Abolishing the Max Salary

[Lamrock]

Ever since Kevin Durant signed with the Warriors, I have found myself more disillusioned with the NBA than usual (oh how I thought the day KD left the Thunder would be a joyous one... oh well). Though Golden State isn't guaranteed to win the championship this year, only the Cavs and to a lesser extend the Spurs have a chance to stop them. This lack of parity is nothing new in the NBA, but the super team phenomenon has made following the league feel even more pointless than usual.

Some franchises will always have advantages over others due to management, market size and luck. However, I think that getting rid of the max salary while keeping the salary cap would offer a clear disincentive to players teaming up to form super teams. You can hate on Durant for leaving his team to play for the 73 win squad he barely lost to a year prior, but it was certainly a rational move, given that OKC could only offer him a little bit more - a drop in the bucket compared to the endorsements garnered from being a perennial champion in a big market team. However, stars would be more inclined to be more evenly dispersed around the league if a team like say, the Utah Jazz could offer 40-50 mil to a top 5 player.

One of the big negatives to the NBA's lack of parity is that for most teams tanking is the only way to seriously contend for a championship. While Philadelphia is a bit of a laughing stock due to them still having the league's worst roster even after three consecutive years of tanking, they are nonetheless a much better bet to win a championship in the next five years than say, my Blazers, who have essentially decided to go all in on being a low playoff seed for the conceivable, in the hopes of once again lucking into their first round match-up losing it's two best players to injury again. And yet getting rid of the max contract wouldn't discourage tanking at all. This is because of the rookie scale contract. The new strategy to build a contender would be to horde talented young players, adding a star or two in free agency when it's clear your guys will or have panned out, and then go over the cap to re-sign everybody. As such, there are a couple approaches you could take: abolish the rookie scale (not recommended - see the NFL and Jamarcus Russell, as well as Eli Manning and Joey Bosa, the latter of which is in a contract dispute despite the rookie scale and damn it I'm getting off track), or implement a system like a draft wheel.

I don't see the player's association ever agreeing to getting rid of the max salary, as most players would make less money without it (I'm looking at you, Solomon Hill!), but I guess the point of this semi-drunken rant is to spark a discussion. Would getting rid of the max salary fix the NBA and bring about world peace, or would it actually make things worse, or make no difference at all?

[Andrew]

I don't think it would stop the super teams from forming. In fact, with the increasing salary cap, it'd probably make it a bit easier, while stripping teams of their "we can pay you a little more" bargaining chip with their own free agents.

I'm glad that you brought up the topic of super teams and their effect on the NBA, however, as it's a thread I've been thinking of starting myself. I also find myself a little disillusioned with the practice, and the lack of parity and competitiveness in the league right now. In all fairness, that's just the way it goes sometimes, as some seasons/eras are going to be a little better than others, but I'm not sure that the group of legitimate contenders has ever been this small, or this far ahead of the rest of the pack.

It should be noted, of course, that only one out of the thirty teams can win the championship in any given season, and only two will be able to directly play for it. However, in most years there's usually been anywhere from 4-6 legitimate contenders, maybe a couple of dark horse teams with an outside chance, and some other teams of relevance. Right now, it feels like we're going to be marking time until the Cavaliers and Warriors square off in another Finals. While Durant's move to the Warriors fuels the rivalry with the Thunder to a certain extent, it also makes it very lopsided. There are fewer teams of great relevance, fewer match-ups/rivalries of interest and somewhat equal footing.

The usual defense of LeBron taking his talents to South Beach in 2010, or Durant going to the Warriors this offseason, is that it's a smart move, and they have right to do it. That is absolutely true, but I don't think anyone who finds fault in their decisions is saying that they aren't smart moves, or that they have no right to make them. It's just that there's something about the way the left and/or the teams they went to that is a bit on the nose. I don't think a majority of the criticism has anything to do with whether or not they had the right to move on - they obviously did - but how it all went down.

With LeBron, you had The Decision, which came off looking bad despite the fact a charity was involved. There was also his strange disappearance in Games 5 and 6 of the Cavs' second round series with the Celtics in 2010. It makes you wonder: had he made up his mind to leave at that point, giving up on the Cavs and just phoning it in as a result? With Durant, he also had some strange moments in crunch time during the latter games of last season's Western Conference Finals. As the tide began to turn, did he give up on the Thunder and decide that he'd join the Warriors? Either way, he ultimately he went to the team that came back from 3-1 down to beat him, with a player that hit his teammate in the groin more than once, in what looked like it might be shaping up to be a heated rivalry.

