This is an issue for sure. I think one thing you can do is to continue distribute rookie salary slots among teams by how bad they are-- perhaps even with a larger disparity than it does now. For example, lets give the worst team in the league a $6.5 million starting salary to spend on its "first round pick" and the team with the best record only $800K. So, if a guy wants to go to Miami instead of, say, Charlotte, he will have to accept huge big pay cut in order to do so. Lets also allow teams to carry over its unused salary slot for a year, so that it has wider latitude to decide which players to bid on-- this will give the bad teams a more useful tool. This doesn't adress the issue of city preference between two teams with simiilar records. However, if a team gets snubbed for a couple years, it will presumably have racked up a worse record and one or more bigger salary slots, thus enabling it to rebound. Moreover, given the nature of the new luxury tax structure (with much more punitive tax), a prospect will have to think hard about joinining a team with too many existing stars because they may not realistically have the $ to pay the guy his fair value when he comes up for free agency.
http://espn.go.com/espnradio/play?id=7748767 Here's an ESPN podcast on the Clippers. The 2nd half of the discussion (beginning at 14:30 or so) has Henry Abbott discussing the anti-tanking ideas and why he decided to write about it. Interesting to hear him talk about how bad some GMs are.
I've harped on it a ton during the lockout and I'll repeat it here. The way to achieve competitive balance is to have a hard cap with no max salary. Can teams still tank for a #1 pick? Yes. But by the time that #1 player reaches his prime after 3-4 years, he'll be asking for ridiculous money.
I've always wondered about this. In any other business, if you had a CEO doing as bad a job as these GMs, his head would be rolling in a flash. I just don't understand why the owners would tolerate it. I guess the system just don't punish bad management, not just basketball-wise, but also in financial terms. A sucky team can still make money. So there's no incentive other than sport competitiveness for owners to fire bad GMs.
