For everyone complaining about players rejecting cap smoothing

Exactly. I didn't get and still don't how they wouldn't see that the only beneficiaries of the cap spike would be the free agent class of 2016, and why the collective body of players would want that. It just didn't make sense. Smoothing would be so much more logical both for the health of the league and for the vast majority of players.

I guess logic isn't a very important factor in CBA negotiations.

 

yeah, considering how many players call it a business and focus on their paychecks, they didn't seem very concerned about their paychecks. guys like boogie and IT costing themselves millions coming off injuries if there were more cap room to go around.

the easy answer is michele roberts is just there to sound tough and create good optics for herself. after the last negotiations saw the players go from 58% of BRI to 50%, the union brought in new leadership. so roberts, not concerned with smarts but with optics, decided to refuse anything the league said. they said the word "lower" somewhere in something, so she just shut it down. frankly, they could have offered the players a million free dollars and she would have probably turned it down because the owners were the ones making the offer. shame the players can't do math.

 

They should negotiate the smoothing mechanism that would give them the same overall money over time rather than rejecting it outright which the majority of players would certainly not get the benefits.

 

Time value of money is irrelevant here - the money wasn't being pushed back by the cap smoothing proposals.

And yes, some players would have made less and lots of players would have made more. That was the entire point of the exercise. That's not a negative, if the goal was to prevent a handful of players from cashing in.

 

i'm not sure what that means. my understanding is that the players get 49-51% of the money. end of story essentially. there are ways to make it so. in fact, 10% of players' income is held by the league and then given to them once the league figures out how much they are supposed to get. so if 54% of BRI were handed out in contracts, the league would essentially keep that extra 3% and the players would only end up with 51%. if the league hands out 58% of BRI in contracts, the 10% reduces it to 52.2% and i believe the players just get the 52.2%, too bad for the owners. not sure what happens if only 48% of BRI is handed out in contracts. i think the league has to make that up to get to 49%.

i suppose it's possible that in a smoothed cap situation, you eliminate the "exceeding 51%" scenario because there is no chance you will sign contracts for 56.7% of the actual BRI when the smoothed cap restraints are based on something like 85-90% of BRI, but i don't know if that scenario of exceeding 51% has ever actually happened. but even then, just put in the same rule. if they are supposed to get 53% of the smoothed BRI then they get 53% of the actual BRI. i feel confident if they gave me the numbers, a calculator, and an afternoon that i could come up with something fairly satisfactory to all sides. i don't think the sides tried.

 

What do you mean by "front load" it. Not smoothing IS front loading it.

No matter how it was done, the players would not lose overall money. It's just distributed more evenly rather than giving it to a few lucky free agents.

 

I'm convinced with @wizkid83 that smoothing at the point the revenue comes in is an easy thing for the Union to vote down, and they did so unanimously. Recall, the MLE is tied to league ave salary. All the exceptions got a boost. It benefits players to count the money when it arises, as much as it benefits owners.

Smoothing would be like the owners asking the networks to smooth out their payments.

Doing smoothing earlier than at the point of the TV contracts kicking in, or making it the New Math moving forward regarding future renegotiations of TV contracts (up or down), I suppose is worth discussing, but seems like owners will vote down anything that forces them to pay more than they should, since they already voted that down.

The downside argument seems to blame the spike on hurting competitive balance...and creating the Warriors, as Klay and Green were already locked in, and Durant seems to be doing his own smoothing. (The spike created a perfect storm for the Warriors.) But blaming one CBA thing (BRI spikes, in this case) on Super Teams forming is not what we really do, when talking about how Super Teams form. There are a lot of things involved.

 

No spike, no 20 million dollar overpaid, weaksauce, bench warming fraud

 

yes, but only people up for contracts in 2016 benefitted from increased exceptions/maxes, etc. free agents in 2017 and 2018 have been paying for this because 2016 sucked up all the money with how (predictably) excessive (stupid) spending was.

for one thing, everyone who wasn't a free agent would have gotten a raise in 2016. just a free raise. because after all the smoothed spending was done, they would have prorated the leftover money to everyone. so anybody with an existing contract just got more money for doing nothing. that alone makes it absurd they voted it down.

then you factor in the follow-up effects on subsequent offseasons. this offseason lots of guys are taking 1 year offers or multi-year lowball offers because no one will have capspace until next offseason (when some of the 2016 guys come off the books and again get to join in the frenzy).

since more than half the league can't be free agents every offseason i assume, all benefits of the cap spike were relegated to only one free agent class, which seems to hurt the majority of the players, which is why i don't understand why they would vote it down. if you were a 2016 class free agent then i understand why you would vote it down.

but you are seemingly changing actual cash flow (which is fine if all parties agree). smoothing did not result in the players or owners, in aggregate, receiving/making any more or any less money in any of the years involved.

sure, max contracts are the actual reason superteams are even possible. but since owners want to be protected from being stupid and most players want all the extra money the true max guys aren't getting, no one will get rid of them.

 

There's a lot of assumptions you are making here.

