Agreed. It's an idiotic idea. Good teams have to build a team as well as one injury and your team is now very average.
By "leveling the playing field," do owners mean in wins or dollars? This plan would do so only in wins. Owners usually are more interested in dollars. If owners are telling players that parity in wins is the priority, I think it's a subterfuge to get more dollars. This players union plan won't get any more dollars, so owners will reject it. The players union idealistically fell for owners' talk about leveling the field. Owners are thinking, that "leveling" propaganda went too far--we need a new angle to distract these fools.
Well, owners of unprofitable teams, and there are quite a few, would certainly prefer to extract even more dollars out of the few really good teams. Honestly, if I were the NBA, I think their best way to profitability would be to demote half the league to AAA status, raid the shit out of the colleges and threaten to destroy NCAA basketball. If they really want to seek new revenues, rather than minimizing cost, that's where there's a lot of revenue in basketball that they're not collecting. On another note, since when does adding a couple of rookies generally help a team get very good? Out of the first thirty picks in the draft, it's usually a good draft if even 10 of them ever end up even being starting quality players. It's a pretty laughable proposal.
If they want to "level" the playing field, put in a hard cap, and max contracts/non guaranteed contracts.
How about this. Every even-numbered year, only the worst 5 teams get to have a draft. Every odd-numbered year, it's the same draft as it is now. That was too simple. How about this. When the Oracle says the new King will be born tonight, all the newly-born males are slain. This requires a census in everyone's hometown, and don't forget to check mangers. In this way, good teams would be denied any new talent. How about this. Why do teams which draft late still win? Because they have good coaches. How can we defeat this curse? Once an NBA coach wins 100 games, he is banned from the NBA. This way, the best teams become bad again, and the losing teams move up. Now, instead of changing the draft to give the best draftees to teams with bad coaches, you just give worse coaches to good teams. Bingo, parity.
A hard cap only creates "parity" in the sense that it creates a tyranny of the lowest common denominator. A hard cap is for people who think Donald Sterling is the epitome of a great owner.
BTW, Stern likes to yak about the league losing $400 million. Math is not my strong suit, but $400 mil spread over 30 teams = $13.3 mil apiece. $13.3 mil? You can fix that be giving teams a mechanism for getting out from under Roy type bad contracts. $13.3 mil? PA spends that much on yacht fuel. Jerry Buss spends that much on hookers. Is this a fargin' joke? Stern expects us to believe the league is hurtling toward a lock-out over THAT? <Rant over>
It's not a one-time loss, it's annual. If an average owner is worth $500M, he'll lose more than 1/4 of his worth every decade. (133 / 500 = 26.6%) You have to think like us. Sure we can afford it for one year, but how long do you expect us to keep this up?
A change to the draft like that really hurts borderline playoff teams more then any other. Great teams will still be great without there draft picks, but the mediocre teams will get hit harder because they wont even have the chance to get a good bench player with there non existent first anymore. A hard cap with non guaranteed contracts like the NFL would be the best to even the playing level for small market/big market teams.
Of course, his franchise's value will have appreciated by more than that amount over the course of that decade, so when he eventually sells his club, he'll more than recoup his "losses".
Increase the years to 6 for the rookie contracts with a team option to terminate the contract at 3 years(in case they are a bust). Decrease the salaries of rookies 20% and allow teams to extend at 4 years. More players will sign extension with current teams instead of having to get low paying salaries. Also the franchise tag the NFL has isn't a bad idea either. Keeps the league with more parity.
Does a franchise tag really work in the NBA? I don't think the general fan wants to see great players in meh organizations. You'll probably see more forced trades then.
I do not like that draft idea. You've got lot of teams around .500 in the playoffs, so they'd get no 1st round picks? Even though a team is good, You've got to give them some opportunity to get young players to groom the next generation. That's just way too much of a punishment for success. The biggest change I'd like to see is non-guaranteed contracts, just like the NFL. No more being cap strapped by someone who can't play or underachieves And though this would never happen, I'd like to see fewer, games. There's too much lolly-gagging around the league because it's such a strenous schedule, also reduce the playoff pool to 6 per conference with 2 byes, like the NFL has. I don't like the idea of a hard cap, because teams should be allowed to keep players they draft. I like this current system, where you can't go over the cap to sign a FA.
good point. what if you're an EC team and you made the playoffs, but your record is far worse than the 9th seed in the WC? A huge stretch I know, but think about it. Making the playoffs in the Eastern conference could potentially have a double whammy negative impact for teams. It would just make the teams in the Western Conference even better.
Plenty of NFL teams are cap strapped by players who get hurt or underachieve or just never were that good to begin with. That's because signing bonuses are guaranteed, so that's what negotiations revolve around, generally not years and average annual value. The signing bonuses are paid out evenly over the length of the contract, but if the contract is terminated early, the remaining amount left to be paid on the bonus is accelerated to that year's cap...which generally is not something a team can afford, because then they have to get rid of other players somehow to get under the cap by the deadline. If you went with totally non-guaranteed contracts, and no guaranteed money at all, no players would sign multi-year deals. The reason athletes want multi-year deals now is for security against possible injury. If contracts weren't guaranteed, then there's no incentive for players not to go year to year. Some fans might be okay with every player on every team being a free agent every off-season. I bet a ton of fans would hate it, since they like the idea of "locking up" players they like, knowing those players will be around awhile. That would not happen if there were no guaranteed contracts/money beyond the first year.
