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Adam Silver: 'My preference would be to have a harder cap'

Danny La / USA Today Sports

In the waning weeks of the NBA offseason, the future of the league has been thrust under the microscope, with the announcement of a lucrative impending television rights deal sending players and owners alike to their soapboxes to talk logistics. 

With lottery reform – another (tangentially related) hot-button offseason issue – now off the docket, commissioner Adam Silver has likewise turned his attention to 2017, the year after the TV deal will take effect and when the league and players' union can opt out of their current collective bargaining agreement. 

Silver spoke to CBS Sports's Ken Berger on Wednesday about some of his goals for the next round of CBA negotiations, which many believe will lead to another work stoppage. Silver doesn't see a lockout as an inevitability but he did reveal his preference for a harder salary cap in the future, in light of the revelation that one-third of the league's 30 teams are losing money.

"(T)he caveat has always been, if well managed," Silver said. "And I would also say, if you don't have a hard-cap system, for example, one of the teams that isn't profitable are the Brooklyn Nets. That's an election they're free to make under our compensation system. They've elected to be unprofitable. My preference would be to have a harder cap, where teams couldn't elect to spend so much more than other teams.

"We've always said to the players' association ... you can make revenue sharing our issue, not yours. We've never come in and said because a particular team is unprofitable that that somehow becomes your problem. We recognize it's our obligation to run a well-managed league."

Given that players have been openly touting a more union-friendly deal after getting steamrolled in the 2011 negotiations, Silver's goal of achieving both labor peace and a hard cap (one of the few things the owners pushed for but didn't get in the last CBA) seems unrealistic. 

"There's gradations of hardness in terms of the cap as well," Silver said of whether the hard cap would be a make-or-break issue in 2017. "I wish our current cap system was harder. It's what we proposed last time around, but we compromised."

This isn't the last we'll hear about this and no doubt the league's financial picture will continue to be hotly debated over the next two seasons. As the 2014-15 season draws nearer and nearer, the NBA's future seems to get harder and harder to project. 

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