Players Union to Submit a New CBA Proposal

Billy Hunter tells SI that he’s drawing up a new proposal for the owners to summarily reject: “NBA Players Association executive director Billy Hunter said on Thursday that the union is in the process of engineering a proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement and will submit it to the league before the end of June. The league’s owners and commissioner David Stern crafted a proposal and gave it to the players during All-Star weekend in Dallas in mid-February. The players were unanimously dismissive of the owners’ plan to virtually redefine the parameters of an agreement that Stern said will force the owners to lose as much as $400 million combined this year. Hunter said during a news conference in Dallas that he and the players’ leadership told owners they would create their own, separate proposal, though he left open the date for handing over that proposal. Now, he says, he is instituting a soft deadline. ‘We are demonstrating an open-ended willingness and desire to get a deal done instead of just talking about it,’ Hunter told SI.com. ‘This is about good will. Our timing will give the owners the entire summer to review what it is we are proposing and decide what they want to do next.”‘