For the players. I ask this for a few reasons... A) Lebron is the most underpaid player on the face of the planet. His value, in my eyes, would easily be, well, whatever someone was willing to pay him. 40 million? 50 million per year? Who knows, but either way hes making far below what he is worth. B) The idea Lebron is worth 45 million per year (for the sake of argument) means that whatever team he plays for would have less money to spend on other players. The salary cap remaining in its current form, how good could the Heat be if one player was 60% of their salary. Which leads me to... C ) Super teams would less likely form, thus, spreading the talent out among teams. Like Lebron would ever go play for the Heat for his current salary when another team would offer him 40 or 50 per. The Lakers couldn't go out and try and steal every free agent that can tie his shoes still. With the CBA now, no team can afford Lebron AND Durant, so one would have to go elsewhere. D) I understand the fear of overpaying a player (Lewis, Arenas) but to me, if you take a gamble like that, well so be it. You gamble and lose, happens every day in the game of life. There are always losers.
If you have no max salary and keep the salary cap. There wouldn't be a fair spread amongst the players, which is something the players union wouldn't like. Lebron making 45 million wouldn't be 60% of the cap either. Also, if you were to get rid of the salary cap. Say good bye to an even playing field, the Nba would turn into a Mlb, Epl or La liga mould. If it's not broken don't screw around with it, i say.
it's better to take on a communism approach, everyone plays without pay, except for free eating, housing, etc.
Nothing to do with "fair". Right now, a bunch of midlevel vets are getting overpaid while the superstars like Lebron and guys on rookie scale contracts are underpaid. This itself is not "fair." The reason is that the NBA Player Association is one man one vote when it comes to ratifying the CBA. So, the CBA ends up taking from a small minority without much voting power and give it to a larger portion of players. There are more Roger Masons and Matt Bonners out there than there are Lebrons and Hardens. It is actually more curious how a sports league, like the the NFL as far as I know, does end up with a cap and no max individual salary given how voting power is allocated.
If you have no max, then you need a hard cap and the players won't go for that. Putting the 2 together is one of the simpler ideas for getting more parity in the league.
You'd see much more parity and competitive balance in the NBA with: 1. Hard Cap - raise it to the average of what teams actually spend now to make it more palatable to the union 2. No max salary for players 3. Let teams release players for 1/2 their cap value (but still pay their full salary); this would be a union-friendly move that would increase actual pay This would especially help small market teams that, right now, have no hope of attracting top-tier free agents because they can't offer anything that the big cities can't offer.
I like the idea of this. Would you still keep the rookie pay scale? Or perhaps structure it to only 2 years with no team option?
I've always been a fan of no max salary with a hard cap. I'm also open to no max salary and no cap, but I'm a bit hesitant to do that. But both would be better than the mess we have now.
I remember coming across something on the internet that was intriguing to me. I can't remember where I saw it and I really don't know if it would work well, but it was just an idea. Basically...it's like slotting pay for each player on your team. Player A: Free to be paid anything up to the max Player B: Free to be paid anything up to, say, 12 mil per year Player C: Free to be paid anything up to, say, 8 mil per year And so on and so forth... Once again, I'm sure there is a glaring flaw that I'm overlooking that somebody could point out, but it sounds intriguing to me because the true star players will have to take a serious pay cut if they really want to team up with the other stars.
Owners won't agree to it because that's a huge financial risk. Imagine a Grant Hill / Orlando situation except with 5 years / 250 mil. That type of guy gets injured, you lose money, marketability, ticket sales for the next 5 years. Add some kind of amnesty option for big contracts? But who could afford to amnesty that kind of contract, except the biggest market teams? And the players won't agree to it because it hurts what they like to call "the middle class." Anyway, this IMO looks like a solution to problem that isn't so bad. I don't mind superteams, it's generally good basketball. I also don't want teams to ping pong from best to worst because of one injury or signing. I just want every team to have a shot to build a contender. So I'd rather want them to work on better revenue sharing.
