Restart/Financial Notes: Escrow, BoG Call, Player Reactions

About a month after the coronavirus pandemic initially brought the 2019/20 NBA season to a halt, the league and its players reached an agreement to withhold 25% of players’ remaining pay checks in escrow. However, due to the success of the summer restart in Orlando, players will be receiving a significant portion of that withheld salary back.

According to Shams Charania of The Athletic (Twitter link), players will receive a refund worth approximately two-thirds of the amount of their salaries held in escrow. As Charania explains, because the league was able to recoup some revenue during the summer, an additional player escrow of just four percent was required to satisfy the revenue split between the NBA and the players.

While that’s good news for most players, it doesn’t apply to all of them. Most players receive their annual pay in 24 regular installments through November 1, but a small handful of players – including LeBron James and Stephen Curry – negotiated deals that pay them in 12 installments through May 1. Because they’d already received their yearly pay checks by the time the 25% escrow went into effect, they won’t get the same refund as the rest of their fellow players.

Here’s more on the NBA’s plans to restart play next month and the league’s financial situation:

• According to Marc Stein of The New York Times (Twitter link), NBA has scheduled a Board of Governors call for today so that team owners can approve the changes to the Collective Bargaining Agreement and the salary cap for the 2020/21 season that were agreed to on Monday night.
• As we relayed on Monday, a number of health officials around the NBA have concerns about the quick turnaround for the start of next season and the potential injury risk for players. Within his latest newsletter of The New York Times, Stein observes that health experts are also worried about what sort of impact the coronavirus will have on the season now that games are set to be played outside the bubble.
• Michael Scotto of HoopsHype spoke to several players, executives, and agents to get their reactions about the agreement to start the 2020/21 season on December 22. As Scotto details, the players he spoke to unanimously felt good about the deal to artificially keep the cap at $109MM for the coming year. “No one is passing up that money,” one player said. “It’s better than $90MM. As long as guys are in a similar range, everybody is relatively protected, and we can make large amounts of money.”