Competitive Balance

[FlyingArrow]

Is this the forum to discuss suggestions for restoring competitive balance in the league?

Seems to me that the main issues are:

1. the one year big salary cap spike (too late to do anything about that now)
2. luxury tax isn't enough punishment
3. max salary is too low
4. hometown discounts

So the obvious solutions:
1. Don't have big one year cap spikes. Phase them in.
2. Higher luxury tax punishments, especially for free agent signings
3. If max-salary players were paid what they're really worth, the teams would have less for role-players and teams overall would be worse.
4. Let players play for less money if they want to stay put - that's fine. But count their market value against the salary cap. The highest (or maybe second or third highest) binding offer to a player would set their market value for salary-cap purposes, even if they accept a lower salary to stay with the team they want.

[Smitty731]

1. The NBA tried. The NBPA rejected cap smoothing.
2. The NBPA isn't going to go for this. It would only reduce the amount of money their players could make.
3. Max salaries aren't keeping teams from filling out rosters. Most teams end up at the cap or over at the time they sign someone to a max salary.
4. Team would just throw max offers to players to take up the cap room of their opponents.

Beyond that, competitive balance is fine. The NBA has always been top heavy. Both the Cavs and Warriors almost got beat this year. It's not the problem many seem to make it out to be.

[giberish]

1. Owners and Players didn't agree on a plan, and didn't trust each other much at the time.

2. The luxury tax is way, way more punitive then it used to be. It (at least arguably) helped the downfall of the Heatles. Golden State really hasn't been that far into the luxury tax (only in it at all for 2016 and 2018). They probably won't be that far into the tax for 2019 either. 2020 and further on GS will either have to lose talent to limit their luxury tax hit or else pay massive luxury taxes to the rest of the league - helping the other 29 teams one way or another.

3. Paying the top players more would take money away from the other players around the league. So most of the players union doesn't really want that. Though there have been moves to pay top players more. Max rates were slightly increased in the last CBA, and the designated player rule allows some players to hit the 35% max level earlier.

4. A minor issue. And it would be impossible to judge what fair market value is all around.

Overall the competitive balance issue is overblown. Golden State peaked in 2017 and is already declining. They BARELY won the WCF against Houston. The reason the finals isn't close is that GS and Houston are both in the WC. Philly and Boston look to be rising - perhaps to elite levels as soon as next season - so the EC will be stronger at the top.

[DBoys]

Smitty, I think there is indeed a perception among just about every constituency - fans, media, players, and owners - that the competitive balance is pretty far out of whack, since Durant landed in GS. And perception is reality. While that lopsidedness is good for GS, and for the very few teams who think they might have a chance to unseat them if they get lucky, it has served to somewhat disenfranchise 85-90% of the fans and owners from feeling that they have any chance at all ....and they certainly have enough votes to change things in one way or another.

Notice also that the "better competitiveness" you think you see hasn't come from GS now being on the same level as most other teams. Instead, HOU has risen because they have aggregated multiple stars in one place - which then made yet another team much weaker. Now you have all the top talent trying to gather on 2 or 3 teams, and it's a league of haves and have nots, where most games barely matter anymore because the talent is no longer spread through the league. Boring.

I think your answers on 2 and 3 are way off base.

In 2, raising the luxury tax does NOT reduce what players get paid at all. The tax itself is not reducing player salary, as it's simply a redistribution of money between owners and has no impact at all on what players as a group get paid. Nor does the tax putting a harder limit on spending by each team matter either, inasmuch as player salaries get adjusted at the end of the year so that the players as a group make the same total, whether any or all teams pay tax, run from tax, or whatever. An alteration in that tax rule would simply alter the equation of how well the league-wide "money paid to players" would be more (or less) balanced from team to team - the "harder" the spending limit, then the better balance there would be in spending. But make no mistake, the players as a group would still make the exact same money.

I think you missed his point in 3 about having raised (or lowered) max salaries ...the point (and impact) of raising the limits would be that the big stars end up getting more money as they deserve but also end up having a weaker supporting cast (as their salary then sops up a greater portion of what a team is able to pay everyone else). It's another way to competitive balance, in a league where the true superstars are quite underpaid and thereby are able to have an outsized impact on games.

[DoItALL9]

1. If there were another opportunity for a big cap spike what're the owners offering the players as a compromise for "cap smoothing"?
2. It would seem more genuine to just argue for a hard cap. The luxury tax is currently quite punitive. Also, it might just favor personally richer owners.
3. Raising the max salary could work to some degree but players could still take discounts plus middling franchises will occasionally make mistakes trying to hold onto their stars and be devastated.
4. The hometown discount market value plan seems to involve too much gamesmanship to ever be a working system.

Sent from my LG-H872 using RealGM mobile app

[flipside21]

I don't think the players associated would ever accept a hardcap - but if they did, that would really be the way to go to help achieve competitive balance. Maybe this could be augmented with one franchise player tag per team which incentives one player to stay within their team. Taking this approach, and then compressing max contracts to create more moveable parts and flatten the disparity between top tier and mid tier players would probably create more flexability across the league to try and make adjustments on the fly to roster construction.

Maybe consider adding in a 3rd round to the NBA draft as rookie contracts become more and more valuable...

[Warriorfan]

A change I would do is to let teams roll over their cap space like they do in the NFL banking up to 3-5
Yrs. They can save to give a lump sum bonus to a player they draft or a FA.

Perennially bad Sac might look better if they can give a 100 mil 2 yr deal.