Play God with the Next CBA

Indentured Servant ? Since when did an Indentured Servant make multi-millions of dollars, travel on chartered planes, stay in 5 star hotels and get over $100 per day in per diems?

There sure is a whole lot of athletes trying really hard to become an Indentured Servant in the NFL. I feel really sorry for those guys they've got such a tough life, hopefully they'll be able to overcome all of those hardships.

It must really suck for a guy like Duanta Robinson to get nearly double his true market value and in exchange for that have to play in a city like Houston. That's so tragic.

 

The problem is the owners playing with their toys. The problem is not the players and agents. They simply try to get what the market dictates.

Just like movie actors and bands. Funny how they sign luctrative deals, but don't sign their lives away, and their job isn't chosen by a ping pong ball between the crappiest employees available. Only athletes. And when musicians do sign crappy contracts like Prince did, they still have a way out. They just have to give up their name LOL! But not Blake Griffin. Not according to your plans.

Blake Griffin must remain a Clipper, or never play in the NBA.

He is a millionaire Indentured Servant. But let's call him a Franchise Employee instead. He'll agree to that.

Unlike any other entertainer except NFL franchise players, athletes get screwed in the name of TEAM and CITY. Those stupid athletes. Why are their unions so dumb. Hmmm, maybe because they are. haha

 

haha.

I'm so blindly against the NFL way that I don't really know much about it or care. Yeah, no exceptions means no salary matching required. I get it now. duh. haha

btw: do you not think the NFL CBA screws the players really badly.

I don't follow the NFL much at all, so to me it just appears like players (aside from the "Franchise" tag) are switching teams all the team. That works in that sports, 55 players, 3 deep--by it's very nature. I don't see it being good for the NBA...to develop a city/team connection that Easy described.

 

Here's a different question: What kind of CBA rules do you think would be most favorable to the Rockets?

I really don't want to see the LLE and MLE go away. I think our management team is pretty sharp and would be able to find some bargains with the LLE. I love the MLE because it's onerous enough that a cash-strapped team would give up an asset to get rid of an MLE player, but small enough for a team that manages its finances wisely (like the Rox) to absorb.

Franchise tag, for sure. If we don't have something like this, we can expect the Superfriends saga to repeat over and over, with the best players accumulating on a few big-market teams.

I can't decide if a hard cap helps us. On the one hand, I trust our front office to value players more effectively than most teams, which should allow us to assemble our rosters with greater cost efficiency. In other words, if all teams spend the same, production per dollar becomes the ultimate metric, and we've demonstrated proficiency in this area.

On the other hand, if we go to a hard cap and the max contract rules stay in place, I'm worried that it will become like the college game. Since programs can't compete in terms of salary (Calipari excepted) the best players flock to the most prestigious schools. I'm afraid that if the stars are going to get paid the same amount no matter where they play, they'll all just go to NY and LA, which isn't good for us.


In a soft cap system, owners like Cuban or DeVos (and Les, although we're not currently big spenders) who see their teams as a toy rather than a profit-generator, can spend like the big basketball-revenue teams like the Knicks and Lakers. If the NBA goes to a hard cap,

 

agree, this is the main problem. Owners overpay for glue guys.

I'm not really that against the hard cap. But I think the difference between me and everyone else in this thread is I am not that against the NBA CBA either. I don't think it is horribly wrong, like MLB. Just a few tweaks. Franchise Tab, oooo. I do hate that, though. And 30yrs of history shows that it is unneeded.

maybe it would be cool to see Blake Griffin forced to stay in LA on the Laker's 2nd child team. Clippers would be the ultimate underdog. But image an NFL CBA forcing Gordon to go somewhere else for his pay, since Griffin commands so much of the franchises cap room. Then Griffin is stuck on a loser with no one to help him. That would suck.

Love would also be stuck. Garnett was too, yet he was a Sam Cassell injury away from making it.

