End gurranteed contracts...good idea?

[Cevap]

MLB is a whole different animal, they have all guaranteed contracts and no salary cap. You could argue that they have the only model for "true" market value because they don't have an artificial maximum contract like the NBA and no salary cap that hurts the team. It's a lot easier to make 100 million in your career when the team can spread a 50 million dollar payroll over 15 players then when a team has to spread a 100 millin dollar payroll over 53. It's simple mathematics. But top NFL players also get paid comparably to top NBA players. The only difference is that the NFL teams are bigger and thus there's more players to split the salary cap money with. Also most NFL'ers receive the money upfront instead of over the life of the contract, it's not unusual anymore to receive 20-30 million dollar bonuses.


I don't understand how you can with a straight face say that the league wouldn't be more competitive with nonguaranteed contracts, i can't think of 2 good reasons.

[Dieselbound&Down]

Cliff Levingston hasn't put a lot of thought into it, but some sort of general rule that says if a guy was only active for 30 of the team's regular season games (or less), the team has the option of buying out his contract for 1/4 of the remaining contract worth, which would be appropriately assigned to the salary cap for the remaining years of the contract.

Isn't there a distinct moral hazard that somebody, say myself, might hire Tonya Harding's bodyguard to take out a knee, make the fro feel a little pain.

[Doctor MJ]

MLB is a whole different animal, they have all guaranteed contracts and no salary cap. You could argue that they have the only model for "true" market value because they don't have an artificial maximum contract like the NBA and no salary cap that hurts the team. It's a lot easier to make 100 million in your career when the team can spread a 50 million dollar payroll over 15 players then when a team has to spread a 100 millin dollar payroll over 53. It's simple mathematics. But top NFL players also get paid comparably to top NBA players. The only difference is that the NFL teams are bigger and thus there's more players to split the salary cap money with. Also most NFL'ers receive the money upfront instead of over the life of the contract, it's not unusual anymore to receive 20-30 million dollar bonuses.


I don't understand how you can with a straight face say that the league wouldn't be more competitive with nonguaranteed contracts, i can't think of 2 good reasons.

You said specifically that football players were getting market value. All your points here about salary caps are completely irrelevant.

Your point about there being more football players *is* relevant, however not to the very top guys. The value of a Peyton Manning to a franchise is honestly greater than the value of an Alex Rodriguez. The QB is just that important. Yet, ARod will end his career having made half a billion dollars and Manning will have made maybe a quarter of that. This despite the fact that the NFL generates *far* more revenue than the MLB. It's just unreasonable to conclude that NFL ownership isn't reaping a financial benefit at the players' expense here relative to the other major sports.

I never said the league wouldn't be more competitive with nonguaranteed contracts. I actually said if you wanted to maximize the level of competition in a game you should kill the losing side. Point being the NBA doesn't exist simply to provide us with entertainment at whatever expense to the players (or owners for that matter).

[Dieselbound&Down]

-= original quote snipped =-
Well the real reality is that the reason why football owners fight so hard for non-guaranteed contracts is that what they pay their players to do is likely to completely destroy their bodies, thus making it harder to predict who will be worth a long-term deal.

I hope that disgusts y'all like it disgusts me.

This goes right back to the point that the NBA union is too far ahead of the game to ever let something similar be negotiated in the NBA. And you are right in that NFL players bodies/careers are destroyed every week and they have to get the money while they can more than any other sport.

[Cevap]

how can you compare ARod and Peyton Manning? it's like comparing apples and oranges, peyton would also get the same contract had the NFL not implemented a salary cap. ARod gets the money because a team can pay him whatever they think he's worthy without having to put a minimum contract player at another position.

Payton gets paid well compared to LeBron, Wade, Duncan. Making the guaranteed contracts obsolete would still give the best players great contracts and everyone would be paid their current market value

[ljp24]

The problem isn't so much guarranteed contracts for me, its that there is no mechanism in which a team can a) fire a player and in the event of firing the player b) prevent him from playing in the NBA.

