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Scrap max contracts and keep the cap. Problem solved.
Salary caps do work. We've had them here in Australia in our major sporting codes since the early 1990s and it has been the most significant contributing factor to balancing the competition.
The NBA would go the way of the EPL without the cap. Success would depend on who spends the most money.
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On September 30 2013 10:39 slyboogie wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 10:35 a176 wrote: The Heat are a case of players taking "less money than their worth", to play for championships rather than playing for money.
If you are asking if "thats fair to the players", well ask them?
I think the problem here is that there are so very few people who actually argue for professional athletes to make even more money than they do, so nobody has any idea what point you are coming from. Dude, why shouldn't a laborer earn what he's worth in a free market? The players taking less than they were worth was because of the cap - the team says, "sorry, I can't pay you what you're worth. Cause of the cap...damn, sorry. But here's the $1.2 vet exception!" and as the league falls apart due to the same team winning every year, then every player would make no money!
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On September 30 2013 10:39 slyboogie wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 10:35 a176 wrote: The Heat are a case of players taking "less money than their worth", to play for championships rather than playing for money.
If you are asking if "thats fair to the players", well ask them?
I think the problem here is that there are so very few people who actually argue for professional athletes to make even more money than they do, so nobody has any idea what point you are coming from. Dude, why shouldn't a laborer earn what he's worth in a free market? The players taking less than they were worth was because of the cap - the team says, "sorry, I can't pay you what you're worth. Cause of the cap...damn, sorry. But here's the $1.2 vet exception!"
what is the pay scale? is lebron worth 20 million? 40 million? 100 million? do we equalize payrolls across all sports? do nba players deserve more than mlb players? do we let the lakers determine the pay scale with their virtually unlimited payroll? how would a team like the detroit pistons, toronto raptors, charlotte bobcats, find the money to attract superstar talent to compete?
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On September 30 2013 10:36 Jerubaal wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 10:28 slyboogie wrote:On September 30 2013 10:21 Jerubaal wrote:On September 30 2013 10:08 jmbthirteen wrote: Except in the NBA you don't need the 12 best on the same team. If you get three of the top 10, you are winning the championship. Look at the Heat now. They have the best player in LeBron, another top player in Wade and a good player in Bosh. They are rounded out with roll players. And they are back to back champs and favored to win it again. The contracts teams like the Lakers, Celtics, Knicks and Nets would be able to hand out would be ridiculous compared to the rest of the league. The way the Spurs and Pacers are built today, that wouldn't exist in a league without the salary cap. Small markets would be completely fucked. And would still have lost without 3 very good players playing for peanuts. Let me see if I can explain this without eliciting a violent response, despite being completely accurate. Slyboogie doesn't precisely think this would make the NBA better somehow, but is applying his historicist, some would say Marxist, narrative in which the employer is always manipulative and the employees are always oppressed and it's not really worth arguing past that point. Well, it's not totally Marxist... Owners own teams that generate a lot of money from the public because sports are cool. Owners aren't all manipulative, no. It's totally natural to want to control your costs - that's okay. And owners should make money, they pay for the franchises and sort of..kind of..pay for the stadiums that the players play in. That's okay. But if you don't accept that fact, that owners will try to keep most of the money, then you'll keep thinking the salary cap exists for competitive balance purposes and not for keeping salaries down. Ostensibly, it exists for both, but one of those reasons is unprovable. My question then is why wouldn't the increased salaries for mega players cut into the salaries of, if not the mid range players, the lower level players. As I understand it, the CBAs are negotiated as a percentage of total revenue, so I don't see how that would work, even if individual teams tried to overspend.
Right, removing a salary cap means the negotiated revenue split would not work, so it'd have to be dumped. Also, without a salary cap, you'd have no salary floor. So you're right, the pay of lower quality players would probably sink. That's the right questions, imo. I think even the NBPA would be against removing the salary cap altogether, since the superstars pull up the earnings for so many of their members.
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On September 30 2013 10:49 a176 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 10:39 slyboogie wrote:On September 30 2013 10:35 a176 wrote: The Heat are a case of players taking "less money than their worth", to play for championships rather than playing for money.
If you are asking if "thats fair to the players", well ask them?
