Appreciate all the effort put into initial post. That said, I'm with what appears to be the majority responding in this thread. Don't freaking care, just play the games. Let the owners find new players and let the current players start a new league for all I care. Millionaires and billionaires fighting... snooze
I think most of your suggestions are pretty good and reasonable. I don't like the idea of a lemon law, though. I think the better way to treat albatross contracts is that you can get more immediate salary cap relief if you buy out the contract (maybe 1 more season of pain, and then it's out of the cap calculation), but don't let owners weasel out of their monetary obligation to the player. I like having some punishment for signing bad contracts in the first place. Otherwise, I'd like to see the elimination of restricted free agency. It's always an affront to me to see great players on the Clippers forced to choose between market-rate and freedom. Give the incumbent team an ability to offer the best contract, but don't hold the player hostage.
Actually its a lot closer to Wall St arguing for all their bonuses whilst their business model collapses around them. In fact it seems eerily similar, plenty of these teams losing money and having to be propped up, meanwhile people arguing they need to keep their 5-6m paychecks because its only fair.
Given 5 year contracts, I think forcing a team to put up with two years of it and paying 75% of a third to get out of the last 2-3 years is fairly painful. I'm not going company man, but there's definitely something to be said for the idea that the NBA's financial issues stem from bad contracts being handed out. Forcing a team to pay the full amount on a $120M mistake is bad for business. It's not the Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, or Dirk max deals that cause financial issues in the league. It's the Rashard Lewis, Baron Davis, Gilbert Arenas, Elton Brand, Vince Carter, Joe Johnson, Jason Richardson deals. It's Eric Dampier, Eddy Curry, and Jerome James flipping an end of their deal push into a stupid contract that they won't even try to earn. You either need a way to preclude these contracts from being handed out....or you need a stick to threaten players to live up to the deals or risk losing them. Stern and Co want that to be low dollar buyouts, but I agree that there needs to be a financial penalty so that teams acknowledge some responsibility. Also, it's pretty cold to have a system that allows teams to dump a guy that second he gets hurt. Totally agree that the players have to get it that they've been living off a revenue bubble and are in for some measure of a paycut. What I was getting at was, you do have to appeal to a majority of the 430 players to get a deal done....and putting in a proposal that's going to be incredibly painful to over a third of the members is going to be a lot more difficult than a proposal that stings a small percentage. In the late 90s, there was a movement towards a huge disparity in salaries and an erosion of the "middle class" player salaries....which is why they fought for and received the MLE and LLE in CBA talks. It's easy for us, as fans, to say get rid of the exceptions and go to a simple hard cap....but 70+% of the players union know they'll never see a max contract and are rightly concerned about a system which could pay 1 or 2 guys around the max and leave 10 guys on each roster near the minimum. They simply will not sign off on that. It'd be like Texas school teachers signing off on a deal that deals with funding cuts by allowing principals keep their full salaries and the teachers all take 40% paycuts. I'm not arguing about "fair"....just that getting the NBPA majority to agree to slash their money so that ~35 guys can stay rich is not going to go over well. Get rid of the S&T and teams have a 10-fold better chance to keep their own guys. The S&T renders null and void the advantage teams have of retaining guys with a better deal. I'd go so far as to say that a FA resigning with a team should be trade ineligible for a calendar year. That would also close loopholes like the one the Mavs used when they signed a retired KVH just for salary purposes in a trade. But I like rFA for rookie deals. The reason it was inserted was that there was a problem in the late 90s of small market teams becoming farm systems with young guys. They develop them just to watch them jump ship right as they're beginning to pay off on the court. What I don't really like is the "early max extension" guys can sign so quickly. Too many guys (like Brooks) get pissy and bitter if they aren't given big money well in advance of earning it or proving themselves. RFA lets the market set the price. But maybe it should be modified to give outside teams a better shot, with draft pick compensation instead of the current system of contract matching.
It's not so much about what's good for business as what is fair. If they make a 4-year contract, they should pay for a 4-year contract. If a player signs a small contract and then blows up, he doesn't have an option to increase his wages; so neither should the employer have the option of diminishing them when his value goes the other way. With garanteed contracts, the teams wear the risk of injury. By giving them the option to buy the contract out at a fraction of the price, you make the player wear the risk. I don't think that's right. Given that it is his own body, you know the player is motivated to maintain his own health. The team has a lot of influence on his health too though -- they provide the doctors and the trainers who tell him if he should play or not or what sort of surgery to get or rehab to do. They already deal with the temptations of vying interests of keeping their players healthy for the longterm and getting valuable but risky performance out of them in the short-term when they're returning from injury. Softening the blow of bad injuries for the team will have the effect, on the margin, of making them less risk-averse when it comes to rehabbing players. When you have situations like Grant Hill's, where the team is having him play when he should not be playing, the team absolutely should suffer as many consequences of breaking their $100m player as possible. Certainly Grant Hill shouldn't have lost any money promised to him because of management's recklessness. Injury isn't the only factor. You also have the Rashard Lewises who don't play up to their contracts. But, that's just management being dumb -- do you really want to give them an escape from their own stupidity? I knew the day they announced the contract that it was an albatross. Of course, there are cases of guys getting the contract and not trying too hard after that. But, I don't know how you tease those out from contracts that were stupidly high in the first place, or contracts that were impacted by injury. You could just say that that needs to be part of a team's due diligence -- is this the sort of player that's going to quit once he gets paid? Perhaps, you could expand the use of incentive pay in contracts.
KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Speaking with reporters Wednesday in Manhattan, NBPA chief Billy Hunter said of #NBA owners' latest proposal: "Their demand is gargantuan." KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Of owners reaching into players' pockets for money already earned, NBPA president Derek Fisher said, "It speaks to their arrogance." KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Fisher also called Stern's description of "flex" cap "a total distortion of reality. It's not a flexible cap, it's a hard cap." KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Hunter: "It's a question of to what extent (the owners) want to kill this thing." KBerg_CBS Ken Berger According to players, the #NBA's proposal will cost them $7 billion over the life of a 10-year deal. 7 minutes ago KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Hunter said players would not regain their $2.17 B in salary/benefits until the 10th year of the owners' proposal. 6 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Union officials will meet with about 50 players Thursday in NYC to plot their next negotiating move. "I'm not optimistic," Hunter said. KBerg_CBS Ken Berger But Hunter was careful to say owners and players are not at an "impasse," a key legal term that would signal a total breakdown in talks. KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Players are deciding what, if any counterproposal to make in Friday's scheduled bargaining session. KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Hunter said he anticipates that owners may vote to lock out players Tuesday in Board of Governors meeting in Dallas. KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Fisher said players he's spoken with, including Kobe Bryant, are "in total disbelief" over owners' demands. 2 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply
KBerg_CBS Ken Berger Fisher on player reaction to owners' latest offer: "They've asked us point-blank why we are even talking." 1 minute ago Favorite Retweet Reply
