The NBA's most recent collective bargaining agreement kicked in for the 2023-24 season. It has a mutual opt-out clause after the 2028-29 season, meaning we are now halfway through it, and it's a good thing we are, because it has created one of the most unpopular roster-building systems in the history of sports. This isn't simply the opinion of frustrated fans anymore. It is now essentially the official position of the NBPA.

"We are not fans of the second apron," David Kelly, the recently appointed executive director of the players association, told reporters at Las Vegas Summer League last week. "We did not propose the second apron. We should have done a better job of fighting back against the second apron. In the future, we will have a much more unified union, and we will do a better job of fighting back. ... We're seeing (the apron system) decimate teams and force decisions to be made that are not basketball decisions."

On that last point, it'd be hard to argue that Kelly is wrong. The Boston Celtics won a championship with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown as their two best players two years ago. They just traded Brown because they decided that building the depth to win again, given the amount both are getting paid, would not be feasible. The Minnesota Timberwolves traded Karl-Anthony Towns prematurely, largely to avoid that dilemma. The New York Knicks just let their backup center walk for nothing to duck the second apron after winning their first championship in 53 years. These are not strictly basketball decisions. They are financial ones.

There will always be a push-and-pull between basketball and finances when it comes to building NBA teams. This is a business, after all, and some spending-related restrictions are necessary in preserving competitive balance. That is a well-known goal of Adam Silver's, and the NBA has achieved it. We've seen eight different champions in the past eight years. Whether or not that degree of parity is a desirable outcome is a matter of opinion, but the system that created it has undoubtedly gone too far in enforcing it. Something is wrong with a system that compels winning teams to give away their best players every summer. So we're going to try to fix it.

"That'll be easy," you're probably thinking. "Just eliminate the second apron." Well, good luck with that. It was collectively bargained for, and the owners won't give it up without a fight. As unpopular as it is among players, it fundamentally does not change how much money they make as a collective, and therefore probably isn't worth a protracted labor war. The players and owners still divide basketball-related income roughly evenly. Neither side can take home less than 49% or more than 51% of it in a given season. What has changed, fundamentally, is how that money is distributed among the players.

Even if the second apron inspires non-basketball-related moves, it has a basketball-related purpose. It is a check, essentially, against a few teams drastically outspending the others. When the Golden State Warriors won the 2022 championship, ESPN's Brian Windhorst called their Game 5 victory in the Finals a "checkbook win." He wasn't wrong. The Warriors had a $340 million payroll with luxury taxes included. They were more than $70 million above the salary cap. A handful of teams -- most notably the Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Clippers -- were spending in similar ways. For all of the second apron's detrimental effects, it has served its competitive purpose as a deterrent to unbalanced league-wide spending.

Balance is what we're looking for here. How can we design a system that maintains the parity Silver is going for without forcing the league's best teams to give away star players every summer? Below is my four-point wishlist for the 2029 CBA at the halfway point of its deeply flawed 2023 counterpart.

1. Standardize the max contract

The NBA's max contract system is fundamentally broken because it misunderstands when players are at their most valuable. The three tiers of max contracts are based on experience: players with less than six years of experience can start contracts at 25% of the salary cap, while players with seven to nine years can get up to 30% and players with 10 or more years of experience can get up to 35%.

This system would make plenty of sense at a law firm or a bank, where experience is a universal positive. But aging hurts NBA players more than experience helps them. The most valuable years of an NBA player's career, when you combine age and injury risk, are usually in their mid-to-late 20s. Shouldn't that be when they're making the most money? 

Meanwhile, the players making 35% of the cap are essentially coin flips to live up to their contracts. There are 11 players in the NBA right now playing on contracts that started at 35% and received the maximum allowable raises. Stephen Curry, Nikola Jokić and Giannis Antetokounmpo have lived up to those contracts. Jayson Tatum just missed most of the first year of his own, but time will tell how he holds up. Anthony Davis, Joel Embiid, Paul George and Jimmy Butler, largely due to injuries, have not lived up to their deals, and Devin Booker has not through performance thus far either. Jaylen Brown and Karl-Anthony Towns were traded over fear of those contracts. Your options are, essentially, to overpay for a bad contract, trade the player, or hope that the player you're signing is a top-25 all-time player and can live up to such a lofty contract.

