Circumventing S & T limits

[Leeroy Jenkins]

One of the major changes in the CBA was the de-incentivizing of the sign and trade. Not only is it now subject to standard raises and years (4 years 4.5%), but teams above the apron are unable to receive players in sign and trades.

Now I may be wrong, but wasn't the purpose of these changes to encourage stars to stay with their original teams rather than forcing their way out? My question is, since there are minimal restrictions on regular trades in regards to teams over the apron, couldn't a team over the apron trade for a star player (thus acquiring his bird rights assuming the player had them already) and then subsequently sign him to a 5 year max deal using the player's bird rights when he becomes a free agent? This would essentially work like the sign and trade worked under the 2005 CBA, except the player technically becomes a free agent before he re-signs.

Am I understanding something incorrectly? Wasn't the whole purpose of limiting sign and trades to prevent what I just described above?

[DBoys]

Wasn't the purpose of these changes to encourage stars to stay with their original teams rather than forcing their way out?

Not exactly.

It's easy to look at the various items in the CBA as targeted to a particular end, but the problem is that there were conflicting purposes at play when that agreement was written. The league may have wanted one thing, but the players another, and what passed was a compromise that both felt they could live with.

There was no way that the star players were interested in a system that was going to effectively FORCE them to stay with the same team. But the league did want to have some motivation to encourage player retention, especially stars.

So they ended up in a solution that tried to address both of those conflicting aims. With a star player who wants the most money a team can offer, the financial advantage is still with the old team. And to some extent, the change in the s&t rules made the choice clearer now, as that player can only get that higher amount from one team. But if a star player wants out, his old team no longer can wait and "sell" that financial advantage to another team via sign-and-trade, and they are no longer able to do a s&t with every team.

So knowing that, if a player is not likely to stay, he probably has a bit more leverage now to force a trade in advance to a place he'd rather be, since the trade after he's in free agency is much less likely than before. At the same time, he doesn't hold all the cards - - he can't be too obnoxious in trying to dictate trade terms, but rather needs to work with his team, because if he's not traded to a team where he'd want to stay, he loses his ability to get that bigger "stay with the same team" money as a free agent.