Sark wrote:How many times in the history of sports, have salaries gone down? Maybe during the Great Depression? Maybe during WWII? Our country's appetite for entertainment and sports entertainment has only increased, and there will always be new revenue streams for sports leagues.
Two recent(ish) examples that come to mind are NHL salaries (before/after the lockout that cost a season) and (temporarily) some Euro football teams a few years ago. In both cases it was driven by a step down in TV rights deals that had been going up - and teams signing long-term contracts expecting the large increases to continue. This caused some severe, though temporary financial problems for some teams Even though the decline wasn't that much the gap between the expected large increases and the decline was a big hit. In both cases revenue and salaries have since resumed their upward march.
The NBA should be somewhat immune to this due to the BRI split mechanisms. Salaries would drop in sync with the revenue. Though obviously if this hit there'd be a year or two with unfriendly FA markets for players as most teams would have all their cap space taken up with overpriced 'old cap' contracts - essentially the opposite of this year.
