth over $140 million with the Boston Celtics. Brad Stevens, the Celtics president of basketball operations, said the trade was made in part because he did not want to build Boston’s roster around two players making 70 percent of the cap.
“I think we have to negotiate better exceptions to that second apron and soften that apron that would allow teams to be able to dip over in certain circumstances for a player like Jaylen Brown,” Kelly said.
Why did the Celtics trade Jaylen Brown?
Jay King and Jeshua Kidd
Then there is Victor Wembanyama, who took the rare step of passing on the supermax rookie extension at 30 percent of the cap for just the regular 25 percent max. That will help the Spurs give potential max extensions to Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper in the coming years without compromising their depth.
“Our position would be that the system should not require a player to carry all that burden,” Kelly said. “It should not put a player in a position where he has to carry the burden in order to keep a team together. A system that does that, we have a problem.”
Kelly made it clear he felt it was a problem that the second apron caused teams like the 2024 Celtics championship squad to be rapidly disassembled. Though the Celtics’ teardown seems to fall in line with the expectations of the second apron system — they built a star-studded, veteran core and had to move on before they aged out — Kelly would like to see some changes to the system well ahead of the Oct. 15, 2028, deadline to opt out of the CBA.
But Silver cited that as an example of why he feels the current CBA is fair.
“The system’s not perfect, far from it. There’s always things that both sides want,” Silver said. “But I just think my reaction when I hear some of these reports is to take one narrow issue to me and say, ‘Can we just change that one issue?’ Having lived through multiple collective bargaining agreements, it’s always … a series of compromises.
“There would probably be something wrong with the agreement if one side said, ‘I got everything I wanted.’ You almost know by definition you’ve done a good job when your side is saying, ‘I wish you could have done better on those issues.’ The other side is going, ‘We wish we had done better on those.’”
The NBA is experiencing unprecedented parity year-over-year. Kelly pointed out that the record streak of eight straight seasons with a new champion started well before the new CBA. Playstyle evolution, shooting volatility and injuries have created so much turnover that no team has even made consecutive NBA Finals in this decade.
The second apron is making a substantial impact, but it is far from the only variable strengthening parity. Kelly and the new NBPA president, Houston Rockets guard Fred VanVleet, spent plenty of time Friday making the point that they saw the Brown trade as an example of how these restrictions are hurting the fans as well.
Players like Brown getting moved in their primes because their teams didn’t think the price could work long-term is not novel, and part of the adjustment to this CBA will come from star players accepting they may not be worth quite the max in their 30s anymore.
“Putting aside their disappointment on that one issue, if you look at the system in totality, it’s generating an enormous amount of money for the players and creating true competition,” Silver said. “Competition at a level we’ve never had in the history of this league, and the proof is in the pudding.”