If you’re interested in reading the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), then go to here immediately. If not, continue reading.
The NBA’s CBA is a 598 page legal document that details the labor practices between the NBA and its players. Not only is it a lengthy document, but one that is complicated by an immense amount of self-referencing. Almost every portion of the document references some other section, which can get fairly complex if you cannot remember what the referenced section pertains to.
Its structure is supposed to follow a syntax,1 but it turns out that it this is not consistent. The obvious culprits are Microsoft Word and whoever wrote up the relevant sections in the incorrect version of Word. This ends up leading to typos within the document when they attempt to reference sections which have inconsistent numbering.
1 An article is referenced as a roman numeral and is the starting point of each relevant topic. Next, is a section which is numerically ordered (1, 2, 3, …) and is a subtopic within each article that goes in alphabetical order (a, b, c, … aa, bb, cc, …). But this is where the structure becomes muddied. For most parts of the CBA, the 3rd section under the article is ordered through a lower case roman numeral fashion (i, ii, iii, iv, …). This is not at all consistent as the first diversion from this structure is in Article 4, Section 1, (a) Benefits. The ordering is then in numeric order (1, 2, 3…). This is subsequently violated many times.
Regardless of this problem, the pdf which the NBPA provides is inadequate. One cannot easily flip through the document because there are no bookmarks or structure.
This pissed me off.
So I decided to use bookdown to recreate the CBA as-is. I maintain all of the text within the CBA but break apart the document by article and section. Any reference within the CBA (and its possible typo) is maintained.
The main output is an html output at atlhawksfanatic.github.io/NBA-CBA/ and has an unfortunate glitch that articles are numeric instead of roman numerals. But aside from that, the website contains a search feature at the top as to make it easier to find a particular topic within the CBA. I know that’s been useful to me lately.
Beyond this, the website does contain a pdf and epub version of the CBA. They are slightly hidden in the webpage. If you look at the top, there’s a download icon that you can click. Once you do that, then you can download either formats. And both of those formats maintain the roman numeral structure to articles if that matters to you. It’s the document right above here, so check it out. I hope it doesn’t disappoint.
I hope this resource is helpful to people.