Last year, thanks to Wang Yi's enormous influence, the NBA signed massive broadcast deals with various broadcasters, causing the salary cap to soar.
Player salaries rose dramatically as well.
But after Wang Yi retired this year, the NBA had already lost more than two billion dollars.
The owners were making less money, so naturally they weren't willing to pay the players such high salaries.
And it just so happened that the NBA was entering a new round of labor negotiations.
They had already held four rounds of talks, and none had gotten anywhere.
If they still couldn't reach an agreement, the NBA would have to shut down.
Labor negotiations were talks held every six years between the players and the owners over issues such as revenue sharing, contract lengths, and the salary cap.
Put simply, they were negotiations between employees and owners over how to divide the profits.
If the owners made a lot of money, they would give the players a bigger share, so negotiations would naturally go smoothly.
But if the owners were making less, they naturally wouldn't want to give the players too large a cut.
The players, of course, wouldn't be happy about that.
So they would negotiate round after round, and if they still couldn't reach an agreement, the NBA would grind to a halt.
If the NBA shut down, the losses would amount to far more than just tens of billions of dollars.
The entire massive NBA industry would be hit hard.
And the league's mid-tier and lower-tier players would face the greatest threat during a shutdown.
With the NBA shut down, they wouldn't get paid, and many lower-tier players would end up in extremely difficult circumstances.
This year's labor negotiations should have been easy to settle, because with Wang Yi around, the owners