How can Marvs and Kings be so over salary cap? How much luxury tax do they pay? How can Marvs still have two cap exceptions?
Salary Cap Questions How does the Salary Cap system work? And what are Luxury Taxes? I hear a lot that we are strapped for cash, yet according to hoopshype we only have the 22nd biggest payroll. Yes I am a newbie
1. mavs no R 2. what little Les will spend,he doesnt use wisely. See Moochie,Mo,Rice,Cato,Maloney. If its CD fault and not Les,then Les is still at fault for not firing CD. 3.The rockets will NEVER be under the salary cap.Once Cato is finally gone,then Mings max kicks in. See #2. 4.Cant sign anybody since over the cap 5.there is no lux tax YET,but might be next year,and Les wont risk it.See #2 6.new bargaining agreement basically has screwed over the rockets because "balloon" payments arent allowed anymore. The rockets had to cheat the system with Barkleys last year,and Mo with a under table deal and Shandon. Cant play by the rules,so they are stuck with Mo and Rice. 7.Will probably trade a bad contract in Rice for another bad contract but a slightly better player. 8.JVG is the only hope for improvement
Give me a break. Please tell me how Les can spend more $. He can only add another 5 mill via MCE. Did you not pay attention to the Rockets when he brought in Drexler, Barkley, and Pippen? I can't stand it when fans erroneously blame Les for our problems.
They got the players on the cheap (i.e. on rookie contracts) and then when their contracts were up, they gave them big new contracts. Plus they signed a lot of FAs using the MLE and LLE every year. You have to pay double the amount over tax limit. The tax limit is rumoured to be at $52m for the last few years. So for a team like Mavs with a payroll of $70m (?), they have to pay an extra $18m ($70m minus $52m) as luxury tax. For every team that's over the cap, there are 1 MLE (about $4.5m) and 1 LLE (veteran minimum, about $1-2m) available for them to use every year. Clear?
Please dont twist my words around.I did pay attention.How was Pippen a wise move? Also, on the cheap thing, hes not going to pay Lux tax,to me thats cheap. Either try to compete with Cuban and the Kings or do the fans a favor and sell the team. Btw,do you know Les personally?
He can't spend more money because he has already screwed himself over with the previous bad deals with Cato, Taylor, Moochie etc which made us so over the cap. Also I bet he won't spend the MLE this summer because under the luxury tax system, another $4-5m is actually = an extra $8-10m. You think one would spend $8-10m every year for a player like Piatkowski, really? But maybe we should not blame our owner for this problem as he would just trust those under him and pay the cheques. I personally think the GM (the one who was negoiating all those deals) and the coach (the one who was evaluating talent) are more at fault.
What I don't quite get is why there is still this 15% trade rule then. The super rich owners can always sign big contracts outright, the 15% trade rule has little effect on them. Only the middle or poor teams get screwed. There should not be any cap exeption for teams like Mavs. I am sick to watch them go after PJ Brown, Mouning, etc.
Because Steve Francis's new max contract will start to kick in next season and all players' salaries will increase by about 10-15% (it depends). We already have about $50m guaranteed contracts going to next season (not counting Posey resigning or any extra FA signings). That put us at or over the luxury tax threshold (estimated at about $52m). To learn more about salary cap and luxury tax issues, you can read the following site: http://members.cox.net/lmcoon/salarycap.htm Hope that helps. Cheers.
Certain things have to happen for the luxury cap to even be enforced. From what I have read, the luxury cap has not even been enforced because these conditions have not been met. I am not sure if the luxury cap will come into play next year though.
I think you're missing the concept and comparing apples and oranges. The 15% rule and the re-signing of a teams own FA's (once the team has a players' Bird Rights) are mutually exclusive functions. Common sense dictates that players' salaries will vary widely due to such things as different rookie scale contracts and escalators. If exact dollar for dollar salary matching were required, there would be very few trades ever conducted. 15% (for over the cap teams) is an arbitrary number agreed to by all teams owners and the NBA Players Association. The %age could have been 12% or 18% - it is an arbitrary range limit. (Although 15% is easier to do in ones head). Any and all teams can re-sign their own FA's to max type contract if they so choose. It has nothing to do with being "super rich", but more to do with being fiscally responsible and making good personnel decisions. Spending money is no guarantee of anything. The Lakers and Spurs both have much lower payrolls than Dallas and Portland. Remember this - the CBA was signed off on by both owners and players. Not allowing over the cap teams to have a MLE (or vet minimum contract) would have dried up a source of revenue for the players and it would have made it more difficult for teams to have the required 12 player roster. These type of cap exceptions benefit both the players and the owners. The MLE (or Average Player Salary Exception) can be used by any team over the cap. Thus, in competing for FA's the Rockets have just as much as $ Dallas to offer Zo, or Juwan, or PJ.
