Michele Roberts re-elected as NBPA executive director

National Basketball Player’s Association executive director Michele Roberts has been re-elected for a new four-year term, the labor union announced on Tuesday. Roberts was voted in for the second time by NBA players.

“I am honored that the players have put their trust in me for another four years,” Roberts said in a press release. “I look forward to continuing to serve the best interests of the players by using my voice and my position to advocate on their behalf.”

.@MRobertsNBPA on her re-election:

“I am honored that the players have put their trust in me for another four years. I look forward to continuing to serve the best interests of the players by using my voice and my position to advocate on their behalf.”

— NBPA (@TheNBPA) July 10, 2018

NBPA president Chris Paul, who was similarly re-elected last year, agreed Roberts has helped the players “take back their union” and has helped develop it into one of the strongest in all of professional sports.

.@CP3 on her re-election:

“Our goal when we hired Michele was to take back our union." “With her leadership and guidance, we have not only accomplished that but we have also established the NBPA as one of the strongest and most active unions in all of professional sports.

— NBPA (@TheNBPA) July 10, 2018

Roberts’s re-election comes on the heels of controversy over her decision not to accept the NBA’s proposal to smooth the cap before the 2016 free agency period that saw the NBA salary cap balloon to over $90 million after newly negotiated TV deals.

NBA executive VP of communications, Mike Bass, detailed what smoothing the cap could have done that summer had Roberts chosen that approach.

“Smoothing would have avoided a substantial Salary Cap spike in 2016-17,” he said in a statement to USA Today. “Under the league’s smoothing approach, the salary shortfall resulting from more gradual Cap increases would have been paid directly to the Players Association for distribution to all players, and thus the total compensation paid to players in any given season would not have been impacted.”

In layman’s terms, smoothing the cap would have replaced that $20 million salary cap spike with incremental increases and a lump some of money to be split among the players. Many believe doing so would not have allowed a team like the Golden State Warriors to sign Kevin Durant in 2016, then DeMarcus Cousins this season. But it also would have taken one of the most lucrative free agency periods in NBA history off the table, which is one of the reasons Roberts declined the league’s offer to smooth the cap in 2016.

Smoothing the cap has been a talking point many have spoken on, but Roberts stuck to her guns in an interview with The New York Times’ Kevin Draper.

“Frankly, I have been amused by the chatter suggesting that smoothing — or more accurately the failure to smooth — has now become some folks’ boogeyman de jure,” She said in the interview. “While we haven’t yet blamed it for the assassination of MLK, some are now suggesting that it is responsible for all that is presumably wrong with today’s NBA.”

“Needless to say, I beg to differ.”

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