Washington Wizards majority owner Ted Leonsis told local business leaders Wednesday that he expects the NBA soon will have a hard salary cap similar to the NHL’s model.
NBA commissioner David Stern said that’s not necessarily true—and warned Leonsis could be punished for discussing private league business. The NBA later announced it had fined Leonsis $100,000 for “unauthorized public comments regarding the league’s collective bargaining negotiations.”
“We’re negotiating and that was one of our negotiating points,” Stern told The Associated Press before the fine was announced, “but collective bargaining is a negotiating process, and that was not something that Ted was authorized to say and he will be dealt with for that lapse in judgment.”
Leonsis, who also owns the Washington Capitals, spoke to a group of Northern Virginia business leaders before the Wizards’ daily training camp session. He told them that the more fans a team has, the more they spend on the team, the more the team has a chance to acquire and keep good players.
“In a salary-cap era—and soon a hard salary cap in the NBA like it’s in the NHL—if everyone can pay the same amount to the same amount of players, its the small nuanced differences that matter,” he said.
Can't see the Players Association being huge fans of that. I'd be really surprised if they got a hard cap in place; with some of the contracts that run beyond the end of the current CBA, could it even be done without setting the cap to some ridiculous amount?
