Report: NBA owes players $131-million for 2015-16 season

As NBA teams and players collectively sit in limbo - with the free-agency moratorium in effect for five more days - the league office has seemingly concluded its annual internal audit.

Having crunched all the revenue numbers from the past season, and adjusted for the lucrative TV rights deal set to kick in this year, the league has set the new salary-cap and luxury-tax thresholds for 2016-17. It's also reportedly corrected for a fairly significant discrepancy between player salaries in 2015-16, and the 51 percent of basketball-related income to which the players are entitled under the current collective bargaining agreement.

League owners owe their players a shortfall payment of $131 million, which will make the players whole in accordance with the two sides' agreed-upon BRI split, a source told Ken Berger of CBS.

That shortfall doesn't even factor in the league's new TV deal, which is only taking effect this coming season. When it comes time to settle up differences next summer, Adam Silver and company have predicted they'll wind up owing the players somewhere in the ballpark of $500 million.

In other words, even if you feel like the unprecedented contracts being handed out this offseason are outlandish, they're still expected to come up well short of what the players will be collectively owed this coming season. Player salaries, while skyrocketing, have not, to this point, kept up with the league's uptick in total revenue. (Players received a $57-million payment after the 2014-15 season, as well.)

Rather than being paid out directly, the shortfall is effectively rolled into the following season's salary cap, which helps explain why the 2016-17 figures came in slightly higher than what had initially been projected.