DusterBuster wrote:The players union really screwed themselves by not accepting a smoothing of the cap hike. It was good for them for one year, but now it's really hurting a lot of the players.
the owners really wanted that smoothing provision; I think for two reasons, one stated and one unstated. The stated one was for the consistency and predictability of phasing in the massive cap increases and the impact of that on salaries. The unstated one is because they knew that wouldn't be able to help themselves and would give out a bunch of albatross deals that would bite them in their collective asses...and they sure did.
relatively, players are headed for hurt but I'm thinking hurt isn't the quite the right word. For instance, Ed Davis may be hurt in that he may end up making 500-600K a month rather then 800-900K. That's a significant difference. But if he's making 20M over the next 3 years, he's in the 1%, and actually, the top third of the 1%. I'd like to be hurt like that
but for sure, any player, other then the elite, that becomes a free agent in 2018 will likely get hosed compared to other years. There may be a lot of 1-2 year deals this summer
edit: more on this....
Including scale contracts for first-round picks and player options that will likely be picked up before Friday's deadline, NBA teams are currently committed to spending about $2.8 billion for the 2018-19 season. Exactly how much they will spend is impossible to predict with certainty, but in the recent past, teams have typically spent between 10 and 15 percent more than the collective salary cap for all 30 teams (projected to be a little more than $3 billion in 2018-19).
Assuming spending again falls in that same band, that means teams have somewhere between about $500 million on the low end and about $645 million on the high end to spend on free agents. That's bad news given that collectively the players hitting free agency made $650 million in 2017-18. At best, free agents will as a group achieve parity with their former level of pay. At worst, they're collectively in for a pay cut of more than 20 percent.
http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/23940071/nba-free-agency-all-big-signings-winsPelton does some calculations based upon WARP in that article as well, if you like that kind of stuff
he also talks a bit about Nurkic's dilemma, but I think he misses a lot of context talking about the threat of Nurkic playing for his QO
