My point. Would he leave Cleveland if they offered 45m where as the Heat could only offer ____ because Wade and Bosh commanded high salaries?
Lebron's making so much more money in endorsements though. As I said Michael Jordan played in an era with no max salary yet he accepted a 7M a year annual contract. And even in your ideal scenario where each team has it's own superstar, glamour cities would still have the edge because the small salaries would attract better role players, who would look to other ways to supplement their income like endorsements. If supposing Lebron ate up like 80% of the cap in the Cleveland, what kind of dleaguers would he be able to attract on his team? OTH, Kobe would still be rolling around with Lamar Odom, Meta and Ariza all making 3M a year with endorsements at Bob's bakery.
Giving up 25M A YEAR in your prime is still a lot. I don't care how much money a guy makes with endorsement. If superstars were willing to give up that kind of money to field a winning team, people would have a lot more respect than LeBron got by bolting to Wade Country. BTW, Jordan played for 30M for a year after he came back from retirement.
I am sure if one of these European OVERLORDS wanted to pay LeBron $50MM a year to play for their team in Euroleague, he wouldn't go.
Like JVG proposed, hard cap but no max on player salaries. That way, a guy like lebron should be making more than other certain players that are getting max. Like let's say cap is $60M. Well Lebron could take up $20M or $25M of that cap.
In a league without max contracts, the trend would be that superstar players would gain increasing power over their franchises (even more than LeBron already has), since they would control an even greater share of the team's value than they do now. This would further encourage players to hold franchises hostage to their demands, and to constantly threaten to move to other cities, even more so than now. This is not a good thing for fans, though, since players can easily change cities but fans can not. So this would tend to damage the league's popularity in subtle ways. Consider the KG $126 million contract. While it is true his contract was fine from a pure market perspective, his contract was actually very unpopular with the general public, many of whom felt that no one in the world "deserves" $126 million. So his excessive salary reduced the popularity of the league as a whole.
Remember when Jordan made $30 million per in the 90's for a couple of years (after being grossly underpaid for most of his career). That's part of the reason for the max salary cap.
Actually, I doubt the owners would agree to a hard cap. Bottom line, they are all business owners. More than half of them make extra money because of the luxury tax.
The simple answer to the OP is about spreading the wealth among players. You are ONLY considering the Max players. If you allow the max players to get market, then everyone else gets less. The Rich get Richer. You develop a divide between middle class on the top 1%. This is very simple to understand. That said: I am all in favor of having a Franchise Tag that allows a substantially higher max for one player per team.
This only worked because there was a soft cap. The no-max-salary only works with a hard cap, because of exactly the situation you described. With a hard cap, if Minnesota - or anyone - gave that money to KG, they are screwing over their franchise's ability to compete, and thus no one would offer it.
Morey has said his ideal system would be a hard cap with no other rules (besides the draft/rookie wage scale)
and the rockets will be bottom feeders for the next 50 years due to Knicks and Lakers buying up all the talent
nope.. the best cities with the best economies will win in such a scenario. teams like the bucks, timberwolves, and pistons could be left in the cold.
