All teams want to be below the cap these days, so they will have more than MLE on the free agent market to attract big names. However, for teams like the Heat, Spurs, Lakers (of two years ago) and yes, the Rockets, being over the salary cap is the best thing that can happen to them. When a team already have a core of super-stars who are paid accordingly, they will be over the cap. But since they are contenders, players on the free agent market will want to go to those teams and become part of a possible championship team. The GMs of those teams can simply tell those players that they'd love to have them and pay them big bucks, but since they are over the cap, they can only pay them the MLE. They can use their team's potential as a powerful selling tool, while use their financial restraint as a budgetting tool. The result is that you can add good players will rather cheap price. Some of the players will go for the money and sign big contracts else-where. But some of them who are in the downside of their careers and hungry enough for a championship will go to those teams for less salary (Malone, Payton, Finley, Horry, Swift, Anderson, Morning...). However, when a team is under the cap and trying to sign players from the free agent market, the players can use the fact the teams do have money to ask for big contracts. Since the market competition is tense, sometimes you have to overpay the players to get them. Utah over-paid Boozer/Okur, Denver over-paid Martin, Pheonix over-paid Richardson, San Antonio over-paid Nesterivic, Atlanta over-paid Johnson, Cleveland over-paid Hughes, Milwaukee over-paid Redd... and those teams are paying (or will be paying) for their over-spending. Remember when the Rockets were below the cap? They signed guys like Glenn Rice, Moochie Norris, Mo Taylor and Kelvin Cato to rediculous contracts, and it haunted them for years. Now we are over the cap and having two super-stars with championship potentials, we will be able to attract solid role players, like Anderson, Swift and Deke every year without overspending, and in many cases, find great bargains. I say find your true championship capable stars, get over the cap(as little as possible, of course), and use the cap as your budgetting tool to find cheap talents is the right way to build a championship team these days.
Talking about cap #s, can anyone tell me what is Miami's Salary? It has to be over the luxury tax, and plus they haven't even given Wade the MAX.
It's a blessing in disguise unless your owner has a reputation of being a penny pincher and refuses to enter luxury tax land. In this case, we are lucky since LA obviously wants a championship calibur ballclub out there, but it's not necessarily always going to be that way..... If a team is right around the cap in safeland then all of a sudden an opportunity comes along to spend the MLE on a declining star, it's still a gamble. That's an extra 5 million or so coming right out of the owner's pocket. Of course, it's easy for any of us to shout out, "DO IT, WE NEED TO WIN!" but I can't promise you if I were in an owner's shoes I would be so willing just to fork over that much money.
Actually, the cap would REALLY be the Rockets' blessing if Yao had an extra year on his rookie contract. The way to get more talent than cap money allows is by having someone making much less than he deserves. Phoenix and Cleveland are two good examples with Amare and Lebron. Phoenix was able to give Nash 10+ mil per year despite having two all-stars in Amare and Marion. Cleveland did the same with Hughes with Z and Lebron on the roster. Unfortunately, the Rockets can't do this. We have so much crap filling up capspace that can't be cleared until Yao starts making huge bucks. By which time, we're screwed again by the cap.
The equation boils down to this: If you don't spend the max on players who are worth it, you'll end up spending the max, or close to it, on players who aren't. The best scenario is to get two max players who are worth it and work well together. From that point on, the cap limits your ability to make terrible decisions.
Has it occurred to anyone that the very reason for the cap's existense IS to prevent owners from spending out of control?
Does a team get a new MLE each year? Because if that is the case then we could add another quality player next year as well....
good argument overall. however, i do not consider swift a player in the "downside" of his career so i dont agree with him being on the list of players who you included.
