The effects of waiving players - Lebron got his wish

Bogut has been garbage this season and Williams hasn't been great. So, YES.

 

I don't think that is the issue we are talking about. Nobody is trying to prevent the players from signing with any team (except the one he was traded from). These guys are free agents and should be free to sign.

What is being discussed is that in mid season, few teams have significantly more than the minimum to offer. So if everybody can only give them the minimum or close to it, of course they are going to sign with the contenders. The weaker teams have no way to compete with the super teams in getting the service of these waived players who still can have significant contribution.

This is like if you limit all the teams to sign UFAs to the same amount, then you are basically privileging the super team to make them even better and decreasing further the competitiveness of the weak teams. One of the biggest advantage these teams can have in the FA market is the ability of offering more money. That's the whole idea of the salary cap. In fact, many posters already pointed out the problem with max contracts. Max contracts also give an edge to the good teams in getting star players. The nature of mid season signing of waived player has similar issue.

 

If you're going to change the rules to punitively target super-teams built largely externally or via player relationships, then how do you distinguish the collateral damage to teams like the Thunder of the past 10 years, or the Spurs of the past 20 years, or even the big-3 Celtics of the 2000's? Those are teams and rosters created or orchestrated largely via superior decision making in free-agency, via the draft, and via salary-cap management on top of "strategic" win/loss pursuits .

Even a team like the '16/'17 Warriors: Klay, Steph, Draymond are all draft picks. That is, an2-time MVP, a top 5 Shooting Guard, and an all-Nba forward - drafted. Buttressed by smart acquisitions like Livingston, Iggy, etc. I hear you on the rich getting richer thing, but how many corners are we going to let tanking teams cut? Why would we punish elite roster managment and talent assessment decisions organizations make?

There's no easy way to do this. I don't view this as anything which needs to be fixed. This is a derivative or function of great teams being great - they become greater.

I mean it's like arguing with insurance company's that a 45 yr old with no accident history deserves similar premiums to 16, 18, or 21 year old's with no accident history. The divergence exists largely as a product of itself.

 

I don't think what we are talking about is letting tanking teams cut corner. It's not that at all. It's giving weaker or non contending teams (not just those tanking bottom feeders) the ability to offer more money to attract FAs. I totally agree that off season signing has a lot to do with smart cap management. Mid season signing of buyout players is different because almost all teams spend all their available cap space in the off season. So it has nothing to do with smart management but simply by having a good chance to win a championship.

Morey is one of the best asset and cap managers in the league. Yet he has not been able to assemble a super team. The most important reason is that he cannot offer more money than any other team who has the same cap space. Remember before we got Harden, Morey was so desperate in getting a star he literally made a lot of potentially bad deals in hindsight. (Pau, Nene, Bosh, Lin, Bosh again, Melo. Even picking Morris over Leonard had something to do with trying to hit the high upside thing.) We were lucky by dodging several bullets where some of these deals did not get done for one reason or another.

Once you are lucky enough to get an elite player, you begin to get rich enough to get richer. Cleveland would never get a super team no matter how smart they managed if they didn't get LeBron. Now they can sign good veterans for the minimum and there's nothing other teams can do to prevent that because they cannot offer more money to attract those players.

 

I don't think 1 sentence out of my 4 paragraphs was what I was talking about, at all, either LOL. So we agree on this. The one sentence you highlighted from 4 paragraphs carried 0 weight WRT my point. I brought it up to highlight that you feel the current setup benefits teams at the top - by definition - a rule change will disproportionately help teams at the bottom (inarguable in a 0 sum environment).

That was just an aside. My point remains the same. And your inference...

that Offseason is smart cap management and mid-season is different is, IMHO, wholly incorrect. The cap is the cap. It's $XXX. It's $XXX on day 1 of the league year, day 1 of free agency, day 1 of the regular season, at the all-star break, and game 7 of the finals.

It's management's job to manage to that cap. It's never a moving target intra-season. That's the point. Off-season and mid-season are absolutely dependent upon each other. If you are nimble and spend the offseason acquiring assets at market value or below, you will have 0 problem creating mid-season capspace regardless of whether you were capped out when the season began.

Simple and extreme examples: Seth Curry 2 yrs / 6mm, Dwayne Dedmon 2 yrs / 6mm, Troy Daniels 3 yrs / 10mm vs Chandler Parsons 4 yrs / 94mm, Dwayne Wade 2 yrs / 47.5 mm, etc. If you're a capped out with one of the first 3 contracts, creating cap space is a phone call away. If you're a capped out team with one of the latter two - RUH ROH R'EORGE. Simple.

 

Just want to respond to your last paragraph. Every team has big contract players and small contract players. Whether those players are good players who worth their contracts is a totally different issue. Your examples are comparing GOOD small contract players to BAD big contract players.

Every team could have got rid of their small contract players to sign a guy like Bogut. But would it be worth it? For example, would it be worth it to unload Daniels to get Bogut or Williams? Maybe, maybe not. So it goes back to square one. In order to sign a good value waived player, the vast majority of teams would have to choose between (1) giving up a serviceable player to offer good money or (2) offering minimum money. And if you are not a super team, offering the minimum is not going to cut it.

 

I'm not doing a good job of showing you the forest. Good cap management keeps you away from "BAD big contracts players." Did anyone confuse Parsons or Dwade for max level players last year? And yet the Grizz and Heat felt compelled to make those moves b/c they fancied themselves a prime Parsons or watered-down Wade away from taking the next step. It's just a risk/reward decision management makes. It's identical to the risk/reward process which has to be undertaken for the "small contract players" b/c - again, and I want to stress this - the cap is the cap. The magnitude of the risk and the magnitude of the reward can vary significantly from one decision to the next - nevertheless the process is uniform.

If Bosh signs here then we probably go all-in, capped to infinity (and beyond!), and match the Parsons deal. Instead, we signed Ariza, thereby avoiding not 1 but 2 "BAD big contract players" and acquiring 1 "GOOD small contract player", and it was all 100% interrelated. Nothing in the cap era is in a vacuum. Each decision levers or unlevers your capacity on the next decision. If you have moveable assets (Hinkie, inspite his faults, always has these) acquired b/c of smart offseason decisions then your platform for creating cap space midseason is great - and vice versa.

<sigh> So? We had or could have created max space to sign LBJ of his last two trips in FA - did we even get a sniff? Did we get a meet with KD? Did more than 15% of the NBA even get a meeting with either? Nope. And all this, despite the fact that 90% of the league either had or could have created the cap space required.

On one extreme it's not fair when teams have 0 to spend midseason and talent winds up in a select few destinations. In the other extreme when teams have max to spend....guess what?.....elite talent winds up in a select few destinations. #Life'sNotFair

If you want to start handing out participation trophies and give teams handicaps so the Suns start at +13 and the Warriors start at 0 at tip-off....ok. Have fun with that. The discussion has jumped the shark for me.

 

I already talked about that. The reason why the Rockets together with a lot of other teams could not land a LeBron or a Durant was because we could not offer MORE than the super team due to the existence of max contract. Max contract, as some posters pointed out, artificially makes all teams to offer the same amount to star players. If a lesser team is not allowed to offer more than a super team can, how are they supposed to compete? You see, this is not just about managing the cap. The system is simply slanted toward encouraging the rich to get richer.

Your final paragraph shows that you still don't see the real essence of the discussion and you are beating up a staw man.