"Only way to avoid 'super teams' is to impose a hard cap."

[Dennis 37]

Here's an idea. Have a soft cap, no player maximums on your own draft picks, over-max salaries reduced to max when traded or leave as a free agent, and the luxury tax formula includes the team's revenue. Local TV, ticket sales, advertising etc. the higher your revenue, the heavier the luxury tax.

This way the luxury tax would bite each team equally.

To illustrate, if a team with revenue of $100 was one dollar over the cap, they would pay $1 in luxury tax.
If a team with revenue of $300 was one dollar over the cap, they would pay $3 in luxury tax.

[Sark]

Again I ask, why the hell should anyone be a fan of a small market team if your choice is that you have to root for a team that is not given a fair chance to compete?

Whats the use of having more than 8 teams in the NBA if that is the case?

Why even bother buying season tickets to a Raptors game if your choice is to be fodder or a farm team to the big markets?

FYI. Not everyone likes LA, Boston, NY or Miami.

Can you tell why we should even have teams in small markets? I mean Seattle is a top 10 US city, meanwhile OKC is somewhere around 50, but for some reason Stern and the NBA thought it was ok to move the team there. If they can't support themselves through their own local deals, why should the NBA continue to do business there?

[DanTown8587]

Two, nothing is stopping these teams from acquiring great talents in the draft and then building around them. While that requires luck, teams have done it.

We had Carter and McGrady and McGrady left.

We had to overspend to surround Carter with players. Players were not taking a paycut to play beside Vince Carter.

When Carter left we were left with overpaid pieces and it took us years to clear cap space.


If Carter was drafted by the Knicks, McGrady would have gone there instead of Orlando. Then other pieces would have taken paycuts to play with them.

It just doesn't happen as easily for the less popular teams.

Bender for Antonio Davis didn't help. Michael Bradley in the 01 draft certainly didn't and that was a different era. McGrady would have been signed via RFA. Teams that don't surround good players eventually lose them, market be damned. And McGrady went to Orlando.

[Komodo]

The NBA is selling a better product for casual fans now, so going back to 1 "upper echelon all star/super star" for team won't happen, just deal with it, couch fans who write in forums/twitter complaining about his team sucking or how unfair is for LA and MIA to be LA and MIA... are not the target of the product, so you better understand that and try to enjoy the game, support your team and relax, if your front office/owner sucks im sorry for you, they will suck in the "super teams" era and did sucked in the previous eras, and odds are that they will suck in whatever era comes after this one...

Either save a few hundred of millions and buy your team or just buy a few beers, few candy bars, few hot dogs/pizzas/ pop corn and watch the games and enjoy the best team sport for the sake of it, because is fun and amazing.

/thread

Basketball is definitely not the best team sport, in fact it's a very individualistic sports where it's all about having a superstar(s).

[Jazza2319]

Smaller market teams just have a much shorter leash than big market teams, so there is less margin for error when building around a star. Toronto/Cleveland both did horrible jobs building around guys they had for 6 years, if you cant stand your ground and not make stupid band-aid trades like Cleveland did for Lebron then you can be successful. People forget how bad the cavs were in the draft

In 02 they busted on DaJuan Wagner
In 03, they got Lebron and knew they likely only had one year with a lower draft pick
In 04, they busted on Luke Jackson with a lottery pick
05 - traded their pick and used their 28 million in cap space on Larry Hughes, Donyell Marshall and Damon Jones
06 - picked Shannon Brown
07 - traded 2 1st rd picks for Jiri Welsch (WTF?) He averaged 7.5 ppg on below average percentages

I'm sorry, but you dont deserve to be awarded star players if you consistently make crap moves like this, and most small-market teams do

[HangTime]

Franchise Tag for a re-Signed player = $20M/year
Franchise Tag for a player signing with new team = $17M/year
Can't do both in the same season

2nd highest player on the team can make no more than $14M/year
3rd highest paid player can make no more than $10M/year
4th highest paid player can make no more than $9M/year

Add $1M for the above players that are Re-Signing, with their orginial team ($15M, $11M, $10M). NO S&T allowed for salaries above $7M.

Everyone else must make less than $7M a year.

Hard cap set at $50M.

---
No more trade exceptions. Trades must be equal in value(no limit on $).

For example.
Team A trades 5 players combining for $20.045M.
Team B trades 3 players combining for $15 million.

Team B must add $5.045M in cash to evenout the trade. That Cash still counts towards the cap (during the season). If a pick sold to team, the amount doesn't affect the cap.

[DanTown8587]

Hard cap set at $50M.

Your BRI for players: $1.5 billion
Current projection for BRI last year before opt out: $2.5445 billion

Please try again.

[LateRoundFlyer]

Again I ask, why the hell should anyone be a fan of a small market team if your choice is that you have to root for a team that is not given a fair chance to compete?

Whats the use of having more than 8 teams in the NBA if that is the case?

Why even bother buying season tickets to a Raptors game if your choice is to be fodder or a farm team to the big markets?