So yeah, there's questions about professionalism there, if indeed both players did quit on their teams before they actually left. They had a right to leave via free agency, they made smart decisions in their choices which you can understand from their point of view, but there's still something iffy there, still something that kind of stinks. I don't think anyone is seriously denying that they didn't have the right to leave, but that alone doesn't deflect any and all criticism of their decisions, or the nature of their departure.

That said, I hope that I'm wrong. I'm hope that the league is more competitive than I expect, and even if it does end up being Cavs and Warriors again, that there are a few other teams that can give them a run for their money as legitimate contenders in their own right. At the very least, I'd like to see 4-5 legitimate contenders, and a few more teams of relevance in the rest of the top sixteen.

[Sauru]

just give me a hard salary cap and i will be happy.

[air gordon]

Respect but questioning Kd if he gave up in the Gsw series? That was the real NBA finals there. If not for Klay Thompson, it was OKC representing the West and they didn't need an overdue suspension to get there

Nothing can compare to the decision. Announcing it live like that using the charity thing as a front. And then talking about winning all these titles. Lol why was the big 3 flexing in their presser?? Btw Anyone hear from that guy who was head of ljames management team lately

There was the big loophole like Curry's contract being cap friendly. What about the rest of the league? Gsw needed to clear cap to get it done. Did Dallas want Bogut that bad??

Or did OKC really need to take on some garbage from the heat which was the final move to give Miami the cap to get their big 3?

[NovU]

Abolishing the Max Salary would create new problems. It wouldn't solve much if not anything.



I've come to accept this is the new era. Players, organizations, and even fans are little different today. Overpaying star players does not prove organizational loyalty and helps signing premier free agents. Players are mere commodity. Organizations are just jobs. Fans are bandwagoners looking for quick thrill.

[Murat]

Abolishing the Max Salary would create new problems. It wouldn't solve much if not anything.



I've come to accept this is the new era. Players, organizations, and even fans are little different today. Overpaying star players does not prove organizational loyalty and helps signing premier free agents. Players are mere commodity. Organizations are just jobs. Fans are bandwagoners looking for quick thrill.

I agree with this.

However, I don't think that this era will last forever. It will change sometime, but sure that it's not today.

[Axel]

Abolishing the Max Salary would create new problems. It wouldn't solve much if not anything.



I've come to accept this is the new era. Players, organizations, and even fans are little different today. Overpaying star players does not prove organizational loyalty and helps signing premier free agents. Players are mere commodity. Organizations are just jobs. Fans are bandwagoners looking for quick thrill.

I agree with this.

However, I don't think that this era will last forever. It will change sometime, but sure that it's not today.

It will change whenever it affects the NBA's bottom line. Right now, they've sold out to the casual fan and while they're raking in the profits, the quality of the product has gone down imo. The regular season is meaningless, and so are the first two rounds of the playoffs. The ONLY reason to follow the regular season is for fantasy sports, which goes to show why we have so many player fans.

I feel like I've wrote the above lines almost verbatim before. Maybe I've just been thinking it for a long time.

I'm also not a big fan of how political the NBA has been. The decision to move All-star weekend from Charlotte to Louisiana was a complete joke. Adam Silver claims it was for "business reasons" but I'm sorry to say, Charlotte is FAR better equipped to successfully host the all-star game. It was clearly politicization of sport, which is not only a bad business decision, but also inconsistent (hypocritical) with other missions of the NBA. Adam Silver had no qualms with the Chinese government's treatment of its own people when he chose to profit off NBA expansion into the Chinese market.

[benji]

We're somewhat operating without a max salary right now because of the way it's tied to the cap. Roy Hibbert signed for a maximum contract a few years ago. Mozgov got more than that.

LeBron currently doesn't have a "max salary" because of his opt-outs which are considered continuations of his current contract options.

Durant, like LeBron, was in an interesting grandfathered situation. The Thunder gave their "franchise player" deal to Westbrook because they assumed Durant would stick to his grandfathered deal which was reasonable at the time. But the cap exploding blew that up and eliminated the advantage those pre-2011 CBA deals had. This is how Kobe's contract extension went from nuts to irrelevant.

However, stars would be more inclined to be more evenly dispersed around the league if a team like say, the Utah Jazz could offer 40-50 mil to a top 5 player.

