"Ken Berger, in his most recent and very thoughtful piece, describes one of the key hold-ups in the CBA negotiations. To put it simply, he points out that a new, lower BRI percentage for players will result in certain teams being overextended in 2011-12, possibly so much so that they'd be forced to exceed a newly instituted hard/harder cap.

What is more, the current free agent class could bear an undue burden in shouldering salary cuts and/or teams with cap space would have an undue burden in paying/overpaying these free agents.

I see two, non-mutually exclusive ways that these issues could be addressed. First, let's suppose there was a hard cap of $70 million per team, and all teams had to spend at least $60 million. Teams could be allowed to exceed the cap so long as their only additions were minimum salary players and rookies."