There are systems in place designed to reward the best players by nudging them into the higher tiers earlier on, but they're rigid and, frankly, arbitrary. For a player to be eligible for either a Rose Rule max (30% when they're in the 25% experience tier) or a super max (35% when they're in the 30% experience tier), they functionally need to make All-NBA or win Defensive Player of the Year in two of the three seasons before their new deal would kick in, or in the single season before it would. This has created all sorts of problematic outcomes when it comes to basic fairness.

Consider Jayson Tatum. He made All-NBA in his third season, but because his rookie deal didn't expire until after his fourth season, he had to make All-NBA again in order to get that Rose Rule bump. He missed out in that fourth season and was stuck at 25% of the cap for the next four years. He made First-Team All-NBA in each of those four seasons. It didn't matter because of poor timing. Meanwhile, Jalen Duren is eligible for 30% of the cap right now because he happened to make All-NBA in his fourth season. Nobody would compare his value right now to Tatum's in 2022. 

The supermax was designed as a carrot to convince players to stay with their original teams, so they're only allowed to get that bump with a team they played for in their first four seasons. Well, Luka Dončić was traded against his will, and that cost him his supermax eligibility. Meanwhile, teams are put in the awkward position of hoping that their players don't win awards because doing so would compromise their long-term financial outlooks. These rules were well-intentioned, but they do more harm than good.

So here's my pitch: drastically simplify the max salary structure by removing the tiers entirely. In the new CBA, there should be a single, fixed maximum salary. Let's meet in the middle at 30% of the cap. This allows stars to get paid appropriately when they are at their most valuable, and it prevents the sort of team-building dilemmas that 35% max contracts create when those players are less valuable. 

Take the Brown situation. Brad Stevens openly cited the difficulty of building around him and Tatum when the two combine to make 70% of the cap as they do now. Lower that figure to 60% -- right around what last year's Knicks paid their two most expensive players -- and they might not feel as compelled to break up that championship-winning duo.

Younger teams might get forced into harder decisions earlier, as their best players could make up to 30% of the cap rather than 25%, but having two players in their mid-20s who deserve 30% of the cap is a good problem to have. At the very least, you're paying for future promise rather than past production.

Is this concept necessarily fair to the NBA's best players? The answer is "no." But the max system has never been fair to the league's best players. Michael Jordan made more than 120% of the salary cap in 1998. The max system was introduced in 1999 and nobody has come close since. LeBron James at his peak was easily worth 50% of the cap. There are a handful of players who are never going to be paid appropriately as long as any sort of ceiling exists on individual salaries. 

One of them, Victor Wembanyama, just willingly took a discount on his own max contract. It was a decision driven by winning, but one made possible by how cartoonish these numbers are getting. Even discounted, Wembanyama guaranteed himself more than $250 million. James was underpaid for pretty much his entire career. He is also a billionaire. That class of player is going to make such enormous sums of money playing professional basketball -- much of it off the court -- that fairness to them probably matters less in the grand scheme of things than it does to the middle class of player who badly needs teams to have more spending resources.

Perhaps the NBA could create some sort of universal bonus structure for awards that doesn't need to be baked into the salary cap. You could even argue that those should be paid at the league level. James makes everyone money by driving the entire league's popularity. But the max system as it exists today is backward. It pays players at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. Fixing it is the first major step the NBA can and should take towards addressing the problems perhaps caused and certainly exacerbated by the aprons.

2. Replace the lottery with a draft credit system

The NBA knows that its revamped lottery structure is a temporary solution designed first and foremost to eliminate tanking rather than create a fair drafting system. That's why a sunset provision was built into the new system. It expires after the 2029 Draft, same as the CBA. It was designed to be replaced with the CBA. As it stands, the system has two fundamental flaws. One of them is new. One of them is older.

The new problem: While flattening the lottery odds discourages the most blatant forms of tanking, it also essentially randomizes the team-building process. It makes it far too easy for good teams to get high draft picks, and simultaneously offers bad teams no clear path out of the cellar because they are no longer assured top draft picks. The entire purpose of the draft is to serve as a talent-balancing mechanism to send the best incoming players to the worst teams so that they can hopefully stop being the worst teams. The new lottery no longer does that.

But there's a subtler problem that really started to emerge over the past several years, and it relates to trades. As it stands right now, NBA teams are essentially paying for trades by racking up credit card debt. They trade away picks that they don't even have yet, picks that are deep into the future, to acquire players in the present. 

