WTF NBA?!

I am always in favor of players getting whatever they can in contract negotiations. They are the ones who own the scarce resource (in this case NBA talent). In fact, I think there should not be salary cap.

I mean there aren’t salary caps in other forms of entertainment. Tom Cruise makes about 50 million dollars per movie. Judge freaking Judy makes 47 million dollars per year… and only “works” 52 days a year. I’m no math expert but that seems like it is almost 1 million dollars a day to yell at someone for their cat destroying a landlord’s apartment. Entertainment salaries simply cannot be compared to the real world. And sports are one of the biggest forms of entertainment so I think it is absurd to cap the salary of anyone who generates billions of dollars of profits. We would not stand for it anywhere else in our society.

But I digress. There are salary caps. They supposedly are there to ensure a level playing field for small market teams so that New York and Los Angeles don’t just buy every Championship. (I realize Chicago should also be listed here but this is about basketball and the Bulls owner still doesn’t understand he is in the 3rd largest market). But here is the problem, there are just too many ways to circumvent the salary cap. Teams who spend money will always have an advantage… and they should. If you have an owner that is willing to spend their billions of dollars on creating a winner, that’s awesome! (And I’m very jealous you have one). Again, in no other business would we say “Nope. You can’t invest money to make your business more successful”.

But if you are going to have a salary cap… have a freaking salary cap! Don't let teams do end arounds so they can get an advantage while still not paying a player what they are worth.

Right now the biggest NBA salary cap shenanigans is the buyout, waive and stretch strategy. In this strategy, a bad team buys out a player for about 90% of their remaining contract. Next they releases

the player and stretch that remaining money over 5 years on the salary cap to greatly reduce the impact for those 5 years. So you get rid of a player, give him a huge check, and you get a little cap relief. So you pay millions of dollars to NOT have that player producing for you. That is absurd! Any system where that seems like a good idea is fatally flawed.

And yet the trend has started. It has already lead to DeAndre Ayton and Bradley Beal being paid huge dollars to leave. And these are not scrubs. Perhaps they were overpaid but they are starter level players. They are 2 of the best 160 basketball players on earth. And the system encouraged their teams to say “we will pay you not to play for us”.

After a player is bought out, they are free to sign with any team they want. And they are still getting the huge check from their old team so the new team only needs to pay them a relatively tiny salary. Both Ayton and Beal signed with a new team for about $5 million per year. So those teams got a starter for about 1/30 the of the beloved salary cap.

This is a VERY attractive deal for all involved. The old team saves 10% of a big contract and it only counts as 1/5 per year for 5 years on the salary cap. The player gets a huge check and doesn’t need to play on a bad team. The new team gets a huge bargain on a starter so they can pay the rest of their players more money. So you better believe this is going to start happening more and more. It is going to get out of hand very quickly.

Oh and did I mention what teams signed those starters? The freaking LA Clippers and LA Lakers. Leveling the playing field…my ass.

And right on cue, as I was writing this, the LA Lakers got Marcus Smart, another starter for 1/30 of the salary cap. Smart was the defensive player of the year in 2022. This is just silly. Totally a level playing field.