^ just to clarify, i don't want everyone to be a contender, i just want everyone to have a chance to build contender if they are smart enough. So I'm fine with the current system. Just share the revenue, please. I want the Pacers to be able to afford a bit of luxury tax, expensive coaches, great analytics teams, and such.
I actually like the rookie pay scale with the team option the way it is now. Damn near perfect in my eyes.
It's a stupid concept due to poorly run teams doing stupid things with money. Hence, by trying to create cost certainty, the owners instead simply shifted overpayment from stars to the average/above-average players. Basically it arose from this timeline. 1. Owners complaining that when stars become FAs, they leave their team. 2. CBA creates "Bird rule" which allow teams to pay for their own FAs beyond the salary cap. 3. Owners than proceed to give stupid money to their own FAs, the most pointed to player being Kevin Garnett getting $20mil/yr back a decade ago. 4. Owners then realize that when they give stupid money to their own FAs, they don't have flexibility to make the team better elsewhere. 5. Hence, Max salary is created 6. Owners still pay stupid money, except rather than giving KG $120mil, they give Jerome James $30mil, Hedo $48mil, Cato $42mil, etc. Nothing changed to the bottom line, except stars get pissed that they can't make what they're worth, and average role players get life-time financial security for being average.
We've been talking about this for a long time. Hard cap with no max contract is good for the league but the Players Association will never allow it. And some owners have to protect themselves from their own stupid management. Marginal players are eating up millions from the superstars. Middle class players are overpaid regularly because of dumb "asset" management.
you want this passed? you have to get the players union to sign off otherwise a huge lockout and there are many more mid level regular players than stars and they jsut wont approve. The idea makes sense and probably gives about fair market value, but they don't want that.
I don't really agree with your reasoning, max salaries are pretty much a new thing, and the NBA wasn't exactly a level playing field before they were introduced. As you said his value depends on whatever someone was willing to pay him. However in the current NBA structure a lot of players right now are underpaid, including our very own James Harden. NBA players like all human beings want to compare their own situation to players like them. If you removed the max all it would really do is increase the max....up to let's say 40M. Your points B and C don't really lead into each other. What is the difference between Tim Duncan, MJ and KG? It's that TD and MJ took discounts off their max salaries so their GM could surround them with better talent, and KG didn't. Sure Mchale wasn't exactly a good GM, but one of the main reasons those T-wolves teams were so bad was because he had no capspace to work with his mistakes. You can argue that Mchale was a bad GM so he deserved it...but all the "super teams" right now have good GMs! OKC, Blazers, Miami, Lakers, Clips...all of those already have good GMs. Who has the bad GMs? Why, the ones owned by bad teams. OTH, TD, Manu and Parker could have all made the absolute max when their contract expired, but they didn't. Because Pops convinced them that winning was more important than $$$. So really, all removing the max will do is increase the power of collusion in the NBA. Money is important, but for some stars winning is more important. MJ, for example, could have made as much as 31M every year, but he only did that in the last year of his contract with the Bulls. The rest of the time, he only signed for 7M a year. Money wasn't a factor when the 3 Kings decided to get together, they shared whatever the capspace was equally between the 3. So in a theoretical world where OKC only had KD because they couldn't afford anyone else, how overpowered would Miami be? And then there's what I call the role player effect. The smaller the role player's salary is, the higher the effect of incidental perks of some states. For example, if Parson's contract expired and he's looking for a new contract, would he stay in Houston for 1M? Or how about in LA, where he could make around 200K more in endorsements? If his salary was 7M (around his market value IMHO), then 200k isn't really a lot of cash. But if he only made 1M, then that's like 20% more gross income in his pocket. So really, all removing the max would do is decrease the parity in the NBA. What the NBA really needs is the ability to clear the roster of bloated contracts, just like what the NFL has.
This is only true because there is a max salary that limits what you're giving up. For Lebron, winning a championship is worth more to him than the extra million or so in salary. But would it be worth it to him to take $15MM instead of the $30MM or $40MM that some team might offer him? That's much more difficult to give up.