The so-called "spike" in Salary Cap (it didn't go down, so really its a caproom spike) made the Rookie Scale Salary Exception and MLE shoot up, too, and mini-MLEs and BAE, and Early Bird and Minimum Salary (thus Non Bird, too)/

Aside from the fact that ALL First Round Picks from 2016 on benefited from no smoothing, show me a huge list of teams who chose not to use those other exceptions. Smoothing would smooth out all of those, too, including Rookie Scale. The theory (and yes, it's a theory) that 2016 caused all teams' money to run dry would need to show that use of these exceptions dried up, too. Essentially that no more added spending (except existing contract raises) happened vs any other years prior to 2016.

I'm not arguing against saying smoothing could have helped prevent the Warriors (among other reasons), I just don't get the argument that players shot themselves in the foot whereby only 2016 free agents benefited.

I'd need more proof that use of all exceptions dried up, too. The majority of players in the league play for MLE or less money, so I can see why the players would unanimously vote down smoothing. It would be easy to prove otherwise, by someone researching the use of exceptions since 2016.

 

would rookies get to vote in these things? i would think not since i would assume the voting pre-dated them being in the union. if they didn't get a vote, i know the vets weren't going to lend them a hand. there can only be 30 combined MLE/mini-MLE's? and give or take 15 BAE's depending on who used them the previous year? how does the early bird exception factor in? i thought it was just 120% of your previous year salary but i'm not that familiar with it? and even then, all those guys would get the same first-year salary as the reduction in their first year salary would be made up by the distribution after the smoothing. i suppose 2nd years and beyond would be lower as they would be based on lower first year salaries, but that's still part of the point to not inordinately benefit guys who just happen to be free agents in 2016 and still only affects 2016 guys (at least my understanding is that smoothing was only a 2 year process and even if if weren't, all analysis would still apply,but to an even lesser degree, to 2017 free agents getting inordinate benefits)

the biggest voting bloc i can think of would be minimum contract guys, but aren't those amounts untethered to the cap? i would think a lower cap would make minimum/low contracts more valuable to GM's and then those minimum/low guys also get their little prorated distribution from the smoothing mechanism.

maybe they figured they could get more than the minimum since people would show some sort of self-control on the upper end contracts (which obviously didn't happen) and then maybe throwing an extra million at a minimum guy wouldn't seem so bad as you tried to fill out your roster. dubious thinking i would say as most minimum guys would probably get $5 and a t-shirt if there wasn't an actual lower bound to their contract.

did you mean NOT unanimously? even if i was convinced that 50+% somehow benefited from no smoothing, every player on a contract who stood to get a raise wouldn't vote against that raise unless they were going for some sort of united front (which sounds like more effort and organization than anyone was up to at that time).

 

Michele Roberts Discredits Suggestion Rejection Of Cap Smoothing Caused Competitive Imbalance

Michele Roberts responded to a series of assertions that blamed the NBA's current competitive balance issues on the rejection of cap smoothing by the players leading to the 2016 cap spike.

“Frankly, I have been amused by the chatter suggesting that smoothing — or more accurately the failure to smooth — has now become some folks’ boogeyman de jure,” Roberts said in an email. “While we haven’t yet blamed it for the assassination of MLK, some are now suggesting that it is responsible for all that is presumably wrong with today’s NBA.

“Needless to say, I beg to differ.”

The salary cap, which limits the amount each team can spend on players, is tied directly to league revenue. In 2016, the first year under the new agreement, the salary cap increased by $24 million, to $94 million.

“Under the concept we discussed, the total salaries paid to players in the aggregate each season would not have changed, but smoothing would have allowed for steadier, incremental Cap increases, instead of a one-year spike,” an N.B.A. spokesman, Mike Bass, wrote in an email.

In February 2015, union reps from each team unanimously rejected the proposal from the NBA.

Agreeing to artificially lower the salary cap “offends our core,” Roberts wrote. “It would be quite counterintuitive for the union to ever agree to artificially lower, as opposed to raise, the salary cap. If we ever were to do so, there would have to be a damn good reason, inarguable and uncontroverted. There was no such assurance in place at that time.”

Many players had been preparing for the expected spike to become free agents in 2016.

Roberts explained, instead of artificially depressing the salary cap, the league could have proposed advancing television money into 2015 and increasing spending. But it didn’t want to “in part because teams weren’t expecting an early Cap increase,” Roberts wrote.

“Just the same way that they shouldn’t be faulted for seeking to meet teams’ expectations,” she added, “folks should recognize how important we felt it was to meet the reciprocal expectations felt by the players.”

Roberts believes the teams who signed players to bad deals should be blamed.

“I get that there are folks who believe that some of the contracts executed post the smoothing rejection were too large,” she wrote. “I vehemently disagree as I am sure do the players that negotiated those contracts. However, if that’s the beef folks have, take it up with the GMs that negotiated them. The argument that we gave teams too much money to play with is preposterous.”​

 

That Michelle Roberts sounds like an unlikable dumbass. There's a lot better ways to get your point across in the "apologies is a weakness" era.