I think the problem here is that there are so very few people who actually argue for professional athletes to make even more money than they do, so nobody has any idea what point you are coming from. Dude, why shouldn't a laborer earn what he's worth in a free market? The players taking less than they were worth was because of the cap - the team says, "sorry, I can't pay you what you're worth. Cause of the cap...damn, sorry. But here's the $1.2 vet exception!" what is the pay scale? is lebron worth 20 million? 40 million? 100 million? do we equalize payrolls across all sports? do nba players deserve more than mlb players? do we let the lakers determine the pay scale with their virtually unlimited payroll? how would a team like the detroit pistons, toronto raptors, charlotte bobcats, find the money to attract superstar talent to compete?
Let the free market decide. If Mikhail Prokhorov wants to pay him $50 million annually, 10% of the teams worth, let him do it.
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On September 30 2013 10:39 slyboogie wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 10:35 a176 wrote: The Heat are a case of players taking "less money than their worth", to play for championships rather than playing for money.
If you are asking if "thats fair to the players", well ask them?
I think the problem here is that there are so very few people who actually argue for professional athletes to make even more money than they do, so nobody has any idea what point you are coming from. Dude, why shouldn't a laborer earn what he's worth in a free market? The players taking less than they were worth was because of the cap - the team says, "sorry, I can't pay you what you're worth. Cause of the cap...damn, sorry. But here's the $1.2 vet exception!"
That's a bad example. Really the only players getting "screwed" are the max contract guys who play well enough to deserve that max contract. Because they are worth even more than that to the chances of winning compared to other players. Anyone who accepts a vet exception is getting what they are worth, or has decided that money means less than sticking with a team they want to play for. Otherwise they go to another team and make more. If no one else offers them more, then that's more evidence that the vet exception is all they are worth.
Baseball depends on the farm system and developing young players playing for rookie contracts to compete with lower pay rolls. A good scouting department and farm system can overcome a money disadvantage in a given year, but that presumes that the team with more money spends their money poorly and does a poor job with their farm system. All things being equal the team with money still has a better chance to succeed.
Basketball doesn't rely on minor league prospects becoming stars, each player has a much huger impact on the wins and losses, and there are a lot less star players to pick from.
Even with no salary cap the Thunder would not have been able to afford to keep Harden. In fact they probably couldn't afford to keep Durant or Westbrook either if their was no cap.
The NFL is the most popular US league and they use the salary cap with no max contract limit, and they have the protection of being able to cut a player if he is no longer playing up to that level for a reason other than injury (injured players contracts are guaranteed). Seems to be working pretty well for them, but the NBA players would never agree to non-guaranteed contracts or franchise player tags.
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The anti-CBA rant's aren't Marxist, the CBA itself is. The contract screws Lebron, yes, but he is basically the CEO of a major corp in this situation. The secret winners are the Derrick Fishers, and Rashard Lewises.
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I think in the issue of "paying a player what he is worth", the player's skill and actual worth are being conflated. Sure, an owner might pay an obscene amount of money for a star, but at some point that dynamic starts to break down because the owner is running a business and he is not commodifying skill, he is commodifying entertainment. In that regard, even the most deadweight player must have some minimum absolute value because the team simply couldn't function without 5 players.
On September 30 2013 11:45 cLutZ wrote: The anti-CBA rant's aren't Marxist, the CBA itself is. The contract screws Lebron, yes, but he is basically the CEO of a major corp in this situation. The secret winners are the Derrick Fishers, and Rashard Lewises.
I didn't call it historicist/Marxist because of the argument but because of the attitude, i.e. going into the discussion assuming that the owners are being unfair, manipulative, which I don't think is very helpful.
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Its not the owners in a vacuum. Yes they fight to give up the smallest % of revenue they can, but the players union also fights for other things that the Owners could honestly give fuck about, like the Max contract. Those rules ensure that the "middle class" gets a bigger piece of the pie, which they have to negotiate for because otherwise the NBA would be subject to AntiTrust litigation and cease to exist.
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I don't think I explained myself well in the last post:
You can ask the question how much is it worth for an NBA player to play 82-~100 games of basketball a year, or how much is a fair price for his labor. Is $20 million enough? Seems like a hazy discussion.
You can also ask how much is that labor worth, or what sort of money is it generating. It seems like the CBA and individual contracts each tackle a separate portion of this and that a proper resolution would be pretty difficult.