FYI. Not everyone likes LA, Boston, NY or Miami.

Can you tell why we should even have teams in small markets? I mean Seattle is a top 10 US city, meanwhile OKC is somewhere around 50, but for some reason Stern and the NBA thought it was ok to move the team there. If they can't support themselves through their own local deals, why should the NBA continue to do business there?

That's just it. He can't, he really can't. Not that it matters anyway, because even if he did have that understanding, he'd be loathe to admit it.

I've tried spelling it out for him many times, and he just willfully ignores it all. The more he carries on with this nonsense, the more trollish he appears.

Sent from my Nexus S 4G using Tapatalk 2.

[Arose1980]

This isn't the NFL. This isn't the MLB. The NBA has NEVER EVER been without a super team. It never will. More than any other league, the NBA is where one player can drastically alter the playing field. If you are wanting to gain some sort of level playing field in the NBA, you're never going to be successful.

Los Angeles has what most other franchises don't: Los Angeles. Beautiful women, great weather, Hollywood, leagcy, etc. The Miami Heat have Miami, no state tax, and now, they have LeBron, Wade, and Bosh.
Quality of life matters especially in the NBA and as long as that is the case, athletes will always flock to locations where they can have a high quality of life.
If you want to implement a hard cap, players will still find a way to join forces, even if it means taking a pay cut up front.

[Sark]

Franchise Tag for a re-Signed player = $20M/year
Franchise Tag for a player signing with new team = $17M/year
Can't do both in the same season

2nd highest player on the team can make no more than $14M/year
3rd highest paid player can make no more than $10M/year
4th highest paid player can make no more than $9M/year

Add $1M for the above players that are Re-Signing, with their orginial team ($15M, $11M, $10M). NO S&T allowed for salaries above $7M.

Everyone else must make less than $7M a year.

Hard cap set at $50M.

---
No more trade exceptions. Trades must be equal in value(no limit on $).

For example.
Team A trades 5 players combining for $20.045M.
Team B trades 3 players combining for $15 million.

Team B must add $5.045M in cash to evenout the trade. That Cash still counts towards the cap (during the season). If a pick sold to team, the amount doesn't affect the cap.

You must love socialism.

[Super Selby]

Again I ask, why the hell should anyone be a fan of a small market team if your choice is that you have to root for a team that is not given a fair chance to compete?

Whats the use of having more than 8 teams in the NBA if that is the case?

Why even bother buying season tickets to a Raptors game if your choice is to be fodder or a farm team to the big markets?

FYI. Not everyone likes LA, Boston, NY or Miami.

dis ain't marriage bruh, if you want to move on to bigger things with your team than ditch them bridesmaids farm teams and go for them heavenly blessed 10/10's, elbows just perfect big market teams

[Don Draper]

snip

I'm sorry you wasted your time writing all that but my post wasn't important enough to warrant that long of a response. I was simply pointing out that Houston is considered a good location for young, black, wealthy Americans not arguing it's overall merits (I'd choose Toronto or Denver if that was the case). I never said it was that better than LA, NY, or Miami so I'm not sure why you went off on such a silly tangent trying to compare cities (also not sure why you went on a tangent grading Houston's public transportation, health services, and science research but I digress).

This statement:

I'd wager his reluctance to sign there has far more to do with how terrible a city HOU is for a twentysomething athlete's lifestyle

simply isn't true. That's all.

[clevceltics]

Smaller market teams just have a much shorter leash than big market teams, so there is less margin for error when building around a star. Toronto/Cleveland both did horrible jobs building around guys they had for 6 years, if you cant stand your ground and not make stupid band-aid trades like Cleveland did for Lebron then you can be successful. People forget how bad the cavs were in the draft

In 02 they busted on DaJuan Wagner
In 03, they got Lebron and knew they likely only had one year with a lower draft pick
In 04, they busted on Luke Jackson with a lottery pick
05 - traded their pick and used their 28 million in cap space on Larry Hughes, Donyell Marshall and Damon Jones
06 - picked Shannon Brown
07 - traded 2 1st rd picks for Jiri Welsch (WTF?) He averaged 7.5 ppg on below average percentages

I'm sorry, but you dont deserve to be awarded star players if you consistently make crap moves like this, and most small-market teams do

Glad you were able to exspond on one of my earlier ideas. It reminded me of something else. Thanks. One of the things that I have noticed is that teams usually make their biggest mistake in the year following acquiring their "superstar" player. Usually no matter how great that player is their rookie year, the team is still pretty bad the following year therefore having a high enough pick to actually find another star player. For the sake of this arguement, Im not going to go into trades that were made the year after the star player was acquired cus it will be more work than I feel like doing. Anyways, in almost every case, you will find that almost every time a team drafted a high level star or a superstar on a team that really had nothing, they picked a huge bust the year after. The 3rd year of having that star player resulted in the playoffs reducing the team to really search for another star. Anyways, here goes:


