The scale of the cases involving James Harden in Houston and Ben Simmons in Philadelphia is set to set a legal precedent. In December 2022, the NBA and the Players Association must sit down to sign the renewal of the collective agreement that unites them. During it, the future television contract that the League would sign for 2025 and which is rumored to report 8,000 million dollars annually will surely occupy the foreground. But on the list of priorities, transfer requests occupy the indisputable second place.
Organizations’ concern in this regard has soared in recent times. The managers claim to the NBA leadership that the maximum extensions to rookies, designed to ensure the retention of superlative young talent, were not bearing the expected results. Ben Simmons signed his in 2019 and has assertively claimed his transfer just one year after it became effective. This and other examples have led some managers to say that “these guys sign the super maximum and are asking for the transfer the next day,” according to report Jake Fischer para Bleacher Report.
Obviously, the vehemence shown by Simmons in refusing any ties to the team is not the norm. His attitude allows the Sixers to have been able to deprive him of part of his salary, but the common thing is that the player who asks for the transfer does not suffer any penalty for it. Which could change in the short term. Usually, the Players Association has always advocated granting greater freedom of negotiation to its members, but the normalization of transfer requests points to a new regulatory regulation.
Those implicated in the article suggest very different figures. Some defend a subtraction of 70% of the player’s salary, something totally out of the question. The most consistent figure seems to be the deprivation of 40% of salary until the player in question is transferred. At the moment, they are just ideas about a few tables that join those that propose to reformulate the idea of supermaximum contract because of how it conditions the short, medium and long-term future of franchises. But the reality is that something has to be done.
(Photo courtesy of Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)