In lieu of that to me the best solution is forteams to have 3 year contracts with the third year always being an option year, and whether the third year is the players or the team's option would be determined by incentives. The catch is if the player does not meet his incentive and the team doesn not pick up his option the max money of the next contact would be lower. Right now there aren't built in checks for the player to show any loyalty to the organization. There would have to be allowances for injuries and stuff.

I'd really like to see all years be incentive laden and an option for a team to drop a player and not have any cap problems if they don't meet the incentives.

NBA players are humans, not robots.

[Doctor MJ]

how can you compare ARod and Peyton Manning? it's like comparing apples and oranges, peyton would also get the same contract had the NFL not implemented a salary cap. ARod gets the money because a team can pay him whatever they think he's worthy without having to put a minimum contract player at another position.

Payton gets paid well compared to LeBron, Wade, Duncan. Making the guaranteed contracts obsolete would still give the best players great contracts and everyone would be paid their current market value

What do you mean how can I compare ARod to Manning? It's not like the organizations that pay them have different goals in mind. They're looking to make money, and pay ARod and Manning in order to accomplish that. How can you not look to compare them when making claims about "fair market value"? Which by the way, you still haven't explained to me how you evaluate.

I think you strongly overestimate the effect of the cap in football on top player's salary. Note that it is basketball not football that has seen top player salaries take a big step backwards, and that the difference between basketball and football contracts is that basketball has Max Contracts specifically for this purpose. This also means that a comparsion like you're doing between a football star and current basketball stars which doesn't factor in Max Contracts while coming to conclusions is flawed from the start.

Regardless, my point here was not that non-guaranteed contracts cause lower salaries, but to dispute your assertion that football players were getting market value, and saying that Manning makes as much money as players in a league that specifically prevents top players from making market value does not prove your point at all. If anything it does the opposite.

Last, consider the Max Contract effect, it begs the question not how Manning compares with Tim Duncan (who we know isn't getting market value), but how he compares with lesser players. Consider that Manning almost certainly won't make as much money in his career as someone like Shawn Marion, which means that in spite of the NBA worse-than-market-value-status, it's still better to be Top 20 player in the NBA than the top player in the NFL.

[Cevap]

Market Value=What a team is willing to pay for your services, irrelevant of an artifical cap on earnings (max contracts) nor a team cap on spending (salary cap). happy?

Arod gets paid market value, lebron and peyton don't. Now explain to me how can you compare the salary structure in the NFL to the salary structure in MLB. One has a salary cap, one doesn't. One has a league wide TV contract pool, one has each team negotiate their own contracts. All merchandise in NFL is split evenly. MLB is each team for itself.


Yes NBA players get more money then NFL players because they are able to play longer careers. But in any given year the top paid NFL player will receive a bigger paycheck then the top NBA player. but all this is besides the point: i said that nba would be a lot more exciting and more teams would be able to stay in contention if the contracts wouldn't be guaranteed. all of that would benefit the fan, the money would still be there for the players but instead of d-ho earning 4 million and dikembe 16, it would be more fair....isn't that what you want as well?

[Doctor MJ]

Market Value=What a team is willing to pay for your services, irrelevant of an artifical cap on earnings (max contracts) nor a team cap on spending (salary cap). happy?

Arod gets paid market value, lebron and peyton don't. Now explain to me how can you compare the salary structure in the NFL to the salary structure in MLB. One has a salary cap, one doesn't. One has a league wide TV contract pool, one has each team negotiate their own contracts. All merchandise in NFL is split evenly. MLB is each team for itself.


Yes NBA players get more money then NFL players because they are able to play longer careers. But in any given year the top paid NFL player will receive a bigger paycheck then the top NBA player. but all this is besides the point: i said that nba would be a lot more exciting and more teams would be able to stay in contention if the contracts wouldn't be guaranteed. all of that would benefit the fan, the money would still be there for the players but instead of d-ho earning 4 million and dikembe 16, it would be more fair....isn't that what you want as well?

Not sure what you're asking me here, and I think I may be starting to get confused as to where we're going so I apologize for that.

