Taking less money defeats the purpose of Salary Cap?

You're confusing fantasy leagues with the real league. The salary cap's "big purpose" is to make the owners more money. So, stars taking less money reinforces the big purpose of the salary cap.

 

I thought salary cap was for competitive balance. The hard cap has helped hockey with that.

 

Salary cap mitigates free agency, but doesn't fully offset it. And helps keep contracts in check. If players want to participate in keeping contracts lower, I imagine the league is ok with this.

 

How much do you think LerBon, Kobe, Howard, Martin, Duncan would make if there were no caps?

 

The NBA actually mandates that superstars take less than they deserve. Lebron is worth at least 30 mil a year, but has to take less than 20 mil by rule.

 

The NBA salary cap has never created competitive balance. It's "big purpose" is to restrict how much revenue the players can get from the NBA pie. Don't confuse Salary Caps in NBA Fantasy Leagues with the real league.

Were you asleep for the 6mos during the lockout?

 

I thought the debate over the split of BRI percentage was more about the how much the players and owners make from the NBA pie and not the salary cap?

The salary cap, which includes the luxury tax, I was created for teams like LA and NY not to outspend the smaller markets leading to more balanced competition. Thats why the Luxury tax was increased in the new CBA I think becuase it was low enough before for the Jerry Busses of the league to not care to pay it as long as they won.

Am I wrong?

 

The salary cap is directly tied to the BRI. It goes up and down based on agreed split of the BRI. The salary cap and luxury cap thresholds are essentially the player's share of the BRI split into 30 team portions. Max salaries are based on a percentage of the salary cap, so they too are directly tied to the BRI.

But the main point is the many, many months and meetings during the lockout was strictly about the BRI split and making the owners more money and much, much less about competitive balance. That just doesn't happen in the NBA and never has.

Anyone who still thinks the "big purpose" of the lockout or any CBA is about competitive balance is in fantasy league land.

 

The salary cap does preserve competitive balance. It's really the BRI% that puts money in the owners' pockets. And yes, taking less than market value undermines the efficacy of the salary cap because if all actors acted strictly on price, teams would be more equal. But, I wouldn't say the cap was 'defeated.' I think the cap is still generally effective despite the distortions of max salaries and veterans taking less money to play for a contender.

 

Ah, ok. Definitely agree that the bulk of that lockout was about how much money each side would make. However, I do believe that the purpose or at least what the commish hoped for with the salary cap and increased luxury tax was to balance out the competition of the league.

Whether it eventually does that or not has yet to be seen with the new CBA.

 

I agree. The new CBA is stronger than any prior CBA in getting competitive balance clauses in there, but it fell far short of what most of us hoped.

But, imo, the main reason the CBA cannot really achieve competive balance in the NBA versus other sports is because of the unique nature of the NBA. The NBA is a league of a small set of franchise players. They are going to move if they want to...no matter what the Salary Cap is.

bottomline: the lottery and tanking does more for competitive balance than 11th-hour "technical issues" meetings that merely patched a hodge-podge of new CBA clauses together -- reminds me of the tax code.

 

True. The lottery and tanking, however, are also flawed in keeping the NBA competitive in its own way as well.

In other words, the NBA is all kinds of effed up.

 

One thing to note about "taking less money" is that not using your Bird Exception in FA and signing with a new team leaves a tremendous amount of money on the table...much more than the $1m (or so) that Lebron left on the table to save money for Bosh.

So, ask yourself, does leaving ten of millions of dollars on the table by moving teams in FAgency defeat the purpose of the Salary Cap? Do SnTs defeat the purpose of the Salary Cap?

btw: your first post you referred to "superstars." There are not too many "superstars" in history, and certainly none now, who have taken contracts less than "reasonably proportional to their ability." Wade and Lebron are close to the max...or correct me?

 

It's there to prevent a New York Yankees situation from happening.

 

Well, then it failed to work.

 

Maybe. But that certainly isn't its sole reason. And secondly, not every player is going to take 'less' money, so the team won't be able to simply throw $$ around to build a fantasy team and treat the league like a sandbox. The fact that Miami has had to play Joel Anthony and Juwan Howard is proof that it's not a total failure.

 

It's the max contract that defeats the stated purpose of salary cap (competitive balance). When Joe Johnson and LeBron James are both max players, you know the system is skewed.

 

max contract and salary cap certainly can lead to some bad contracts. Unfortunately it is needed to keep some competition.

I think what would help is contract lengths are tied to a tiered system on how much a player makes. For example, a player is limited to 2 year contract for max pay. A min pay player can have up to 5 years. 3 to 4 year contracts would be in the middle.

This would keep bad contracts from floating around the league for years and it would force the larger market clubs to be more careful on how they stacked their teams.