[SportingNews] SBJ: NBA proposes $45 million hard salary cap

NBA lowballing the PA to kick off the negotiations. Classic move.

 

With players getting hurt and having career ending surgerys and such, the superstars should be making top dollor on the off-chance that they only have 1 or 2 years before theyre done. Players make their living off being healthy and it can be gone at any moment. Really good players deserve more security... I honestly don't see a problem with the cap right now... Seems like the commisioner wants to give the Hornets a chance...

 

45 million . .. . Miami will be playing 3 on 5
Wade, Lebron, and Bosh make 15 million each . . right?

Rocket River

 

They'll have to soften up the hard cap, raise the cap number ($45 million is crazy) and phase it in over 2-3 years.

 

Just establish it as a % of net revenue instead of gross, but make sure the books are open so the owners don't pay their wives or children $50 million a year...

DD

 

i'm not sure why people always think miami will be most affected by a hard cap. they were only 17th in payroll last year and because of the artificial cap of a max contract, lebron and wade have the 2 best non-rookie contracts in the league in terms of value (basketball-wise and business-wise). if they have to build around those 2 value contracts and everyone else has to build around lesser value contracts, you would think they would be better off. i mean look at the lakers, kobe and gasol make $44M just by themselves next year.

and presumably any roll back of the salary cap would involve rolling back existing contracts otherwise every existing contract would pretty much be crippling. so james/wade/bosh shouldn't be making $15M per in a $45M cap environment, they'd be making less and still leaving room for others. i think the thunder and bulls are also in very good situations in terms of how much they are paying for what they are getting, even when rose and noah are off their rookie contracts.

what will be really interesting is how they phase this in over 3 years. do you have to knock off 33% of the difference between your current team salary and the hard cap each year? if so, that would greatly favor the current high payroll teams for the next few years. or will there essentially be a set hard cap that slowly decreases from, say, the current average team salary down to the $45M number.

or whatever the hard cap ends up at. a $45M hard cap after having a $58M soft cap is ridiculous. i think the average team payroll is close to $70M so this really is the $800M league-wide total rollback the owners were after. presumably, this ridiculous demand will get knocked down to something more reasonable like a hard cap in the vicinity of the current soft cap. if the owners are really this far from making money with revenues at all-time highs, then they just suck.

the one thing i do like is lowering the annual increases. it was always stupid to have 10% and 12% increases with a salary cap that went up by 3%. every contract became terrible by the final years. since they currently tie the salary cap to to total revenue i don't know why they don't just do the same with individual contracts. instead of signing for $5.8M, you sign for 10% of the cap. and your salary in subsequent years moves up and down by the same percentage as the cap. that way no one can b****. owners aren't handing out raises faster than revenue increases and player's don't have to worry about being left behind if revenue goes up quickly. and gm's know exactly what they have to offer to free agents, instead of the guessing game we have each year leading up to the release of the league's financial numbers.

 

that would be too easy.

 

what are Stern's real intentions? protect billionaires money? prevent gm from giving stupid contracts? or just get richer?

 

By 2015 Miami would be 20 million over the hard cap of 45 million with the big three alone. I am surprise the Miami owner signed off on this proposal. Chris Bosh would have to be traded if this proposal is implement.

I personally really like this proposal. A Hard cap, franchise tag, and non guaranteed contracts would be good for the league, as you would see smaller market teams go to the finals like in the NFL.

 

LeBron and Bosh have max deals and I belive in few years they'll have something like 16,5 millions per year.

 

It's a classic negotiating ploy, where you give them a low offer and meet in the middle. The $45 mil isn't a serious number.

They will settle for halfway between the $45 mil and the current salary cap, $58 mil. In this case, $51-52 mil would be the halfway mark. They could phase it in gradually from $58 mil, to $56, to $54 mil, to $52 mil.

 

I think that what they could do is a kind of normalization of the cap.

I don't see how a hard cap is going to work, even in a grandfathered situation.

So, here is what I think might be a good solution.

Set up a tier based chart that awards a portion of a players salary toward the cap based on the tier that player falls under.

For example: Bosh, Wade and Lebron and Rudy Gay for example, all fall under the max player tier and then design how much a max player is worth under the cap.

Then, after all of the players salaries have run out, one by one they have to negotiate their contracts under the new rules.

I also think that in trades that, to be consistent, you could trade say Bosh for Andrew Bogut because their salaries in trades are also normalized as max level salaries.

 

So a 14 million dollar player is maxed toward the cap as a 9 million dollar player.

This basically helps the NBA begin the hard cap immediately instead of assigning arbitrarily lower cap numbers which may be unfair to teams like Miami who will be over that cap for 6 years. So much so, that how would miami even operate if something like that is done.

 

This could be the first move of a possible lockout.

 

umh . . don't recall saying that but . . whatever.

Lakers will be a 3 man team too . . . does it make you feel better now?

I can agree with some of that.
To me. ..
I have always thought that they should do player contacts by percentages
[similar to what DD says ]

i.e.
say the players get 60% of the profits. [arbitrary numbers]
The salary cap is set by that number.
each team then assign percentages to players.
For instance.
Miami - they could say Lebron = 20% of Salary Cap
Wade = 20%
Bosh = 20%
That leaves 40% for the rest of the team.
So . . .as the cap rises . . . .their pay increases
when they renegociate . .. then Bosh gets 18% then

[Leaves some uncertainty among the players salary i guess]

Rocket River

 

The NBA makes 4 billion in revenue so 45mil*30=1.350 billion so the players will getting about 33.75% of the revenue. Good luck with that happening. I think they should just take 4billion and give 50% to the players. The owners get 2 billion. If you take 2bil/30 you get about 67 million per team. Make that a hard cap and get rid of all the max salaries, MLE etc.

 

$4 billion revenue is not the same as net profit.
You have to take out operating expenses, taxes(everybody gets taxed including corporations), interest(you have to pay the bankers, too).

For example, MSG is going through repairs and renovation which will cost $850 mil. That's not even counting the interest and finance charges to cover the cost, which could push the total cost over a $ 1 billion, when you add the project costs to the financing cost. That's just one example. We haven't even looked at the other expenses like coaches, front office, trainers, medical expenses(those doctors get expensive), insurance, utilities, security, federal taxes, city taxes, county taxes, state taxes, payroll taxes(businesses pay taxes on staff also, it's not just individuals), etc.

 

Yeah, I don't see this being acepted.