Which is why I doubt we will re-sign Posey. Unless Les feels real comforable that there will not be a luxury tax next year.
I don't like these rules because of following reasons: 1) the 15% rule says NO to a trade that is beneficial to all parties only because the the sizes of contract are more than 15% different. Note this only screw middle or poor teams. The deep pocket teams can always turn to FA market. 2) although all teams can go after PJ, Mourning like, only all can overbid Mavs. And you know good players want to win a ring, so they tend to go to teams like Mavs or Kings. And in a few years, these teams accumulate talents more than they can use. OK, they are willing to pay, but I want to see these talents compete with each other, not sit on the bench being under-used. 3) The players make more than enough. We don't need to worry about their income resource. Imposing a strict salary cap would discipline teams' spending and spread good players among teams. This way, NBA is more enjoyable.
<i>1) the 15% rule says NO to a trade that is beneficial to all parties only because the the sizes of contract are more than 15% different. Note this only screw middle or poor teams. The deep pocket teams can always turn to FA market. </i> The only way teams like Dallas, Sacramento and Portland can sign free agents is to use an exception. That means that most likely the player is taking less money to play there. That alone will rule out most big name free agents. Instead of getting the first and 2nd tier stars, they are getting an accumulation of the 3rd and 4th tier stars. That type of strategy will get you alot of wins each year, but you still need the top tier players to win titles. How many titles have the Blazers, Mavs and Kings been able to win with all of their talent? If you got rid of the 15% rule, then guys like Cuban would just buy players. He would have been able to trade for a guy like Mourning or Howard without having to give up anything. The other team would have gladly made a deal just to free up cap space.
What if you get rid of 15% rule and impose strict lux tax, say 2500% lux tax on every dollar you pay over 55 mil? Is Cuban still going to flash his check book?
Joining in this topic a bit.. You have the right idea, but you phrased it wrongly. For the luxury tax, you don't pay double the amount over the limit. You simply pay the amount over the limit. Subtle difference, but it's a big one. Your math is right, though. So if a team goes $5 million over the limit, which is determined by the league, the team pays $5 million in luxury tax. This is why the lux tax is sometimes referred to as being 'dollar-for-dollar.' Hope this helps.
Thanks for your explanation. But that's due to my poor English, not my non-understanding of the salary cap and luxury tax. I love to talk about salary cap and luxury tax issues. I don't think you can fully understand how NBA works without understanding this "dirty" stuff.
The Mavs are $15m above $55m. You want them to pay a tax of 375 million dollars? That's more than the franchise is worth. Why in hell would anyone want to own a franchise with you as the NBA commisioner? What is your goal here...for all 29 teams to be owned by Donald Sterling clones? Roughly half of Cuban's $70m is tied up in Finley, Nowitski and Van Exel. Not one of them was an external FA signing. Finley and Nowitski were offered max contracts and I doubt if any league owner would not have done so. The next most expensive players are LaFrentz, Nash & Abdul-Wahad. Three of the top 6 salaries were part of the Juwan Howard trade. I believe Cuban's only external FA signings were Raja Bell and Walt Williams (and maybe Avery Johnson). All 29 NBA team owners had to sign off on the CBA. For some reason, you appear to be having more of a problem with the current CBA than the 27 not so super rich owners.
the 2500% number is arbitrary, I just wanted to make a point. What I want to achieve is following: maintain a good competition among teams and spread the talents evenly if possible and prevent one or two deep pocket owners from signing too many good players. You have to admit that NBA will be more enjoyable if these superstars are more spread out. The Lux tax is not against any onwer. Let's say we give every owner a head up, and agree a prohibitively expensive lux tax starting 5 years from now. Everybody has the chance to avoid the lux tax then. I understand Cuban signed several big contracts out of FA market, but this is still unfair. Suppose Rox found a lot of super stars in our roster, we wouldn't be able to keep them all because Lex doesn't have that kind of money as Cuban does. It is not a crime to have too much money, but just for the sake of the enjoiability of NBA games, rules should be set such that super rich owners don't have too much an edge. Just think about a year or two ago, everybody was complaining Yankees were getting almost all the good players available.