Imagine Westbrook wanting a Franchise Tag and leaving Durant?

A lot is said of Lebron, but he moved to an under the cap team. That would have happened with the NFL hard cap, too. You can't stop that with a hard cap...only with a Franchise Tag. Also he got them to the finals like Shaq did Orlando. I would not have left. And I think he should not have left. But I respect the right to leave...especially after playing so well during his 4 yrs of imposed rookie contract service...plus extension.

But...I think the Miami situation is likely going to make the owners more money in TV deals. Note that.

We do agree that a sports franchise is just a toy to the owners. No one is struggling to survive here. They obviously do not care about profitability. One reason for that is their franchise always increases in value. They don't care about daily operations because they own a rare asset. They can always sell it for profit. The owners don't lose money is this deal.

Note also, the profitability issue is why I think we could create a Profitability Exception to reward fiscal conservatism, rather than force it.

 

My CBA in one sentence:

That's it.

 

Great! As long as you agree that X is a variable that changes based on how much money the owners make each year. And all players are allowed to switch teams when their contract expires...based on their right to freedom.

The NFL has a Franchise Tag, restricting freedom. The NBA has a Rookie Scale with imposed 4 yrs of service; then you are free; yet your owner can retain you at more money than any other owner is allowed to pay. Which is better?

 

That's true. They are entertainers in a TEAM game, and the TEAMS are based in CITIES.

That is just not true with other forms of entertainment. So I don't think it is just because the player unions are dumb (although they might well be).

To me, whenever a trade is made for financial reasons, and not straightly for basketball reasons, the fans are screwed. I think the NBA as of now is littered with this kind of deals. As aelliot pointed out, whatever is good for the fans is good for the league and ultimately good for everybody because the whole business is supported by fans.

 

Yes the hard cap should be variable.

Sure, no other rules besides the hard cap and draft rights.

 

All entertainment is supported by fans. And owners make lots of money independent of ticket sales...ie, the overall value of the league generates fan interest to watch TV, hence lucrative TV deals. The Super Bowl, march madness, college bowls, the NBA playoffs--it's not like fans of losers stop watching. Profitability wise--the Miami situation is good for the fan interest, and it will be proven if Miami plays LA in the Finals. Fans finacially support the whole league, not just their team. How do the soccer leagues in Europe deal with this?

Fact is, Fans LOVE trades and free agency. It gives them hope that there is something other than tanking. For every Cleveland out there, there are several CITIES glad that he had freedom to choose.

The Franchise Tag steals that hope away.

Why do we need a Franchise Tag when the Rookie Scale guarantees 4 yrs of service + extensions unmatchable by other owners.

I'll say one thing...you can't have it both ways. You can't have a Franchise Tag and 4yr Rookie Scale. That's rape.

this brings up another issue about no exceptions. How do you deal with getting the #1 pick to land Griffin or Yao or Lebron or Duncan, etc etc, yet your are at the cap? What? Fire 4 players? Really? Surely in a Franchise Tag league, you have to give up the Rookie Scale 4yrs because that pretty much allows two Franchise Tags. NFL allows rookies bonuses. That goes over the cap, right? How is that different than a soft cap? Adding a Franchise Tag to the NBA without giving something back to the players like bonuses that exceed the cap is weird. They should at least be able to negotiate as rookies once again--Glen Robinson. Forced to play for the draft team, but still negotiate price/bonuses.


Bonuses that exceed the cap is a soft cap under a different name. Does the NFL allow bonuses to exceed the cap? I don't know that answer...just appears to me that they do.

 

Look at the biggest names in the NFL, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. Both have played their entire career with one team and never been franchised. Same for Andre Johnson the best receiver in the game.

Player movement is much harder in the NFL than it is in the NBA. The reason for that is the franchise tag and the lack of exceptions to allow teams to go over the cap.

 

The NFL doesn't have rookie scale deals.

I'll say it one more time, by definition a hard cap means that you can't exceed the cap for any reason. NFL Rookie salaries count against the cap just as all other players contracts count against the cap. Rookies are like any other player, after you sign them you must be under or at the cap. Potentially that means that you might have to dump some salary prior to the signing.

NFL Signing bonuses are guarenteed and paid up front but for cap purposes they are pro-rated over the life of the contract. The catch is that if you cut the player prior to the end of the deal then all of the remaining pro-rated bonus money for future years immediately hits your cap.

So, for example if you sign a 5 year deal with a $10M signing bonus then $2M of the signing bonus counts against the cap for each year of the deal. Let's say that prior to the 4th year of the deal the team decides to cut the player. The remaining $4M in signing bonus money for years 4 and 5 woiuld immediatly count against the teams cap (for a total hit of $4M).

Does that make sense? The up front money is prorated across the years of the deal but you still can not exceed the cap.

 

Here's a quote from David Stern :

http://www.sportingnews.com/nba/story/2010-12-16/stern-nba-should-move-to-hard-salary-cap

I agree with his viewpoint. In order to be successful he league needs to have all of the teams be profitable and have a chance to be competitive.

 

Yes and No. If there had been a hard cap then Bosh,Lebron and Wade certainly could have still teamed up in Miami. The difference is that they wouldn't have been able to put anything around them. With no MLE, Minimum Salary Exception or Bird Rights Miami would have nothing around those three guys. If that were the case and they weren't going to be a contending team then do you think that they all still sign in Miami?

 

i feel like the wrong side of the problem is being attacked here, the expenses instead of the revenue. it's like people want to say milwaukee and charlotte (or whoever the low-revenue franchises are) make x and can only support payrolls of y, so lets make sure no one can spend more than y. and while that would balance things out, it really just depresses player salaries relative to league revenue and lets the owners of MIL/CHA-type teams not lose money while the owner of LA/NY-type teams generate massive profits.

to me the problem is the revenue differential and the simpler solution is revenue sharing. treat the league as a single business with 30 equal subsidiaries all generating revenue for that single business with revenues shared as equitably as logistically and legally possible (cost of living and other adjustments, etc). just because you happen to be the owner of NBA-LA shouldn't mean you are entitled to way more money than the owner of NBA-MIL as the lakers holding practice in a one team league wouldn't generate money without teams like milwaukee showing up to play them. then base some sort of cap around that new team revenue level. player salaries relative to revenue would be maximized and competitive equality would be maximized.

i would like to still keep the general CBA we have in place now with the soft cap and exceptions with maybe some rule tweaks to make the cap a little less soft but i think flattening revenues would probably harden the cap enough (in an even bigger way than the luxury tax currently does). i think the forced loss of assets that a hard cap entails makes team building much harder and more frustrating (why make a great draft pick just to lose the guy) and the ridiculous level of parity that the nfl hard cap brings about is something i do not want at all**. if you want to spend more, with revenue fairly equal across the league, you're going to have to take a profitability hit that no one else is taking. admittedly, that could lead to a situation where the competitive balance simply shifts from the markets with the biggest populations to the owners with the biggest pockets where the cuban's and paul allen's rule the roost, but i'm willing to take that chance to not destroy the way the current CBA allows a team to be built and kept together for the natural length of its run. and even those teams can only increase salary within the rules. they certainly can't do it yankees style.

and no franchise tag. screw that. if players want to go work somewhere else, good for them. having to stay with some team because some ping pong balls bounced a certain way doesn't seem right to me.