Sometimes it works. Teams like the Milwaukee Bucks and Phoenix Suns are showing us what happens when it doesn't. Those teams have no pick control for the rest of the decade. They are essentially trapped, with no chance of adding top prospects to rebuild with because they traded too aggressively. The Stepien Rule, which forces teams to keep a first-round pick every other year in an attempt to prevent outcomes like this, has largely been neutered by the discovery of first-round swaps. It doesn't matter if you have a first-round pick in a given year if you know it's going to be No. 29 because it's coming from the Oklahoma City Thunder. Given the cost of star-level trades, one bad deal can create a truly hopeless situation for half a decade or more.

A solution that has made the rounds amid the lottery reform debate is a draft credit system that would replace the traditional lottery. Essentially, instead of the draft order being random or based on record, teams would accrue draft credits over time that they could then bid on specific slots in the draft. Below is my proposal, which is a slightly modified version of one made by the Boston Celtics and shared on The Zach Lowe Show:

• Each team would have one slot in the first round of each draft and one slot in the second round of each draft. Teams would be free to trade their slots if they wished.
• When the system is implemented in 2030, each team is immediately allocated 200 credits. Then, with each passing year, teams would be allocated an additional 100 credits. However, for each playoff series that a team wins, it would lose 25 of those credits, meaning that the champion would receive none, the Finals loser would get 25, the two teams to lose in the conference finals would get 50 and the four teams to lose in the second round would get 75. Credits would carry over from year to year with no maximum number a team could accumulate.
• Teams would be free to trade any draft credits that they accumulate. However, they can no longer trade future draft capital. Your credits for a given year are only awarded at the end of that season and are not tradable beforehand.
• A number of first-round picks in the 2030s have already been traded, and we therefore need to account for them in this new system. Unprotected picks would merely become a team's credit allocation in that year. Protected picks would convey proportionally to the protection. If the pick you traded is top-15 protected, for instance, half of a team's allotted credits in that year would go to the team it traded its picks to. If a team traded first-round swap rights in a given year, it would send half of its allotted credits to the team it originally owed those swap rights to.
• Each May, after the NBA Draft Combine, a bidding process would be held for each of the top 10 picks. The three highest bidders for the No. 1 pick would conduct a lottery with odds proportionally weighted in terms of their credit bid, and the winner of that lottery would get the No. 1 pick. That same process would be repeated for picks 2-10. For all subsequent picks, the lottery would be reduced to two teams, and the loser would automatically receive the next pick. The draft order will be determined in this fashion until all teams willing to submit a credit bid are addressed. Any teams that bid zero credits in the first round are automatically slotted at the end in a random order. The second round is ordered by record, with the worst teams picking first.
• The rookie pay scale would be replaced with a system that pays incoming rookies based on the highest bid made for the pick that was ultimately used to select them. This addresses inequity across different drafts. Wembanyama is worth a lot more than Zaccharie Risacher, yet their contracts both started at the same percentage of the cap because they were both technically taken with the same draft slot (No. 1).

This proposal addresses a number of the problems with the existing draft system. While it does not give priority to the weakest teams, it does protect against the stronger ones accumulating too much capital. It also puts a premium on intelligent management rather than simple lottery luck. The teams that scout well and manage their credits responsibly would be the ones who prosper. In theory, any team can hire people capable of doing so. The trading problem gets addressed in obvious ways. 

And if a team wants to spend years accumulating capital it can then use to splurge on a star trade? It is free to do so with a more uniform form of trade currency. The value of any traded draft pick is subjective. The process essentially amounts to betting against the teams you're trading with, and predicting anyone's future seven years in advance is mostly guesswork. This system standardizes that process. One draft credit is worth the same no matter where it comes from. It is not a perfect system, but there's a reason this basic framework has seemingly gained enough steam for an official proposal to be made. It's a substantial improvement on what we currently have.

3. Drastically weaken restricted free agency

There is almost nothing "free" about restricted free agency. Teams are essentially allowed to hold their players hostage. They can match any offer another team makes them, and because the matching window doesn't start until the end of the July moratorium, teams with cap space never want to save it long enough to hand out an offer sheet because they know that by the time the other team potentially matches, there will be no worthwhile players left to spend their money on.

Think of how late in the summer most of last year's prominent restricted free agents actually signed their contracts. Josh Giddey needed until Sep. 9 to re-sign with the Chicago Bulls on a four-year deal. Jonathan Kuminga needed until the end of that month to take his two-year deal with a team option. Quentin Grimes and Cam Thomas both had to take qualifying offers at the end of the offseason to set themselves up for unrestricted free agency a year later.

