I miss the days when teams used to be able to make trade based on the talent involved alone. Now you have to trade contracts primarily rather than talent and you have to be all over the CBA. How did that come to be? I would gather that it is a level-the-playing-field kind of initiative. Not only do you have some kind of cap to be concerned about but each deal has to somehow be equitable financially-- trading salaries in essence. Isn't there a better way?
By trading salaries for talent or specific need you open up the opportunity to sign talent, ie Nash/Q.
I think he's saying that trades nowadays are based on whether the salaries match, rather than whether the teams would like to swap players. ie: on a talent based system - a team could trade whomever they wanted and receive whomever they wanted in return, irrelevant of salary. (so Lebron for Garnett straight up would work - if the teams were into it) I think matching the salaray is a better system to a degree - it DOES level the playing field somewhat!
Kevin Garnett almost broke the Wolves bank after the owner gave him a blank check. Juwan Howard almost got a ridiculously overpriced contract from Miami, but got an even more ludicrous contract from Washington after arbitration. If all contracts were equal in talent and production, there wouldn't be much of a problem. It's the GM's fault, not the CBA.
This was my line of interest. I enjoy the trade threads, but most of them are crazy. They only "work" from the contract standpoint but aren't even close from the talent standpoint. I wish there were some way to allow teams to do whatever the heck they want in the personnel deparatment without allowing the Lakers or the Knicks to dominate the offseason like the Yankees do. That would not work in basketball; one of them would win every year-- which is almost what the Yankees do.
i propose this: when a team trades a player, they are still responsible for paying his salary. so, kg for lebron would work, but kg stays on the pups cap. that way they don't get away with having a whole lot of cap space. teams would still shy away from trades like that (who wants to pay a guy $20M when he isn't playing for you) but it would losen things up a bit.
Or "go fish"... "have you got a fat overpaid power forward?" "Yes - here you go: have you got a defensive minded shooting guard with great defense?" "Go fish...." Make for some super deals wouldn't it!
