Dub Hub: The league targets the Warriors with new changes to the CBA

04.04.2023 18:41

Photo by Loren Elliott/Getty Images

Rounding up all the Warriors and NBA news from around the web.

Good Morning Dub Nation,

While the Golden State Warriors remain focused on finishing this season off strong, their outlook beyond that is about to get more complicated. This past weekend, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that the NBA and the NBA Players Association reached a deal on a new seven-year collective bargaining agreement. Although there were several new changes put into place, one of them regarding teams in the luxury tax appears to be especially pointed at the Warriors.

Via ESPN:

The NBA is curbing the ability of the highest-spending teams, such as the Golden State Warriors and the LA Clippers, to continue running up salary and luxury tax spending while still maintaining mechanisms to add talent to the roster. The league is implementing a second salary cap apron — $17.5 million over the tax line — and those teams will lose several key team building mechanisms, including the taxpayer mid-level exception, utilizing cash in trades, moving first-round picks in drafts that are seven years away, signing free agent players in the buyout market and taking on more money than is being sent out in trades, sources said.

The new changes would further constrict the roster maneuverability amongst teams such as the Warriors who willingly spend deep into the luxury tax. The NBA hopes that these changes disincentivizes teams from spending exceedingly beyond the salary cap in an effort to increase parity across the league. The article goes on to cite Warriors’ guard Donte DiVincenzo – who joined the team this past offseason using a portion of Golden State’s taxpayer mid-level exception — as an example of a player who would not have been able to sign with the team under these new changes.

Several people have voiced their opinions on the new CBA including Warriors’ forward Draymond Green. After details of the CBA were released, Green took to Twitter to vent his frustrations with the new deal.

Players lose again…. Smh! Middle and Lower spectrum teams don’t spend because they don’t want to. They want to lose. So increase their spending capabilities, just to increase them. They continue to cut out the middle. And this is what we rushed into a deal for? Smdh! Never fails https://t.co/rFuSpxCJ8q
— Draymond Green (@Money23Green) April 1, 2023

Never seen someone go to a table with the assets that makes an entire machine go, and lose EVERY time! Blasphemous
— Draymond Green (@Money23Green) April 1, 2023

Golden State has infamously been the league’s biggest spender over the past several years with a projected luxury tax bill that could exceed $500 million next season. The new changes will limit the team’s options when it comes to making certain roster moves, raising even more questions for an upcoming Warriors’ offseason that was already expected to be full of uncertainty.

Here are the rest of today’s stories: