For everyone complaining about players rejecting cap smoothing

Per the deadspin article - Roberts says the 2016 FAs would have been screwed in a cap smoothing move...but would they? No one who worked their contract to end in 2016 would have known how MUCH the cap was going to increase - just that it would increase by some measure and that would have happened even with cap smoothing. I don't get how this would have been unfair to 2016 FAs who were speculating some sort of increase without knowing the details anyway.

...will be interesting to see if all these 1 yr deals guys are signing now create another market problem - guys looking for a time when teams have cap space and as a result EVERYONE will be a FA at the same time creating an artificial market constraint.

 

I still don't get it. Maybe I am wrong. My understanding is that the players would get their share of the BRI money no matter what the cap was. The cap, smoothed or not, only affects how the money would be distributed, not the overall amount of money paid to all the players. Am I right? Why would the players "unanimously" reject the smoothing when smoothing would shift a portion of the overall money to the handful of free agents in 2016?

The purpose of the cap is not for preventing the players from getting the BRI money. It is for preventing some teams (presumably rich/big market teams) from unfair competitive advantage.

 

Agree. Those weren't even points, unless you call pointing fingers making a point.

 

That is mathematically impossible to for contracts to track with the BRI if the cap is artificially low. The Cap, Max, Rookie Scale, MLE, BAE, Minimum Exception ... every exception to the cap is tied to the BRI. All those exceptions and salary scales would be artificially low, so there is no way to reach your allotted BRI.

Smoothing says, OK, you wont get your BRI allotment this year, but we promise to make up for it in later years by making salary cap artificially high...but in a way that has smooth increases of the cap, not one big jump.

It is absolutely insane for players to vote for smoothing at point of TV revenue coming in.That would be like the TV companies asking the owners to smooth out their payments and take less now, for more later. No one is going to vote for that.

And as a reason for competitive imbalance, come on guys, that's the owners spreading a false narrative...to deflect blame away from other equal or worse reasons.

Start a thread about how to fix competitive imbalance, and the #1 reason will be to eliminate player Max..., cap smoothing was never a top strategy, it's just retroactively being used as something to blame, so we don't talk about other things.

 

Players and Owners did not think this thru, they saw loads of money infront of them and did not care what happens next, and she is part of the reason it happened, now she can't admit she was wrong so shes spinning stuff around, lost a lot of credibility in my (and many other fans) eyes. The only winners are 2016 FA's and GSW fans.

 

I know the cap is set so that the overall salaries would approximate the amount of the players' BRI share. But my understanding is, in case the salary amount does not reach the percentage of the BRI, ALL players will be paid extra so that it would match the correct amount. Is this correct?

Also, I know that cap is not the all-encompassing solution to competitive balance, and I am not arguing for that. I am just stating that the INTENTION of the cap is for that purpose, rather than for suppressing the overall salaries. So my reasoning is that when it comes to how much money players make, the cap is not that relevant. I am not trying to argue for the owners or for the players. Just trying to understand why smoothing is bad for the players collectively.

 

No wtf????

 

Are we complaining about Captain Smooth? Space Hop Vol 1 or what? I mean they suck but I don't think we really need a thread for it.

https://captainsmooth.bandcamp.com/

 

yeah, I said that wrong. Meant to say player base salaries would not track with the BRI, if all exceptions, rookie salary scales, Max, etc are kept artificially low. All new contracts (not just those paid by caproom) would have to be kept artificially low, too.

What you're saying is the player portion of the BRI is paid out regardless to whether base salaries add up to their collective share. Yeah, you're right. The Player Union would presumably get one big bonus check to divvy up, even if the growth of salaries are kept artificially low via smoothing.

So, you're saying that cap smoothing would make no difference in the end, since all contracts would get a BRI-windfall bonus check each year, anyhow?

OK, makes sense.

I guess I don't see how anything stops owners from spending that windfall. Both the players and owners will know that windfall exists, and will push the limits of individual contract limits, and not fear Tax territory, knowing they have significantly more revenue to spend. In the end, the lack of smoothing created a lot of teams with caproom for one year, yet, they are still going to spend, since the Bird Max, rookie scale and all the exceptions went up at the speed of the BRI/cap.

 

You stupid late! Been answered and gave my reasoning for asking it smh

 

Yes, that's exactly what I am saying. And I am saying that by smoothing, the increased revenue would be distributed more evenly to all players. A cap spike basically took some money from the majority of players and gave it to a few who happened to be in the FA market in 2016.

What should have been done, I guess, was the smoothing of the TV income. So instead of getting $100 each year for 5 years, you get $50, $75, $100, $125, $150 (adjusted to inflation).

 

See, now this part I say is just a theory, and likely wrong. (I'm repeating myself from a post I made last week.)

It isn't a spike as in one year. Sure, there was a spike of teams having caproom all in one year, but the cap shot up dramatically, and has kept rising. The cap has all those exceptions for going over it, so the caproom of one year is not all the revenue being realized by the players in each year. This is a huge windfall that is realized by every exception used (including Rookies), in every single year.

So, it can be shown that *every* new contract since 2016 -- including Rookies -- has benefitted more than those still stuck on old contracts. But since most contracts aren't great in length, the players union is resigning new contracts fast. It might very well be shown that more players benefit from no smoothing, than smoothing.

You're just prolonging the period of time and the amount of contracts that are artificially low, by smoothing. It's best for the players get to the new revenue plateau immediately.

I also mentioned this in my post of last week that is indeed the analogy, and how this would make absolutely no sense to the owners, and most would agree that it wouldn't make economic sense to impose smoothing on themselves....so why should Players impose smoothing on themselves.

 

i don't know the rules of all the exceptions, but certainly not every contract is an exception. what did happen, was that the cap in 2017 actually went up less than had been predicted because, based on whatever crazy formula they use for calculating the cap, so much more money than expected was spent in the 2016 frenzy that it actually hurt the cap in 2017 (didn't go down, just went up significantly less). so instead of going into 2017 with teams flush with smoothed cap room, 2017 free agents saw a landscape without that smoothed cap and then even lower than everyone figured. and now 2018 free agents are universally thought to have been hurt by the lack of available room.

and simply spending more on 2016 guys, whatever the exceptions are, means teams have to be tighter now to avoid the LT. maybe a guy gets a contract that is a fraction of an increased MLE, so he theoretically benefits from a higher MLE, but maybe the team he signed with broke the MLE into 3 parts instead of 2. or gave the guy an (increased) BAE even though he usually would have gotten 1/2 an MLE.

but you still have to follow the cap rules. freeing up money as direct cap space that requires no effort to spend vs less cap space that you can exceed through bird rights and such is going to make teams spend more. and the luxury tax would still exist. exceeding it knowing that you have a windfall still means money will be taken out of your pocket and given to owners who don't exceed the LT. in some ways people started pre-spending money in 2015 as they knew they would have more cap room/money in the future. but they were still locked into the cap and didn't go crazy like 2016.


and if i feel confident but can't prove that more players would have benefited from having 2017 and 2018 cap room than just 2016 free agents, i feel extremely confident that michele roberts and the union did not do a contract by contract breakdown of exceptions and cap room and come to the conclusion that 63% of the players would benefit versus 37% or 58% vs 42% or whatever. they heard "take less money" and shut it down, even though they were going to get exactly the same percent of BRI no matter what. maybe a bigger jump in 2015 and 2016 and smaller jump in 2017 and 2018 would have been the best so that each side would have claimed "more" and "less" money in several years (even though they would have gotten the exact same percent of actual BRI), but then i'm sure whichever side had to take the fake "less" money first would have b****ed about that.

 

OK, I get it. I didn't consider the exceptions and the rookie scale, which do benefit more than just the FA class of 2016.

The "theory" was just commonsense thinking. The cap spike gave a lot of teams cap room that otherwise would not have. Then in subsequent years, it would be business as usual again because most of those teams would fill the cap with ludicrous signings in 2016. But with smoothing, every year there would be a lot of teams getting cap room they would not normally have (sort of a mini-2016) and thus more FAs would sign larger contracts in those years they would not have in the "business as usual" years. Plus, the surplus money below the BRI share would be distributed to all players, not just the free agents.

Anyhow, we'll see how it impacts the salaries structures a couple of years from now.

 

In this hypothetical payout scenario for cap smoothing, how does the players association even determine who is a player - at any given point in time there are a ton of FA players who are not on a team/in the league but who could be at any minute. Are we talking people who made an NBA roster for any length of time, do you figure it by minutes played, people who pay dues(which would probably be a much larger number of players), etc....and if it is people who made an NBA roster/played minutes you basically would have to wait until the end of the year to determine that so no one could get paid the bonus until after the year which isn't awful except that the players wouldn't have access to this unused money until later meaning they don't reap the benefits of that money(hundreds of millions of dollars) making dividends from investments - instead the owners are making those dividends on money owed to players that has been deferred to the end of the year on payout because of logistics....which is all a long way of saying cap smoothing may have been a tricky thing to navigate in a way that is somewhat fair - certainly the instant cap spike they went with is a lot easier to negotiate.

 

certainly it wouldn't be easy from a details perspective. the nba cba is insane and complicated and has all sorts of provisions i'll never know about. but the cba didn't become insane and complicated because these guys can't figure things out (someone was crazy enough to invent base year compensation rules!). maybe it perplexes me for the reason that i would have considered it fun to figure out the smoothing rules and what would be fairest to all sides (like not delaying all the extra money until the end of the year like you mentioned) and yet these guys were too lazy to figure out something that could have been figured out.

 

I'm with you - would have been an interesting exercise but probably not something you could boil down into a few sentences to explain but to your point - there are lot of things about the CBA that are equally as complex.