We have had numerous situations where players dropped their salaries to instead head where they wanted to. Dwight left $40+ million on the table to get away from Kobe. Nobody's signed with the Lakers despite the team trying to overpay them. The Knicks have gone through this, the Bulls, etc.

A team like the Jazz couldn't shell out $50 million on a top five player because they can't sustain the remainder of the roster without hitting the tax, and small market teams cannot pay the tax because of the double counting. It's much smarter for Utah to spread the deals around like they have been doing to sustain an eight man team that can grow.

As such, there are a couple approaches you could take: abolish the rookie scale (not recommended - see the NFL and Jamarcus Russell, as well as Eli Manning and Joey Bosa, the latter of which is in a contract dispute despite the rookie scale and damn it I'm getting off track),

The rookie scale actually isn't in place to benefit rookies, but to punish them. That's why the players union was eager as the owners to accept it. What a lot of people don't remember is that there was another "cap boom" in the early-1990s (which is what upset Pippen, Jordan, etc. about all the youngin's new contracts) and this led to star draftees sitting out rather than signing with their garbage teams. Jimmy Jackson and Glenn Robinson being two notorious ones. It also led to absurd deals, Glenn Robinson signed only two contracts in his career. His ten year rookie contract (worth an, at the time inside $86 million...down from his original demand of $100 million) and then the minimum deal he signed with the Spurs.

The RFA rules and team options came into being because veterans were ticked when KG turned three years out of high school into the largest contract in NBA history $126 million over seven years.

It's worth noting that the league has gone through this multiple times before and it battered the way teams were assembled for some time. The salary cap boom in the mid-1990s allowed the Knicks to sign Larry Johnson, Allan Houston, etc. the same year that the Lakers nabbed Shaq. Houston signed with the Knicks in part because the Pistons played by the rules, they wouldn't talk to Houston before trying to sign one of their other targets (Mutombo) because they were afraid of getting hit by what Riley eventually did when he dropped an insane amount of money on Juwan Howard after getting all his own FAs to agree to come back and negotiate the terms later. The league considered any contact with your own free agents to be retroactively counting against the cap since you could sign up to the one penny mark and then spend an infinite amount to go over the cap. So Houston ran off to the Knicks.

There also wasn't a max salary as we have now. That's how Jordan was paid $33 million on a one year contract. That would be the equivalent of a player signing a $50 million one year contract today just from inflation. He just waited until the Bulls signed up everyone else, then dropped his demands and Reinsdorf said "sure thing!"

It was all these things that conspired to create the 1998 lockout. (Which Jordan spent a lot of time trying to undermine just to retire lol) And it took the younger players like Shaq, etc. to band together to tell Ewing and the other old fucks to realize they were all getting paid mad money and it wasn't worth it to give up that money. That's why there weren't serious lockout threats until the Union fell apart (again) under Billy Hunter.

[benji]

This season, LeBron will make $31 million. Conley, Harden, DeRozan, Horford and Durant will make $26.5 million. Dirk will get $25 million. Melo is at $24.6 million, Lillard at $24.3 million, and Bosh, Howard and Wade round things out at $23.7 million, $23.5 million and $23.2 million.

The max salary for players this year is:
0-6 seasons: $22.1 million.
7-9 seasons: $26.5 million
10+ seasons: $31 million

But that's only in the first season of their deal. Raises and Designated player deals can make all of this worth far more. James Harden for example signed his deal in his fifth year. But he didn't meet the criteria, so he actually had to drop down to the "max" for his actual years rather than sign a contract based off his prior one. Had he met the criteria he could have started his new deal at $31 million.

Westbrook's recent extension is actually interesting as he dropped out of the designated player situation because the salary cap is increasing faster than any raises and he deal he'd get from it. He's essentially leaving $5 million on the table this season on the bet (not a difficult one really) that when he opts-out and resigns again he can sign for a higher max even though it's limited to 30% of the cap (like the deal he could have signed for this year) but it'll be a higher cap so his starting figure (and subsequent raises) will be much higher.

This is one reason LeBron keeps signing short deals with opt-outs, he can keep punting as the cap goes up to resign under new more favorable terms even if he has no intentions on leaving Cleveland.

And the best part is, their cap holds are based on the prior deal, which is why LeBron waited until after the Cavs did all their other business this offseason to finally negotiate his max deal that everyone knew was coming. Same with a few other players. (Andre Drummond for example had a cap hold based on his rookie deal, not the maximum he was able to sign for. Giving the Pistons an extra $15 million or something.)

[Sauru]

yup still say we need a hard cap