I'll try to get back to the core of the issue about bonuses vs guaranteed contracts. Let me put it this way: For a player, bonuses vs guaranteed money only works out if their bonus plus the average rest of the salary they get before being cut equals what they could have gotten from a guaranteed contract. Of course if it does work out equally, then the only thing that's changed financially is that the owner has had to pay more money sooner. Now question: Why would ownership fight for a system which on average didn't save them money, and which forced them to cough up money sooner? There's only 2 possible answers: 1) They haven't, meaning the current system is saving them money, 2) They're idiots mistake added control for financial benefit. I believe answer #1, do you believe answer #2?

Regarding contract pools specifically, as that is a viable topic here that I haven't addressed before. If it were only the Yankees and Red Sox bidding against each other which created the huge salaries in baseball, that would be huge. However, that's not the case. Clubs with much less cash lying around have signed players to contracts that put NFL salaries to shame. As such while I won't dismiss contract pools as a factor, I don't buy it (or it and salary caps) can explain everything away.

Your statement about in any year the top NFL player getting paid more than the top NBA player is not really accurate. Because star players are not getting such a big chunk of their salary in bonuses, when they get a bonus it exceeds the top NBA player. That is nothing like a yearly salary though.

What do I want? Well, I don't watch basketball and think "man, none of these guys are trying", so I may be the wrong person to ask. It does irritate me when someone like Darius Miles gets a big contract and then proceeds to cancer his way out of the line up, so I would be in favor of making some changes along those lines. But in general, I think that the only thing the current system punishes is stupidity, and I actually kind of like that. I can sympathize with New Yorkers having to suffer through a bad home team, but as a fan of the NBA in general, I see how New York is doing and am reassured that a team can't buy a title which gives the game more credibility.

[Cevap]

The owners would not be saving money on nonguaranteed contracts, the salary cap would still be the same and everyone would spend up to the limit. What nonguaranteed contracts would do is more or less guarantee that the best players will be paid the best. The problem with guaranteed contracts is when you have inefficient players earning a huge amount. the Larry Hughes, the Ben Wallace's, the Stephon Marbury's of the league all receive a ridiculous amount of money in correspondence to their production. Instead of them getting 15-20+ million a year, the Luol Dengs, the Daniel Gibsons, the Biedriens, the CP3's and Deron's would earn a bigger salary. Lebron and Kobe would get more money then the max limit because they are worth more then the 17 million or whatever they're getting paid. The money would still be spend but on better players. THe owners would not be making money of the deal, if anything they would be spending more because they would be having to spend a big bonus on every big accusition.

Apart from the money going to the best players, the teams would be in a lot better situation to build. Who wants to see Iverson spending most of his career with garbage because of his team's salary situation? Same as VC in Toronto, Wade right now, Elton Brand in LA, the phoenix suns situation of selling draft picks and giving away contributors because they signed diaw and banks, etc.

Now i know you can say "well no one forced the GM's to sign them", that is true but it's obvious that it's not as simple as a GM always making right decisions. Great GM's are few and far between and there should be a choice to fix your mistake instead of just waiting for the contract to end or to trade for a worse contract.

[Doctor MJ]

Hmm, well you and I clearly disagree about nonguaranteed contracts saving money. Me, I simply don't believe that owners ever fight tooth and nail with the players union for any reason other than their own pocketbook.

Now here you're talking about keeping the salary cap but removing the max contracts. You realize the effect of that right? Regardless of guaranteed or nonguranteed contracts, it means that stars get paid more, and everyone else gets paid less. Not really a big fan of that one, but I will say it's not really a owner-player issue.

I will say though you may have a point about nonguaranteed contracts with salary cap type restrictions. Specifically, having minimum salary caps in addition to maximum salary caps. If you had something that said "Your team salary cannot drop below X due to dropping a player", you might have something.

EDIT: But yeah, I'm just not that sympathetic for teams that make mistakes. I mean, in real life, people make mistakes that prevent them from ever recovering. Here there's basically no single mistake you can make that makes you screwed for more than a few years. I say suffer or learn.