If you see a player you want, you can go up to that team, yell "TAG" and take the player. but you must, you MUST say "no touch backs" before they can respond, or they get to take any TWO of your players in addition to their own player back!
I am asking the question cause I honestly have no idea. I saw a poster bringing it up and thought it would be a great idea. It sucks that some teams get hosed when the superstar wants to leave, but in some cases, I think bolting is the only way. It would probably have to be something air tight. This "Tag" could easily be abused by teams and that would seriously suck.
I think you keep the system similar to how it is now. You draft a player and have him at your discretion for up to 5 years, total. After 4 years, you can offer him more than anyone else, and, if someone else offers him a deal, you have the right to match that deal. If it's a max deal, that's the potential for having a guy for close to 10 years. I don't think a franchise tag is necessary if you are allowed to go over the cap for your own players, can offer moer than other teams for your own players, and have the right on their first deal to match any offer to your players. I know people have said they want it to, in a way, keep players away from the major markets, so that, say, Dwight Howard can't just leave to Brooklyn, they can keep on franchising him, and keep him on one year deals forever, but I think that's pretty crummy. You have a guy for a pretty decent length of time, with the ability to pay him more money than anyone else. if you can't build around him in that time, and he wants to go, let him go. Teams should just be smarter about it, like Utah was, and act at the right time to get a good return, as opposed to being complete idiots about it, like Toronto.
That would make a nice ESPN special.... I can imagine now the "expert" analysis on the team tag strategies.
In the NFL (only sport I know of with a "franchise tag" though MLB's arbitration is sort of similar), a player can only be franchised by their team twice. They receive a one year deal at a salary that is determined by the average of the 5 highest salaries for players at their position. So they do get compensated like an elite player. They have to stay on their team but at most for only two seasons beyond their rookie deal. The thing with the NFL franchise tag is that it seems like the issue is virtually always that the player wants a long term deal (i.e. 5+ years) but the team is weary of locking itself into that kind of long term money for that player for whatever reason. My point being that NFL players hate the tag because they want a long term deal from ANYONE- their team, another team, whoever they can get it from. In the NBA, however, the tag is being brought up primarily as a measure to protect teams from losing star talent and/or from star players colluding to get onto the same team. In the NBA they give out max deals to borderline star/allstars like hotcakes and they're fully guaranteed. Players know they'll get paid so their next order of business is influencing who/where will be paying them. In the NFL its so godamn hard to get a contract and even when you do you could just as easily get cut and only receive a portion of that money that guys just want the contract.
I would like to see contracts only be 1/3rd to 1/2 guaranteed. It's not entirely bad for the players either, if teams are able to cut some of the salary of grossly overpaid guys then there will be more money to spread around to the players who can play and actually deserve it.
I think if there is a franchise tag, Blazers should use it on Batum. Not really but how can you not love a kid who is in Paris enjoying 85 degree weather and tweets to his fellow Blazers fans in Ptd: Nicolas Batum™ Enjoyin Paris with 85F outside...good morning PDX That is the kind of player I enjoy cheering for . . .
If Batum is ever traded, it better be packaged for a huge star. Definitely one of my favorite Blazers.
HAHA yes. And if you replace him with a player who can score on Steve Nash maybe we'd have won a series or two.
The important part of the NFL franchise tag is that if a player is allowed to leave after being franchised, the existing team is awarded two first round draft picks. If the NBA does something similar, that would be a powerful disincentive. There's no way MIA would have been able to assign four first round picks to CLE and TOR.
While I agree with your implied position that Batum's current impact is overrated, he did have a shoulder injury for that series, so it's a bit of a distortion to imply that Batum is unable to score on Nash. As I recall, he had some good games when the Suns attempted that again early in the following (last) season, since he was healthy.
Any ideas we have will seem, at some level, unfair to players. Franchise tags restrict player movement to the benefit of owners (and, hopefully, fans and the NBA as a whole). I'm frustrated for Magic fans who might lose Dwight Howard, and I think that the NBA will be better in the long run if players are well-compensated but teams have more say over which players go where. A couple of ideas... I think that the maximum salary should be based on just on the number of years in the NBA, but the number of years on a team. If the max salary is $10m/year for signing a free agent, maybe make it so it's $1m/year more for every year a player's been on that team. This encourages a player to re-sign with his own teams. A downside is dealing with how players would be treated if they're traded... it seems like they shouldn't be penalized, but they shouldn't be able to force their way out, either. Another idea is that a player could make more than the maximum salary ONLY if he's designated as the "franchise" player for the team. The designation is set by each team at one point in the year, and so if a team acquires another team's franchise player mid-year, they will have to make a determination of which is more valuable to them. That puts teams in a tough spot when they have two very similar players (or two very good ones) but it would reward players for being the most valuable to their franchise and it would deter players from congregating because they want to form super-teams. Ed O.
Also... it's likely that he's a better player than he was in that Phoenix series. He was 21 and had the offseason to work on punishing smaller players on the blocks after the Suns threw that at him. Ed O.
