Fred VanVleet sat in an Italian restaurant a short drive from the Houston Rockets’ practice facility. Between bites of his spicy pepper-topped pizza, he considered how the ubiquity of sports gambling has affected the players he represents as the president of the National Basketball Players Association.
“Kind of feels like it’s gotten away from us a little bit,” he said.
He tried a metaphor.
“A nice little campfire makes you feel warm,” he said. “You got marshmallows and s’mores. But if it turns into a wildfire — that kind of feels like where we are right now. I don’t know how you rein it back in.”
This is the kind of issue that is now on Mr. VanVleet’s plate.
In September, before the 10th season of his N.B.A. career, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee. Under normal circumstances, his job would primarily entail the grueling recovery from that injury. But last summer, the players elected him president of their union, which was under pressure from its members for a collective bargaining agreement that some of them did not like. Now in the third year of that deal, Mr. VanVleet has taken on the task of rebuilding players’ trust in the organization.
“There’s a vision of how we want things to be going forward,” Mr. VanVleet, 32, said.
The union has tried to communicate better with its members, engage with younger players who had felt disconnected from decision making and urged all of its members to think about their power as a collective brand, which can lead to new kinds of investment and marketing opportunities.
The union is going through a leadership transition more broadly.
In November 2023, it named Andre Iguodala, a former most valuable player of the N.B.A. finals who had retired as a player weeks earlier, as its acting executive director after Tamika Tremaglio abruptly resigned from the role. A former player had held the position only one other time, briefly, in the 1990s.
Mr. Iguodala encouraged players who had never been part of union leadership to join. He recruited Mr. VanVleet, who follows CJ McCollum, a guard for the Atlanta Hawks, as president for a four-year term. He brought in David Kelly, a former Golden State Warriors executive, to be the union’s managing director and general counsel. Mr. Kelly will succeed Mr. Iguodala in July.
Labor Pact Friction
When the new collective bargaining agreement was announced in the spring of 2023, one of the loudest voices in the sport, Draymond Green, chimed in.
“Players lose again,” Mr. Green, a Warriors forward and former teammate of Mr. Iguodala, wrote on social media as details of the deal emerged. He didn’t like that the new rules protected teams that spend less. He criticized the $500,000 prize that players were set to get for winning a new tournament in the first few months of the season as too low. In another post, he called the deal “TRASH.”
The most controversial part of the agreement is a salary cap mechanism called the “second apron.” It was created to prevent owners in big markets from drastically outspending the competition. It does this by making it extremely difficult (though not impossible) for teams that spend past a certain limit to add salary or improve their roster. Some players and teams dislike it because it can make it hard for teams to hang on to key players.
For years, owners have wanted a hard salary cap, or a fixed upper limit that teams cannot cross. The owners proposed that this time, too, and settled for the current system, which is close. The idea that this system would improve the league’s competitive balance, which would in turn increase revenue, was appealing enough that the union was willing to try it. But some think the limitations go too far.
“At the end of the day, the second apron is a hard cap,” Mr. Iguodala said. “No one wants to admit that.”
The league and union can make changes to the collective bargaining agreement before it expires, but Mr. Iguodala seemed skeptical that any changes would be made to the second apron. The contract is in effect through the 2029-30 season.
“We believe the current C.B.A. has created a fairer system with teams and players competing on a more level field,” an N.B.A. spokesman, Mike Bass, said in an email.
And Mr. Iguodala said the numbers did not support the idea that the agreement was bad for players. In some cases, he said, teams may be blaming it for roster shake-ups when their own poor planning is the real culprit.
“The average salary for everybody is up,” he said.
The union also points out that in this collective bargaining agreement it expanded the elements included in “basketball-related income,” which is the revenue the league and players share, and won improvements to its tuition reimbursement plan and pension plan.
The new agreement has also opened investment opportunities for players, including allowing them to invest in Women’s National Basketball Association teams as long as those teams aren’t owned by N.B.A. owners. And in a move that has further complicated the sports-gambling picture, it allows players — like teams and the league before them — to have investments and endorsement deals with sports-betting and fantasy-sports companies, as long as they don’t promote bets on the N.B.A.
‘A No-Nonsense Guy’
Mr. VanVleet ran unopposed for the union presidency as frustration with the contract grew during the free agency period last summer, when some teams were dismantled because they could not or would not risk the future ramifications to pay important players on their rosters.
He hadn’t been much of a fan of the union, particularly after the summer of 2020.
That year, he voted against restarting the 2019-20 season in the closed campus that became known as the N.B.A. bubble, but was on the losing side of that result. After the season resumed, he voted to end the playoffs early when the Milwaukee Bucks sat out a game in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., but the postseason continued.
But that was also the summer when Mr. Iguodala got to know Mr. VanVleet, then a guard for the Toronto Raptors. In the bubble, they often ate in the same area of the hotel that housed the Raptors and Miami Heat, Mr. Iguodala’s team at the time.
Over jerk chicken from one of the few restaurants approved for delivery into the campus, Mr. Iguodala said, he learned that Mr. VanVleet “was a no-nonsense guy and whatever he attached himself to, he was going to do it the right way.”
Mr. VanVleet’s underdog story resonates with players. He wasn’t drafted after playing four seasons at Wichita State and initially joined the Raptors on a contract to play on its team in the Summer League, a tournament in Las Vegas that teams use to audition young players. But he rose to become an important part of the Raptors’ 2019 championship team and was an All-Star in 2022. The $130 million three-year deal he reached with the Rockets the next year was the largest contract that an undrafted player had ever signed.
“I think that’s where he has everyone’s respect,” said Doug McDermott of the Sacramento Kings, who played against Mr. VanVleet in college. “It’s not like he was given anything when he got to the league. He had to work for it.”
Mr. VanVleet said he hoped he could bring together players who disagreed.
And, of course, gambling has his attention. The union is looking into ways to protect players against some of the problems that sports gambling have caused. Mr. Kelly said that if the union couldn’t find productive solutions — he mentioned eliminating certain kinds of prop bets, which are wagers on specific, individual outcomes — it planned to fight to roll back the presence of sports betting in the N.B.A. sphere.
The league has had partnerships with sports betting companies since 2018, shortly after the Supreme Court cleared the way for any state to legalize sports betting. That July, the N.B.A. announced BetMGM as its official gaming partner. Players have taken advantage of their new right to sign endorsement deals with gambling companies, or even to invest in them, provided they don’t promote bets on the N.B.A. That’s why when LeBron James does ads for DraftKings, he typically focuses on football bets.
It’s an ecosystem that Mr. VanVleet thinks has had more negatives than positives.
He believes there should be zero tolerance for anyone who harms the integrity of the sport. But he also worries about the reputations of players who face accusations of breaking the rules and are presumed guilty by the public. He lamented the way players have been accosted by gamblers, as he was in church one day, or as in a viral video that showed a person who had lost money on a bet shouting at the Warriors forward Jimmy Butler, “You work for Vegas,” among other insults.
“If Jimmy escalates that situation and somebody’s got a gun on him, that’s real,” Mr. VanVleet said.
Mr. Bass, the league spokesman, said that compared with illegal gambling, “our belief is that a legal framework is far better because it creates transparency and accountability in the industry.” Mr. Bass said their partnerships with gambling companies include commitments from those companies to monitor integrity.
Revenue from gambling companies now makes up about 1 percent of the pie that the league and players share.
“It’s not substantial enough to make it worth any of this,” Mr. VanVleet said. “For us or for the league, quite frankly.”
Tania Ganguli writes about money, power and influence in sports and how it impacts the broader culture.
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