Quote:
Originally Posted by Mota
If you can have 3 MAX slots on one team, doesn't that indicate that the salary cap isn't working properly? Really, there should only be one MAX slot per team available, which is why all these super-teams keep getting manufactured. You should have a ridiculous amount of money to spend on one player, and then a reasonable amount of money to spend on the other players.
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The NBA's salary cap is a bloated mess. It needs simplified and streamlined.
If have a hard cap and you create ways to circumvent that hard cap then either your cap is set too low or you don't really want a hard cap. On top of that the problem the NBA has over the NFL and MLB is bad contracts can be franchise crippling. With no cap in MLB teams can spend around a bad contract or maybe ship it out with prospects while taking on some of the salary. In the NFL you can release a player and take an accelerated cap hit.
IMO the NBA needs to raise the cap, eliminate max contracts, eliminate bird years (cap becomes a hard cap), and create some sort of out for bad contracts. Rebuilding teams in the MLB can be fun to watch because of the young players coming up from the farm system and while a NFL team can be painful to watch during a rebuild teams are able to rebuild rather quickly if they draft well. Rebuilding teams in the NBA tend to be bad, not much fun to watch, and how long the rebuild takes simply comes down to luck more often than not. The only major exceptions I'd look at with a streamlined cap is a cap on how much a player can take on a 1 year deal and no out clauses in the first 3 years of a contract.
As for a way out of bad contracts, the league needs to consider something such as 2 year cap hit at the highest annual value on the contract if a player is released with more than 2 years remaining on the deal (or maybe 50% of the remaining time on the contract). Using John Wall as an example, he's due 4 years and $170 million starting next year. If the Wizards released him now they'd owe him the full $170 million, but the cap hit after being released would be $47 mil for the next 2 years. This punishes the team without giving fans no reason to watch a Wizards game for the next 5 years unless the ping pong balls bounce their way. Good for the league and good for the fans.
There are holes that can be poked into this, but I do think it's a good starting point for the direction the league needs to take.