Next season luxury tax: 76ers, Celtics, Nets, Clippers, GSW

i think the nba may offer teams a way to deal with the luxury tax next year. Not sure if they will end up paying that much on tax, or force them to get rid of players. Maybe even allow them to cut 1 player ( paying their full contract, but so it dosent go against their salary cap).
I guess time will tell.

 

on the one hand, it feels like they're going to have to make some sort of "fake" cap/luxury tax/hard cap so teams don't have to just cut/trade players for nothing. if not, existing contracts will probably suck up most of the cap room before free agency begins (basically the opposite of the cap spike offseason)? if you keep a fake higher cap, players would get more than their 50%, possibly even beyond the escrow system.

will owners go for that? i'm guessing not. will any player on an existing contract agree to give any money back to essentially even the playing field for free agents? i'm guessing not.

if you calculate a real cap but but just pretend existing contracts are only worth something like 80-85% for cap/LT purposes, then you seemingly have a situation where teams are paying more than shows up on the cap and teams with richer owners will be more willing to keep existing contracts and add to them (since the 75-85% contracts won't knock them way into the LT). cheaper teams might stay below the cap. maybe make the contracts 80% for cap but 90% for LT or something staggered like that.

will be interesting if the actual cap changes by more than the 10% mentioned and it's something like 20% lower.

 

The Union has already agreed to pay cuts. They start in May.

I'm guessing a huge (yet temporary) drop in BRI will be accompanied with some type of recalculation of what constitutes the Luxury Tax Line and the Salary Cap, as some kind of compromise with the Union for agreeing to pay cuts on existing contracts. That is to say, they might have the leverage to compromise on not drastically (yet temporarily) dropping all the exceptions, which would only serve to screw one or two classes of free agents.

 

but weren't those pay cuts for this year based on some rule that basically says if the games aren't played then the league can invoke such and such rule to reduce pay and then maybe the players get it back if the season happens (unlikely at least for the regular season)? i wonder if they actually play the games next year and revenue just drops because of reduced attendance (I assume the larger TV money stays), will the spirit of compromise remain so high among players who already got paid (since there should be more non-FA's than FA's). maybe in such trying times, a show of solidarity will become important among the union ranks and they will agree to reduced pay as opposed to creating have's and have not's, but i assume it's far from certain.

i guess we're probably far enough from the cap spike season that the people becoming FA's are probably a good mix from people who benefited from the cap spike and some who didn't. maybe the players don't even care about all the guys who got paid too much that season, but i would if i was a player and i would be doubly mad if i somehow had to take a paycut this year.

 

IF healthy.

 

Are we just going to ignore that Big Bum has a CFO?