Is the National Basketball Association colluding against point guard Dennis Schroder? The short answer is no, probably not, but it’s an issue that has emerged in recent days and it won’t go away until his contract situation is resolved.

Article XIV of the NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement is the NBA's anti-collusion provision and it forbids two or more teams from conspiring in ways that economically harm players. Theoretically, if multiple teams in the league made an agreement not to sign Schroder due to a reason we already know about or one that we don’t, this would be a violation of the NBA’s own rules, state law, and federal law because it’s restricting the free market and hampering competition. It’s a big deal, as we saw in the NFL colluding to end Colin Kaepernick’s career.

Article XIV addresses collusion as directly as any league’s bylaws or governing agreement ever has:

“…no NBA Team, its employees or agents, will enter into any contracts, combinations or conspiracies, express or implied, with the NBA or any other NBA Team, their employees or agents: (a) to negotiate or not to negotiate with any Veteran or Rookie; (b) to submit or not to submit an Offer Sheet to any Restricted Free Agent; (c) to offer or not to offer a Player Contract to any Free Agent; (d) to exercise or not to exercise a Right of First Refusal; or (e) concerning the terms or conditions of employment offered to any Veteran or Rookie.”

The goal of Article X!V is simple: to a player from economic harm through teams colluding against him. This obviously includes two or more NBA teams conspiring tnot to offer a particular player a contract. Tacit collusion is a legal term where there is a silent understanding and agreement to collude. This is the form collusion would take in professional sports as no teams are going to go on record or put collusion in writing. It’s honestly no different from when oil-producing nations tacitly agree to fix prices, which is what might be happening here.

Michael Epstein, a New Jersey injury lawyer and huge NBA fan, reminds us of the severity of collusion.

“Collusion could be a very serious thing, especially in the context of a professional sports league, which is designed to operate as an open and free market for the athletes’ professional services. The legal bar to prove that the teams in any league colluded against a player is going to be very high,” he noted.

Let’s briefly review the facts as best we have them today.

Back in February, Schroder reportedly turned down a four-year, $84M contract extension with the Los Angeles Lakers. This perplexed the Lakers and could have absolutely upset them - let’s be honest, there is a Laker mystique and it’s not a franchise that enjoys being rebuked by anyone. This even led Laker uberlegend, Magic Johnson, to publicly tear into Schroder after the season, calling him “not Laker material.”

Then, when this year’s free agency period began on Monday night, it really was an abnormal feeding frenzy, with many of the top available players being snapped up within hours. But not Schroder.

So who is Schroder and why would any team collude against him?

Schroder has been in the league for eight years yet is only 27, He is not even at the prime of his career. While he is not tracking for superstardom, his best-case scenario is that in the right situation he is a serviceable starting guard or potentially a candidate for 6th man of the year. During his one season with the Lakers, he played a generous 32 minutes per game and averaged 15.4 points. Four years ago with Atlanta, he averaged over 19 points per game, including close to 25 in the playoffs.

Ah, the playoffs. Schroder had an admittedly pretty abysmal playoffs this season, but so did the Lakers as a whole. What relatively few people are focusing on is that he was diagnosed with COVID-19 very late in the season and never seemed to fully recover. But by the time of his diagnosis, the bad blood in Los Angeles was already a done deal and perhaps his fate there was sealed well before the ancient-ification of the Lake Show.

Watching his YouTube channel shows us a unique perspective on a professional athlete. Having just returned last year to North America from living in Berlin, I’m able to follow a lot of his videos (they are in German, usually without subtitles) and the impression you’re left with is a very relaxed young man enjoying his family and close friends, several of whom work for him as assistants. No, you’re not left with the image of an NBA player training at the highest level, but that’s often the case when athletes choose to show their personal side through a social media presence.

So, absent collusion, how does a player who was offered a 4-year, $84 million contract extension go from there to absolute zero? What are we missing?

That’s the problem. We don’t know at this point and we don’t have enough touch points to piece things together. The best-case scenario for the NBA is that this is a player who priced himself out of the market. He had a subpar end of the year, doesn’t shoot particularly well, and had a notable run-in with an NBA superstar that wasn’t a particularly good look for him.

But we also saw players such as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander sign this week for five years at $172 milllion, which places Schroder’s self-valuation at fours years and $100 million to $120 million and certainly the Lakers’ original offer of four years and $84 million in a fairly realistic light.

Let’s keep one thing clear about the NBA and any professional sports league: collusion isn’t beyond them. The NBA has been accused of collusion before, and given the legal and practical nature of what collusion is, it’s extremely hard to find evidentiary support for a claim. But with each day that passes and finds Schroder unsigned, people who look at the NBA through a critical lens are going to have more valid questions to ask.

Aron Solomon, JD, is the Head of Strategy for Esquire Digital and the Editor of Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was the founder of LegalX, the world’s first legal technology accelerator. Aron’s work has been featured in TechCrunch, Fortune, Venture Beat, The Independent, TechCrunch Japan, Yahoo!, ABA Journal, Law.com, The Boston Globe, The Hill, and many other leading publications around the world.

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