**i wonder how the nba's finances would do with more parity. while it seems to work for the nfl in that practically any nfl game seems to get big ratings no matter who is playing, that doesn't seem to be the case at all for the nba. big markets, big stars, and interesting teams generate ratings. jordan's bulls got ratings. the 3-peat lakers got ratings. the superfriends in miami are getting huge ratings. the spurs vs the pistons do not get ratings. now, i don't know, if the whole league was a bunch of 30-50 win teams who almost all thought they had some sort of chance to be the mediocre team that wins it all, maybe that translates to more gate revenue and an even more engaged tv audience but without knowing how all the revenue breaks down (and without an alternate universe in which to run this experiment) i really don't know. it really might be that tv ratings tell the story and the biggest league-wide fan-based revenues are generated, paradoxically, when lots of fans don't have hope.

 

Even with revenue sharing you'll still have teams with an unfair advantage. Just because one teams's owners has deep pockets, that team shouldn't have a significant competitive advantage.

IMO it's ridiculous to have a "salary cap" below $60M and still allow some teams to have a payroll of almost $100M. Revenue sharing would certainly help some of the teams stop losing money (or at least losing as much) but it still doesn't provide competive balance.

Looking at the NFL experiece with a hard cap, it is much easier to go from bad team to good team than it is in today's NBA. You also see examples in the NFL of well managed franchises having sustained success because they know how to manage their payroll (Pittsburg, NE, Indy, Philly). That's why the NFL is so much more or a competitive league than the NBA.

 

Stern is right, all the soft cap with a lux tax does is make it so only super rich teams can afford to go over the cap. If anything it creates less parity.

 

I think that whole idea is that you don't give out guarenteed deals to every player that you do now. That's how you mitigate your risk and provide a way of undoing those bad deals.

Teams dump good players because of cap issues all of the time in the current NBA. The difference is that in the NFL those guys hit the open market and in the NBA they get traded to one of the deep pocket teams. I personally would rather see those guys be in play for all teams.

Do you really think that raising the luxury tax is really going to stop the Knicks, Lakers or Mavs from buying players? Their pockets are so deep that a few extra million aren't going to change their approach. Doubling the luxury tax would however prevent teams like the Rockets from ever going over the tax. Seems to me like you wouldn't be effecting the biggest offenders but rather just widening the gap between the "haves" and "have-nots".

If all teams had a hard cap on their payroll then teams wouldn't be able to sign 2 or 3 of the franchise guys because of payroll limitations. So, those extra franchise guys would end up on other teams. Distribute the franchise guys among more teams then you'll have a more competitive league.

If a few deep pocket teams still have the ability to exceed the cap and accumulate the top players does it really matter what the payscale for those players is? The problem is that the majority of the teams in the league don't really have a chance to be competitive. The amount of money you are paying individual players doesn't really change that.

Again, there are teams with such deep pocket that simply raising the costs to them acquiring players won't deter them. The Knicks will still spend the money because it's nothing to them. You would however price all of the other teams out of the market for the top talent and further limit the number of teams that have a chance to compete.

The issue right now is that certain teams have a distinct financial advantage to acquiring the top players. If you simply raise the stakes to play, then it's not the high end teams that will be effected. They'll pay the higher cost in order to stockpile the talent. It's the middle and lower level franchises that will get priced out of the game even further than they are today.

Why do you believe that the luxury tax is working? Whenever a top player becomes available there are only 4 or 5 teams that realistically have a chance to acquire the player. That's the state of today's NBA and the luxury tax has done littel to change it. Does the luxury tax stop any of the wealthy teams from acquiring players? Nope, the Lakers will gladly pay $20M in luxury tax in order to acquire Gasol or guys of that calibur. Who are the teams that are dumping players in order to get under the luxury tax? It's not the Knicks, Lakers or Celtics, the money doesn't matter to them. It's teams like Houston, Memphis, Utah and such that are effected by the luxury tax.

 

This is why I favor a tiered scale. In essence, it is a hard cap system, but you don't put everything under one single cap. You put a cap on each tier. Franchise players are hard to come by. If a team gets two of them, that kills parity right there. If a team have two of them and have the flexibility with all the exceptions to get good role players, then you pretty much have a system favors wealthy teams.