Celtics player salaries, cap may be impacted by coronavirus

While it’s far too soon to say how just yet, there will likely be some changes in the future of Boston Celtics player salaries, and salary cap structure as a result of the pandemic.

With suspended Boston Celtics and NBA games due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic comes lost revenue, and if those games are not made up, that money goes away, forever.

And if it does, there will be an impact on the structure of not only Celtics future player salaries and salary cap outlook, but across the whole of the league as well.

For now, we don’t know to what extent the events of the last week will change the future of the NBA, but it will impact the league’s bottom line in some way.

To what extent and how the league chooses to respond are perhaps the two biggest issues facing all 30 teams across the NBA, but there’s a lot of factors mitigating things on a team-by-team basis.

What happens to big-market teams compared to smaller-market teams who depend on revenue-sharing, for example?

And if the money distributed into it shrinks along with the salary cap that is based off of basketball-related income (BRI), what happens to teams that would have been non-taxpaying teams, but now are with a diminished cap?

Another issue is how much players get paid — both this season and in the future. While some players earn a set amount, others may see earnings decrease if their contract is tied to a percentage of the cap, as max salaries are.

The league has a provision allowing teams to cut a certain amount (1/92.6th) from player salary in the advent of a massive disruption to games such as we are currently seeing, and this could be enforced if games are not resumed at a later date, reports the New York Times’ Marc Stein, Sopan Deb, Scott Cacciola and Kevin Draper.

Given the league is set to lose as much as $500 million combined for the remainder of the regular season and postseason according to NBC Sports’ Tom Haberstroh, the impact could be significant in a season already seeing a drop in the projected 2020-21 salary cap due to the controversy over Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey’s Hong Kong tweet and China.

With Boston set to be at or near the cap and potentially a taxpaying team in the near-term future, how the league decides to respond to these events could have significant impacts on the team’s future, roster, and player paychecks.

But as with many things at the moment, until we have more data, it will be hard to say how these events will play out in a concrete way as far as team finances and planning will go.

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