(NOTE: This post is not meant to be taken seriously.)
If you're like me, your head is swimming with all the talk of mid-level exceptions and escrow accounts and the dreaded Basketball-Related Income. It's difficult to understand the NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement - so difficult that one person in the world gets it, and he takes nearly 45,000 words to explain it. And that's the old agreement. Understanding the differences between the old and new agreements takes another 3,700 words.
Lucky for you, I've dug through the new agreement to find a few little things that haven't been discussed in the media as of yet - and some of them may surprise you:
- Players receive a lesser percentage of league revenues, and in return owners have agreed to consider, at some point in the not-too-distant future, ending their agreed-upon practice of lying through their teeth about league revenues.
- Teams can waive one player and take that player's salary off of their salary cap, a rule that was insisted upon by a gun-waving Allan Houston, who is tired of having rules named after him.
- Sacramento will no longer be allowed to sign two pieces of furniture to multi-year deals in order to get above the salary-cap floor.
- As part of the new "Greg Oden Rule," the Trail Blazers will be allowed to pretend that Greg Oden was kidnapped by aliens in 2009.
- All players traded to Milwaukee are now required to pretend that they wouldn't rather work as a truck driver almost anywhere else than live in Milwaukee.
- The standard player contract now includes, at the insistence of the player's union, a provision which states that all NBA players have a legal and moral right to attempt to force a trade to New York, Miami, or Los Angeles, "but not the Clippers, please, God, not the Clippers."
- As part of the travel-related section, no NBA league employee will be allowed to travel anywhere near Seattle, to avoid being slaughtered by a vengeful populace.
- Any team using Comic Sans for communications will be forced to pay a $100,000 fine and send at least two employees to be beaten by font nerds with a bound copy of the original Helvetica style sheet.
- At the insistence of the owners, all escrow monies will be converted to cash and placed in a vault so that owners may visit and partake in their second-favorite pastime: throwing heaping handfuls of cash around while screaming, "I'M RICH! I'M RICH!"
- This vault will be kept under heavy security so that no owners can partake in their favorite pastime: giving huge piles of cash to Elton Brand or Baron Davis and then later claiming that it wasn't their fault.
- Under the new revenue-sharing and luxury-tax rules, the Lakers will be forced take the checks they receive from their new $3billion local TV deal and mail them directly to Charlotte.
- In the interest of being able to field a team in 2011-12, the Nuggets will be allowed to relocate temporarily from Denver to China.
- Oklahoma City will be allowed to play with two basketballs at all times in the hopes of keeping both Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook happy.