The basic concept of restricted free agency makes sense. It's a way to protect teams from losing stars that they drafted after only four years. The best rookies usually wind up on the worst teams. If the league gave them a path to unrestricted free agency after only four years, they might start to get antsy if their team didn't improve within the first two or three. 

The problem is that restricted free agency now more often applies to lesser players. Teams aren't using it to keep their stars. They're using it to low-ball assets they just don't want to lose for nothing. Think of the Warriors and Kuminga: Golden State prevented him from pursuing opportunities with teams that genuinely wanted him because it needed to preserve him as a possible trade asset. That's just an unhealthy dynamic that shouldn't be systemically encouraged.

If a player wants to hit unrestricted free agency badly enough, he can take that one-year qualifying offer and do so in the next offseason. But these qualifying offers are based on draft position and are far too low to be worthwhile for most players. Take Peyton Watson right now. The expectation is that he wants a deal in the $25 million-per-year range. He would have gotten one had he been unrestricted. But his qualifying offer is only for $6.5 million. The Nuggets can use that low figure to try to low-ball Watson into a team-friendly deal.

So let's amend the qualifying offer. Here's the pitch: the one-year qualifying offer for first-round picks coming off their rookie-scale contracts is automatically 25% of the cap, the old max contract figure for players in their experience group (though we'd otherwise still be amending the max to 30%, as covered above). If a team does not tender that qualifying offer, the player becomes an unrestricted free agent. The concept here is straightforward: teams would obviously be happy to give their young stars a one-year, formerly max contract. For the right non-star, teams might even be able to stomach such an arrangement on a one-year deal.

But generally speaking, teams are not going to offer this much for role players, even for a single season. If they are not committed enough to those players to do so, they should be forced to bid on them in the open market. This encourages teams to sign these players early to fair deals. If they reach the end of their fourth season without a contract, other teams should be free to make real offers.

This obviously changes restricted free agency pretty drastically, but it should also have a pretty notable downstream effect on its unrestricted free agency. Have you noticed how much weaker the past few free-agent classes have been than normal? This is the effect of more than a decade's worth of collective bargaining. Over the past several CBAs, the NBA has made it far easier for teams to sign players to contract extensions. This has created a bit of a feedback loop. More extensions mean fewer free agents. Fewer free agents mean teams are less incentivized to retain cap space. Less cap space encourages players to sign extensions because they have fewer options in free agency. And so on, and so on.

By reinvigorating the free-agency talent pool with a new group of players who might otherwise have been restricted, we're encouraging more teams to open up cap space. If they do so, more players will feel comfortable eschewing extensions and becoming free agents. Suddenly, free agency could become a real mechanism for team-building again. This is probably the only feasible way to make this happen. In theory, the NBA could tighten its restriction rules again, but neither side is going to want to collectively bargain for that. Players want earlier and easier access to money. Teams want to be able to retain their players. This proposal is obviously player-friendly. I'd view it as a concession the owners would be making in order to redo the max structure.

4. Soften a few apron-induced restrictions

The basic concept of the aprons makes sense. Some of the actual restrictions it imposes are just a bit too draconian. I'm going to run through a few quick tweaks to make them slightly more manageable.

• When a team takes back more salary than it sends out through a trade, it creates a hard cap at the first apron. What this means, functionally, is that any time two teams trade with one another, one of them automatically gets hard-capped unless the exact dollar amounts getting traded are equal. Teams sidestep this by looping in third teams, but it just makes far more sense to build in, say, a 5% buffer that any team can use once per season before it triggers a hard cap.
• The first and second aprons rise at the same rate as the salary cap each year. However, given how much more punitive the second apron is than the first, I'd propose widening the gap just a bit more to create some extra wiggle room. Let's just tack on an extra $1 million to whatever the formula generates each season to make life a bit easier for teams.
• The bi-annual exception is the weakest overall cap exception. It pays less than any mid-level exception, it can only be used once every two years, and it's only available to teams that are willing to hard-cap themselves at the first apron. I'd bump that up to the second apron. It seems like a fair tradeoff, as teams with second-apron hard caps only have access to the smaller, taxpayer mid-level exception. This way, they may not have access to the higher-level free agents that the non-taxpayer mid-level exception provides, but they would at least be able to cultivate a bit more depth through quantity by signing multiple players for more than the minimum.

Players would obviously prefer loosening these restrictions even further, but collective bargaining is a two-way street. Neither side is ever going to be fully happy with the arrangement, so mutually beneficial incremental change is usually the best either side can hope for. The last CBA went too far, but the next one can take steps back in the right direction.