2003 Draft Cleveland selects LeBron James. 2004 draft Cleveland selects Luke Jackson. 2005 No pick but makes the playoffs the following season.
2003 Draft Denver selects Melo. 2004 Denver selects Jameer Nelson and then trades him. 2004 - 05 make the playoffs.
2003 Draft Toronto selects Bosh. 2004 Draft Toronto selects Rafeal Araujo. 2006- 07 make the playoffs.
2003 Draft Miami selects Wade. 2004 made a trade for the best big man in the game. 2005 Dorell Wright was selected. 2006 Champs
2004 Draft Orlando selects Howard. 2005 Orlando selects Fran Vazquez who immediately after being drafted says he wont play in the States 2006-07 make the playoffs
2007
2007 Seattle selects Durant and Green. 2008 Thunder select Westbrook. 2009 select Ibaka and Harden. 2011-12 NBA finals.
2008 Draft Clippers select Eric Gordon. Gordon get hurt. 2009 get the top pick and Select Blake Griffen. Griffen gets hurt and doesnt play. 2011 flip Gordon for a superstar in CP3.

For this illustration I have left off whom Cleveland, Toronto, Denver, and Orlando passed over in the draft when they selected thier huge busts after selecting their stars since this post is getting long. Bottomline, please stop with the idea that Orlando or any other small market teams are just farm team for big market clubs. Or that not everyone has a chance to compete. Or that teams can hang onto their stars cus players want to go to big markets.
No one told Orlando to use a lotto pick on a guy who had no intentions of playing in the States. That blunder forced you after a couple of years to make band aid moves. The league will never be able to create enough rules to address that level of stupidity.

[Ditchweed]

Yes, you are right, I should have said profits are down, for small markets. There is no revenue sharing and, cap or no cap, the have markets still spend, and even though the small markets revenue has grown, it is not enough to cover the rising floor salaries. The cap has risen by 75% since 2005 and some small market teams now say they can barely make the minimum salary payments. Still, the situation would probably be even worse for them without any cap at all. They would still have some minimum to pay, but have lower revenues, which would leave them in an even bigger financial mess, and as disparate teams in a lopsided league.

Again, a hard cap has not helped most of the NHL. All it has done is capped the spending of the large markets and then made the smaller markets pay more in HRI than they can. The owners of the NHL are exactly where the NBA was in their lockout, which is that they need to share revenue better and cut some costs but they don't need the drastic cuts being asked for.

And the situation would surely be better for small market teams. Think of it this way: the NHL teams are all paying about the same amount of money for their teams, in essence, reducing the value of the markets. The only pro sport without true markets is the NFL. The other sports all had major labor unrest when they realized that was the case (MLB in 94, NBA in 2011, NHL now).

Removing the hard cap does not necessarily also remove the base salary teams have to pay. Right now they are tied together but they don't have to be. If that salary minimum stays and there is no hard cap, the situation would be worse for teams now in financial trouble.

The hard cap is not the issue, it's more the hard minimum that is the issue with the present NHL negotiations. It's the HRI %age split that now determines the high and low brackets, and it comes back to the same thing the NBA owners went through in that they need a higher %age of revenues to make their profit, with a lower %age going to the players. The players now get 57% and the NHL owners want to move it lower to at least 50% just like the NBA did.

[LateRoundFlyer]

snip

I'm sorry you wasted your time writing all that but my post wasn't important enough to warrant that long of a response.

I was simply pointing out that Houston is considered a good location for young, black, wealthy Americans not arguing it's overall merits (I'd choose Toronto or Denver if that was the case). I never said it was that better than LA, NY, or Miami so I'm not sure why you went off on such a silly tangent trying to compare cities (also not sure why you went on a tangent grading Houston's public transportation, health services, and science research but I digress).

This statement:

I'd wager his reluctance to sign there has far more to do with how terrible a city HOU is for a twentysomething athlete's lifestyle

simply isn't true. That's all.

Tangents? I lol'ed . Don't you find it funny when someone you're debating dismisses your criticisms of his position by questioning their validity, and when you expand on them, he dismisses them as "tangents"? No? Oh right, that hits a little close to home, doesn't it?

Let's rewind. I voiced my thoughts on the subject while making a different point to a different person altogether (Agenda42). This triggered an impromptu outburst in passing from you, which I've since attributed to mild homerism. I responded to back up my opinion, not really keen on dragging anything along further. You grew increasingly combative, and after finally tearing your argument to shreds in my previous post, now you need your diaper changed.

Bear in mind that nowhere was I conflating "young, black, wealthy Americans" with "young, black, wealthy American athletes". In fact, I had tried to point out the crucial distinction in this to you numerous times, but you refused to budge. Why would someone who was trying to argue against the merits of living in Houston at all cite the burgeoning career opportunities and low CoL? This is when you yourself betrayed your own ignorance many times; you had even said those points were "irrelevant to a black athlete" so you found it odd that I'd make them.

I stand by everything I said. For the record, I never doubted Houston's merits for young people (of any color) for a second. But if you've chosen to ignore this, by all means go right ahead. Such benign racism already got you this far, right?