gts
07-08-2014, 01:09 PM
The Miami Heat and the NBA’s Double Standard of ‘Sacrifice’
Why superstar players seeking max salaries are stuck between a rock and a hard place — while NBA owners are laughing all the way to the bank
BY ZACH LOWE ON JULY 8, 2014
In a time of hushed meetings and amorphous potential offers, the Rockets have transformed a thought exercise into a real thing by presenting Chris Bosh a concrete choice: take a pay cut to stay in Miami, or earn your full maximum salary over a four-year deal in Houston.
It’s not quite the ideal test case for a new collective bargaining agreement designed with perhaps one eye on engineering “competitive balance” by making it harder for teams to retain superstar clusters. Adam Silver trumpeted that catchphrase every chance he got during the 2011 lockout, but the league’s primary goal during that torturous offseason was to transfer cash from players to owners.
Silver is sincere in his desire for greater parity, and the easiest path to achieving it is to prevent in-their-prime superstars from teaming up. The new CBA attempted to do that by installing a super-harsh luxury tax. Spend a lot on players, and you’re going to face a crippling tax penalty that gets more severe as you add payroll. Superstars are expensive to sign and even more expensive to keep; the tax was crafted to make the “keeping” part prohibitive.
But that’s only part of the story. The league also beefed up that tax so more money would flow from big-spending teams to their (mostly) smaller-market brothers, who need those tax proceeds to pad their bottom lines. It is a revenue-sharing mechanism. Any impact on competitive balance would be a happy ripple effect.
And
The Nets are anything but a model of prudent spending. They are a spook story about what can happen when a team loses all of its flexibility and patience, leaving it to desperately flip one expensive contract for an even more expensive one that runs longer.
But the Heat could have proceeded down a less frugal path, giving raises to their own free agents (via Bird rights) and digging deeper to find quality players without using the full midlevel and triggering the apron. Hell, the Heat got Allen and Battier using the smaller midlevel exception for tax teams — the one they deemed not good enough to snag McRoberts this time around. Fill out the roster with that toolbox, and there’s no need for the guys producing the wins to take haircuts.
Granger is going to make only about $700,000 more than his minimum salary, and he didn’t produce at a rate that merits much more than that last season. McRoberts had a nice season, and the market for bigs who can shoot, walk upright, and hold a basketball is climbing fast.
But Klempner’s point is this: The Heat are asking their stars to forfeit millions so the team can pay McRoberts and Granger an extra $2.7 million per year combined and Arison’s Carnival Cruise Lines can continue to offer the very best in overstuffed buffets and kitsch. And the Heat have opted against just re-signing their own guys because the roster they built was no longer good enough. Whose fault is that?
The entire article here. long read but worth the time
http://grantland.com/features/nba-miami-heat-double-standard-contract-sacrifice-lebron-james-chris-bosh-houston-rockets-free-agency/
Why superstar players seeking max salaries are stuck between a rock and a hard place — while NBA owners are laughing all the way to the bank
BY ZACH LOWE ON JULY 8, 2014
In a time of hushed meetings and amorphous potential offers, the Rockets have transformed a thought exercise into a real thing by presenting Chris Bosh a concrete choice: take a pay cut to stay in Miami, or earn your full maximum salary over a four-year deal in Houston.
It’s not quite the ideal test case for a new collective bargaining agreement designed with perhaps one eye on engineering “competitive balance” by making it harder for teams to retain superstar clusters. Adam Silver trumpeted that catchphrase every chance he got during the 2011 lockout, but the league’s primary goal during that torturous offseason was to transfer cash from players to owners.
Silver is sincere in his desire for greater parity, and the easiest path to achieving it is to prevent in-their-prime superstars from teaming up. The new CBA attempted to do that by installing a super-harsh luxury tax. Spend a lot on players, and you’re going to face a crippling tax penalty that gets more severe as you add payroll. Superstars are expensive to sign and even more expensive to keep; the tax was crafted to make the “keeping” part prohibitive.
But that’s only part of the story. The league also beefed up that tax so more money would flow from big-spending teams to their (mostly) smaller-market brothers, who need those tax proceeds to pad their bottom lines. It is a revenue-sharing mechanism. Any impact on competitive balance would be a happy ripple effect.
And
The Nets are anything but a model of prudent spending. They are a spook story about what can happen when a team loses all of its flexibility and patience, leaving it to desperately flip one expensive contract for an even more expensive one that runs longer.
But the Heat could have proceeded down a less frugal path, giving raises to their own free agents (via Bird rights) and digging deeper to find quality players without using the full midlevel and triggering the apron. Hell, the Heat got Allen and Battier using the smaller midlevel exception for tax teams — the one they deemed not good enough to snag McRoberts this time around. Fill out the roster with that toolbox, and there’s no need for the guys producing the wins to take haircuts.
Granger is going to make only about $700,000 more than his minimum salary, and he didn’t produce at a rate that merits much more than that last season. McRoberts had a nice season, and the market for bigs who can shoot, walk upright, and hold a basketball is climbing fast.
But Klempner’s point is this: The Heat are asking their stars to forfeit millions so the team can pay McRoberts and Granger an extra $2.7 million per year combined and Arison’s Carnival Cruise Lines can continue to offer the very best in overstuffed buffets and kitsch. And the Heat have opted against just re-signing their own guys because the roster they built was no longer good enough. Whose fault is that?
The entire article here. long read but worth the time
http://grantland.com/features/nba-miami-heat-double-standard-contract-sacrifice-lebron-james-chris-bosh-houston-rockets-free-agency/