Raise Stars' max salary to restore competitive balance?

Domination...

 

Why would the league want to end superfriends? They had record revenues with superfriends last year and the majority of title teams since the 80's have had superfriends type talent.

Parity in basketball is a myth.

 

David Stern promoted this, and now he wants "competitive balance," just after a ratings record year? Please. Stick with what works.

 

I would really have loved to give Joe Johnson $50 million/yr.

 

Basketball is the ultimate ME team sport.

Its one of the few sports that if you have one player who is better then any one else your team can win.

That's Why Elite players should be able to make Elite un capped money as long as they are Elite.

Once they stop being Elite the should be cut or have their deal restructured.


Owners don't realize that by capping Max salaries they made Winning more important than money.

Money needs to have importance then winning from a player perspective in order for the League to have true competitive Balance.

You don't want the leagues top players thinking this.

What is the big deal if I loose 10 mil over the life of a 5 year deal? If I win championships and make a ton of extra money off endorsements by increasing the value of my personal brand.
(sound familiar)

IF Cleavland could Pay Lebron say 30 mil a year the way St louis could pay Albert Pulos if they wanted their would be no way LeBron would have left Cleavland.

Back in the day part of the Motivation to be the MAN on a Nba team was to make the BIG money.

The kind of Money that only a team that really needed you could pay.

When just about every team with cap space can pay you the same money + or minus a few Million money players start weighing in other factors like opportunity to win, quality of life stuff like that.

If the Nuggets could have given Melo a partially guaranteed 30 Mil a year, 5 year deal he would be in Denver right now screaming from the roof tops how much he loves Denver and never wanted to leave.

In order for there to be competitive Balance, Money has to be Ultimate Carrot and great equalizer.

Owners are finding out the hard way that Cost certainty can sometimes create new problems that you may not have been ready to deal with.

 

It's been pretty clear to me for a while that the superstars should be making more than they currently are and the middling guys should be making quite a bit less, not even from a competitive balance standpoint, just common sense.

 

THANK YOU! someone finally gets it. all the people complaining about the heat's super team and what it does to competitive balance don't even seem to understand how it was formed. i mean, you've got people calling miami a big market team.

the heat didn't get their trio by outspending everyone yankees-style. they had something like the 17th highest payroll. they did it by taking a huge gamble (or a small one given how much you think they knew before free agency). they got rid of essentially every contract on their team (good luck if that doesn't work out) and then had to convince a bunch of high-profile free agents to join their team (good luck if that doesn't work out).

and even if you want to argue that this particular team knew it could get these 3 players (certainly won't be the case with most teams clearing cap room), the only reason it could even theoretically work is what abbott (and plenty of others) points out, that star salaries are capped. if wade and lebron were making the $25M, $30M or whatever that they could get, they wouldn't be able to team up. the difference in sacrificing $2M/yr and $20M/yr might make the choice a little bit more difficult. as opticon pointed out, money is a great equalizer. but by all means, let's b**** about big market teams forming superteams when it was a mid-market team that did it and only did it with rules you don't want to change.


and then of course, as Icehouse (and me and plenty of others) pointed out, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that parity works for the nba. the world let out a collective yawn when san antonio and detroit were showing up in the finals. and didn't when jordan, the lakers, and the heat were. it's funny, you have people talking about how much competitive balance would help the nba make money and then you have people (probably some of the same people) b****ing every time the lakers or knicks get a call, talking about how much the big market teams winning will help the nba make money. given the prevalence of the latter over the years, and all the supporting data to back it up, it's amazing how many people want to espouse the former.

apparently competitive balance means no team should be bad or good for too long and no one should have to live with their mistakes or successes. signed a bad contract? don't worry, just cut the guy and start over next offseason, no reason your stupidity should hold you back in this balanced world. signed a great young team? well don't worry about dreams of years of long, dynastic playoff runs, we're gonna ship some of that talent off to the stupider (or less lucky) gm's to make sure they have fun, too. and then you all get a ribbon!

 

@francis

Teams shouldn't be exempt from their mistakes, I think one way we restore competitive balance is by having the league be more strict about who owns teams, and how they're running them.

Take the Knicks, for almost a decade they had Isiah Thomas screwing everything up. One bad trade or signing after another. What does Dolan do? Nothing. The league should intervene and punish the owner for not firing Isiah.

Look at the Warriors or the Clippers. Both teams have made the playoffs, I think once each since the turn of the century. There should be a financial penalty on the owners who can't get their team to pull it together.

 

Thats exactly right. If the league wants parity in TITLE CONTENDERS, they need to change the playoffs structure to allow more UPSETS, simple as that.

Need to allow a team on a hot streak to streak all the way through to the Finals. Instead of them playing like 90 more games in the long postseason getting worn down and the more talented team wins.

Upsets are upsetting though, thats partly why no one wants them.

And its not about parity. Its about playing more games especially postseason games to get more ad revenue per-game back. A 7 game series makes MUCH more money than a 3 game series.

 

Morey has been talking about this for a while. Basically he wants hard cap with no spending limit on any player so that spending wisely becomes a good thing.

And for those who keep talking about how great the ratings are, that would only matter if the NBA fully revenue shares. The Timberwolves and the Kings aren't exactly basking the glory of Superfriends lighting the league on fire.

 

I'm not sure how much sense it makes for superstars in the NBA to be making 30-40 million dollars a year. It would end up like the US economy in which 1% of the population holds the majority of wealth. This is just plain dumb.

 

The thing is that if you remove the MAX salary, hardened the cap just a little and had true revenue sharing...all problems solved. If you don't do all three then it will be business as usual with only an exchange in how much pie is given to each side.


However, there is absolutely no system that can be created that will make people make smart decisions with their roster.

 

Professional sports isnt like college or high school or amateur sports. Its just like movies and the entertainment industry. Tom Cruise is gonna get $30 mil for a film and everyone else gets peanuts, cuz he's the major draw. It would be silly of Cruise to ONLY accept $5 mil off a $500 mil movie, or to "cap" him at that amount when he's drawing CONSIDERABLY MORE in box office.

Endorsements aside, for a while Michael Jordan's NBA salary was BARELY more money than Toni Kukoc. Until Jordan rightfully said screw it I'm gonna get paid $30+ mil for my work.

It makes sense what Morey is saying about hard cap/no player spending limit. They'd have their OWN operating budget just like a movie or business, and they can balance the costs out however they wish.

 

All that is true..

Preaching to the choier...the max limits on contracts is both so they don't invest too heavily in bum players or players with diminishing returns. And its to keep front offices from spending STUPIDLY on THEMSELVES. (No one even had to pay Jerome James and Eddy Curry all that money in the first place.)

And even in a hard cap/no max/revenue share there's gonna be an Eddy Curry contract. But yeah 6 years guaranteed of Eddy Curry, can see why owners would be upset with the current way lol.

 

What does that even mean? Yeah, parity doesn't exist right now, but it's certainly not impossible for us to have more of it.

 

True. But there won't be Eddie Curry's contract, Stephon Marbury's contract, Allan Houston's contract, Jared Jeffries contract, Jamal Crawford's contract, etc. etc. etc. all on one team.

The hard cap let people spend stupidly, just not unlimited spending stupidly. The latter is very different from the former.