San Antonio Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama inked a five-year extension reportedly worth $252 million on Friday, hours after he hinted at a hometown discount with a brief social media post that read, “Spurs family, I’m here to stay. Whatever it takes.”
The same day the 22-year-old French wunderkind made a contract sacrifice — reportedly opting for a 25% maximum instead of the 30% supermax, thereby giving San Antonio more salary-cap flexibility to refine its championship-contending roster — National Basketball Players Association executive director David Kelly voiced the NBPA’s frustration with the league’s “second apron.”
The second apron is a financial threshold for front offices. More specifically, it’s a limit to how much a team can spend above the NBA’s soft salary cap and luxury-tax line before facing the highest level of penalties. Kelly believes it must be “softened” or removed, as reported by ESPN.
“We are not fans of the second apron,” Kelly said on Friday, speaking for the NBPA, per ESPN. “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.”
In June, after the New York Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years, owner James Dolan made it clear he wouldn’t put the franchise in the second apron, even calling a decision to do so “suicidal” during an appearance on New York’s WFAN. Amid that segment, he noted the Knicks were “willing to stretch” to keep the band together; however, he drew a line in the sand.
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“I’ll write as big of a check as possible, but I can’t write a check that goes into the second apron,” Dolan said.
Weeks later, the Knicks let offensive rebound magnet — er, backup center — Mitchell Robinson walk in free agency. Robinson, a franchise mainstay and invaluable role player in the Knicks’ title-drought-ending playoff run, signed a three-year deal with the Boston Celtics reportedly worth $47.4 million.
Speaking of the Celtics, president of basketball operations Brad Stevens explained last offseason that the second apron was the reason why Boston traded guard Jrue Holiday and center Kristaps Porziņģis just about a year after they helped the franchise win it all.
“The basketball penalties associated with those are real,” Stevens said in that July news conference.
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At the time, the Celtics had been dealing with those financial and basketball-related penalties for the past two seasons: first while they made their run to hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy in 2023-24 and again the following season when they ran it back to try to defend their NBA title.
Flash forward to this summer, and Stevens again referenced the second apron when discussing what factored into Boston sending five-time All-Star wing Jaylen Brown to the rival Philadelphia 76ers.
“I don’t know that fans in Boston would say that everyone’s making out fine [in the current system], or that fans in New York would say that everyone is making out fine,” said Kelly, a former Golden State Warriors executive who took over for Andre Iguodala as the head of the players union earlier this year, as reported by ESPN.
“You have a [Celtics] team that just came off of a championship [in 2024] that will not have those guys together. We see that as a problem for our members, but also for the fans and for the game. … How do we make sure that whatever system we’re putting in place does not hurt fan interests and hurt players for the benefit of some sort of cost control for a certain number of owners?”
So what makes the second apron so punitive?
At the moment, the NBA uses a $165 million salary cap and a $200.4 million luxury tax line. Those numbers apply for the 2026-27 season and, according to ESPN, so do the $209 million first apron and $221.7 million second apron. The second apron is still relatively new, as it went into effect during the 2024 NBA offseason as part of the league’s most recent collective bargaining agreement, which was ratified in 2023.
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The second apron comes with even harsher penalties than those incurred by the first apron to prevent high-spending franchises from routinely outspending their competition and stacking their rosters without more serious long-term consequences.
If a team is in the second apron, it will not only shoulder the first apron penalties, but it will also face restrictions such as not being able to trade first-round picks from seven years out, use cash in trades or utilize the taxpayer mid-level exception.
The Cleveland Cavaliers were the only team to cross over the second apron in 2025-26, per ESPN.
Kelly argued that parity in the NBA is possible without the second apron, pointing out that the variance of league champions in this era already existed before the second apron was deployed two years ago. After all, a different team has won the NBA title in eight straight seasons.
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In situations like Wembanyama’s, the NBPA doesn’t believe a player should have to take less money to assist his team in retaining more players.
“Our position would be that the system should not require a player to carry all that burden,” Kelly said, per The Athletic. “It should not put a player in a position where he has to carry the burden in order to keep a team together. A system that does that, we have a problem.”
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