The NBA and the NBPA have agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. The deal, which will last for seven years with a mutual opt-out after the sixth, comes after the two sides agreed to extend a critical deadline in the negotiating process. The previous collective bargaining agreement was set to expire after the 2023-24 season, but both the NBA and NBPA had the option to opt out of it after the conclusion of the 2022-23 season. 

The deadline to opt out, which had been delayed multiple times, was Friday at midnight. However, with the two sides close, they agreed to extend it one more time to get a new CBA done. The NBPA had previously declared that it would not opt out, but NBA commissioner Adam Silver suggested that the league planned to had a new deal not been reached.

Fortunately, that possibility is now gone, and the two sides have averted the slim possibility of a lockout. This marks the second consecutive collective bargaining agreement negotiated by Silver that has not required a work stoppage, and the first by new NBPA executive director Tamika Tremaglio, who recently replaced Michele Roberts, who led the players in negotiations on the 2017 CBA that has been in effect ever since. The NBA has lost games due to a lockouts only twice in its history, in 1998 and 2011. The league has enjoyed 12 years of labor peace since, and with this new deal in place, that peace is set to last awhile longer.

With the collective bargaining agreement now settled, the NBA can turn its attention to its next major financial milestone. The league’s current national media rights deal with Disney and Turner is set to expire at the end of the 2024-25 season. The league would surely prefer to have a new television deal done well before then, and reports suggest that the league is hoping to earn three times as much as the $24 billion it got in its last deal.

That money motivated both sides to get a collective bargaining agreement done before there was serious danger of a work stoppage. League revenue has risen so high that both sides would be risking billions of dollars by failing to secure a deal. Now, that deal is done, and the NBA will continue playing basketball unimpeded for the foreseeable future.