http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2012/7/12/3151439/nba-free-agency-2012-brook-lopez-roy-hibbert Great article that explains why good players get superstar money. It's kinda counter intuitive. The Most lucid part being... " In an ideal world, I think the NBA would be well-served to have no maximum player salary and a harder salary cap. Let LeBron make $50 million if that's what he's deemed to be worth and there's a team out there willing to commit 75 percent of its cap to him. Just know that, if James makes $50 million, it means there's much less incentive to pay Lopez and Hibbert the salaries they got. In a superstar's league, the superstars would make superstar money, while the non-superstars wouldn't." No more super teams? More parity? I think so
Nobody really wants parity. People actually want super teams, even if it's just to hate them. Besides, no max with a hard cap does not seem fair to the mid-level guys like Lopez or Hibbert who probably are worth 10 million a year because good centers are rare. No max contracts is a good idea though because a player like James might be worth even more than 50 million a year, but his team should have the financial capability to put a decent team around him. A possible solution would be to eliminate max contracts and only have a certain percentage of a designated franchise player's salary count against the hard cap.
Eh. That read like a college frosh who just took microeconomics. This information is surprising to no one. The CBA is what it is for a reason. The middle class of the NBA players have all the voting power and have negotiated a ton of perks for themselves: limited max contracts, tons of 'exceptions', high salary floors. There's little incentive for the elite players to make a huff over the difference between $20m per year vs $30m per year. Owners, on the other hand, would LOVE to have the option of paying elite players more money at the expense of mid-level talents/players. Hell you could go total free market economics. Get rid of individual team/player caps AND salary floors and the system would work better. At a certain point, it would be cost-prohibitive to keep adding talent. No owner would try to build a team with 3 $50m players. Owners would be better off, elite players would be better off. Only the middle class would be shat on. The entire system is setup that few players actually get paid their worth.
tl;dr but I agree max contracts should be eliminated. The bottom line is the top few players are responsible for a massive amount of the NBA's revenue stream and they should be rewarded for it. Middling and below average players are just riding the gravy train and not contributing much to it. I've argued this for years. BTW, there still wouldn't be parity.
Speak for yourself, I hate the fact that the Rockets have no shot at a title and only 3 teams have a real chance to win it all.
There is a reason why the NFL is so much more popular... any given year your team can make the playoffs... doesn't matter if you were 3-13 the last year or 5-11...
Not if you are the Browns, Jaguars, or a team with an awful QB, your chances are very small for any extended playoff runs or being a serious Super Bowl contender. Brady, Rodgers, Manning, Manning, Brees, and Roethlisberger ... no other QB has won an NFL championship, since 2002 season. Most teams in this NFL do not have a realistic shot at winning the Super Bowl, unless there's a pretty good QB under center. You've got those six, while I think future winners likely come from teams featuring: Philip Rivers, Tony Romo, Matt Schaub, Matt Ryan, Michael Vick, Matt Stafford, Cam Newton, Andrew Luck, Jay Cutler, RGIII, Joe Flacco, or Andy Dalton . . . Even in the newer and more fan friendly NFL, 3-13 team or 5-11 making the playoffs the next year doesn't happen as often as you think, while there are several NBA teams who are either in the lottery one season and make the playoffs in the next. You cannot pretend that bad teams or teams with inferior record never get into the NBA playoffs, because often times they do. The NFL does have parity, but not as much as people would like to think. Plus the talent pool is much bigger in the NFL and MLB . . . parity is alot more fathomable. NFL is more popular in America, but outside of this country . . . . not nearly as popular as the NBA. Also, a good number of stars literally make more off-the court than they do on the court. The NBA is not doing horrible . . . TV ratings and revenue is at an all time high. There are way more competitive teams now than there was in 80s and 90s. Suddenly, everyone wants parity, even though league improved substantially, since the Magic-Bird days. In fact, can you name any other teams that consistently challenged the Lakers in the West, during the 80s. The Lakers could be anywhere from 10-17 games ahead of the 2nd seeded team. Even with a harder cap, everyone saw what happened with Miami, a superstar may sarcifice his potential earning salary and in order to create a top-heavy team. They all took less money. Even look at the Lakers, during the Shaq-Kobe years . . . their roster was fairly mediocre In the NBA, there's only so many stars that can go around, besides the NBA problem is already having too many mediocre teams ... yet hypothetically there might be more under a harder cap. Because the good teams won't be able to stock pile players. There's already parity in basketball. Small market teams can compete with bigger ones, just look San Antonio, Utah, Indiana, Portland, Oklahoma City, and Denver. The worst franchises are a mix-bag of big city teams and smaller city teams. The disparity comes from competent management vs. not-so competent management. Hell, Cleveland and Toronto had superstar players and it didn't necessarily make those franchises all that much better.
Here's my thing did you like the system, during the 90s, when the Rockets were one of the few teams who had a realistic shot at the title, outside of Chicago and New York. Even with Yao and T-mac, that was an anomaly to have two high-order superstars, like that. The Rockets have actually one of the more fortunate teams in the league.
THere's nothing wrong with the MAX contract in principle, BUT the people who are given them is the question ... Again that falls into the lap of individual GMs and owners.
the players union won't let it happen, because most of them are roleplayers and their salaries would be cut drastically.
The main problem with this kind of economic analysis for sports is that sports franchises don't compete with each other the way businesses do. In sports, teams are trying to win games. In business, companies are trying to increase their market share and put their competitors out of business. So the economics just don't work the same. It's closer to the truth to say that all of the players work for the NBA, and not for their individual teams. When the Knicks and the Rockets bid against each other for the services of Jeremy Lin, it makes about as much sense as for the Medical Division of GE to bid against the Aircraft Service division for the services of an engineer. The system isn't broken because of max contracts, or because of other slight peculiarities. It's broken by its very nature. In some ways, what should happen is that all basketball related revenue (including endorsements) should get put into a pool and then divided up somehow amongst the players and owners. That's not going to happen, and its going to be a very long time before anyone realizes that other people might deserve a share of LeBron and Kobe's shoe money. But it ultimately would be a better model for the league than what they now have.
I like the idea of getting rid of the draft and let each team have an academy to develop young players, much like in soccer.
Okay then why is baseball more popular? So much parity in that league where someone can just buy all the good players. /sarcasm
more likely it's popular because Americans love football. MLS (the soccer league) has similar parity, yet most people don't seem to care. on the other hand, NCAA football is still more popular than NCAA basketball, although parity is similar.
I would LOOOOOVE no max contracts. Let the market dictate what the players make. Morey would OWN that NBA, not the artificial NBA where super teams can be made. Parity would rule the NBA alot more than it is now.
How would Morey own that NBA? That Russian owner on the Nets would win. This would be like baseball with the richest owner buying all the good players. Not only that but individual players in basketball have a bigger impact than individual players in baseball.
If there were a Hard Cap then I think Morey could own that NBA. Right now it is just WAAAAYYY to easy for superstars to be on the same team. If an owner is willing to pay enough then he could technically sign people for cheap and then give them stupid rich extensions. At the end of the day football IS more popular because just being in the playoffs you have an honest chance to win it all (see Wild Card Super Bowl Winners), but in the Modern NBA if you're not one of the top 4 teams in your conference you basically have NO shot....