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On September 30 2013 12:26 Jerubaal wrote:I think in the issue of "paying a player what he is worth", the player's skill and actual worth are being conflated. Sure, an owner might pay an obscene amount of money for a star, but at some point that dynamic starts to break down because the owner is running a business and he is not commodifying skill, he is commodifying entertainment. In that regard, even the most deadweight player must have some minimum absolute value because the team simply couldn't function without 5 players. Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 11:45 cLutZ wrote: The anti-CBA rant's aren't Marxist, the CBA itself is. The contract screws Lebron, yes, but he is basically the CEO of a major corp in this situation. The secret winners are the Derrick Fishers, and Rashard Lewises. I didn't call it historicist/Marxist because of the argument but because of the attitude, i.e. going into the discussion assuming that the owners are being unfair, manipulative, which I don't think is very helpful.
This reading of my posts is inaccurate. I don't think the owners are manipulative. Nor are they doing anything inherently wrong, they're behaving exactly how you'd expect owners to behave. But to conflate what's good for the owner with what's good for the sport/fan? That's a thin understanding.
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On September 30 2013 14:17 slyboogie wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 12:26 Jerubaal wrote:I think in the issue of "paying a player what he is worth", the player's skill and actual worth are being conflated. Sure, an owner might pay an obscene amount of money for a star, but at some point that dynamic starts to break down because the owner is running a business and he is not commodifying skill, he is commodifying entertainment. In that regard, even the most deadweight player must have some minimum absolute value because the team simply couldn't function without 5 players. On September 30 2013 11:45 cLutZ wrote: The anti-CBA rant's aren't Marxist, the CBA itself is. The contract screws Lebron, yes, but he is basically the CEO of a major corp in this situation. The secret winners are the Derrick Fishers, and Rashard Lewises. I didn't call it historicist/Marxist because of the argument but because of the attitude, i.e. going into the discussion assuming that the owners are being unfair, manipulative, which I don't think is very helpful. This reading of my posts is inaccurate. I don't think the owners are manipulative. Nor are they doing anything inherently wrong, they're behaving exactly how you'd expect owners to behave. But to conflate what's good for the owner with what's good for the sport/fan? That's a thin understanding.
On September 30 2013 09:59 slyboogie wrote:
Look, I think the idea of a salary cap seems "fair." But it's a trick - tying competitive balance to a salary cap is the easiest way for team owners to coopt the opinions of fans.
I'm struggling to find a different interpretation for this.
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raptors "ambassador"
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United States22883 Posts
Haha, Drake looks so genuinely happy. Maybe he can stop making the same emo/"thoughtful" songs now.
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On September 30 2013 15:18 Jerubaal wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 14:17 slyboogie wrote:On September 30 2013 12:26 Jerubaal wrote:I think in the issue of "paying a player what he is worth", the player's skill and actual worth are being conflated. Sure, an owner might pay an obscene amount of money for a star, but at some point that dynamic starts to break down because the owner is running a business and he is not commodifying skill, he is commodifying entertainment. In that regard, even the most deadweight player must have some minimum absolute value because the team simply couldn't function without 5 players. On September 30 2013 11:45 cLutZ wrote: The anti-CBA rant's aren't Marxist, the CBA itself is. The contract screws Lebron, yes, but he is basically the CEO of a major corp in this situation. The secret winners are the Derrick Fishers, and Rashard Lewises. I didn't call it historicist/Marxist because of the argument but because of the attitude, i.e. going into the discussion assuming that the owners are being unfair, manipulative, which I don't think is very helpful. This reading of my posts is inaccurate. I don't think the owners are manipulative. Nor are they doing anything inherently wrong, they're behaving exactly how you'd expect owners to behave. But to conflate what's good for the owner with what's good for the sport/fan? That's a thin understanding. Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 09:59 slyboogie wrote:
Look, I think the idea of a salary cap seems "fair." But it's a trick - tying competitive balance to a salary cap is the easiest way for team owners to coopt the opinions of fans.
I'm struggling to find a different interpretation for this.
It's not wrong of them to do so. Owners ought to do so. But the fan should know it's being done. Instead of calling it Marxist, you should say it's dialectic. To many fans of the NBA do not consider the financial realities of their favorite professional sports league. I'm not exactly shooting a truth-bazooka. A lot of this is opinion, but a lot of the response seems traditionalist and generic. I don't think the salary cap is good for the player or the fan, I don't think removing it somehow makes the EPL, just because people think it will. That's really all I was saying.
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lmao
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On October 01 2013 01:05 Jibba wrote: Haha, Drake looks so genuinely happy. Maybe he can stop making the same emo/"thoughtful" songs now. all I can think of is Chris D'Elia's stand up on Drake. "I'm crying in the shower"
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They should have listened to Leiweike and changed the "Raptors" name. Apparently he got outvoted though. YOLO.
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