The Next CBA--What Do You Want?

Asian players and Pritchslaps.

Robots

That would prevent teams with wealthy owners ( i.e. Blazers, l*akers, spurs) from doing everything they can to bring a set of rings to their city. With a hard cap, there is no way SA can afford all their (old) talent. In a couple years, how will the blazers be able to afford all their young talents who will surely be asking for their $$. A hard cap would spread around stars and make teams more even, but id rather have a group of elite teams rather than everyone being on the same plateu…

The new economy being, of course, reality—that if you spend more than you make long enough, you get broke. Someone forgot to tell the federal government this, but I digress….

One thing that people tend to overlook is that team owners are investors, in a sense. Yes, they get an emotional kick from owning their own pro team, but in the end they have to make money to make it worthwhile. (To be fair, most NBA players seem to appreciate their team owners.) So the new CBA has to be structured so owners can make money without having to lose their star players all the time.

Rookie salaries are fine. I think they should simplify the overall structure and potentially not allow the mid-level exception or other free-agent exceptions, which would force teams below the cap time and again in order to sign players. Also, they should reduce the max contract amount in order to not tie up team’s money so much in one player. This sounds like it would hurt the players overall, but come on, they’re getting paid millions to play basketball — I don’t have a lot of sympathy for them.

And lastly (probably most controversially), contracts should be injury-proof—if a player loses more than 30 games in a season a team should have the option to waive them and not have to pay the rest of their contracts. Players could take out insurance policies to guard themselves against these things, but a Raef LaFrentz situation should never happen. Nobody should be paid 11, 12 million a year when they can’t earn the team one dime. WIthout contracts like that it would significantly improve the profitability of the NBA and strengthen most teams’ situations.

I waffle a lot on the age minimum, so I won’t comment on that. And I’ve droned on enough above so I won’t comment on the rest.

but I have to admit, I think that guaranteed contracts hurt the league. I wouldn’t want to see player guarantees totally go away, but some limits would help.

I think the rookie scale needs to change. It’s nuts that players would rather be second round picks than low first round picks.

I’m torn on age limits. I don’t think that people should be deprived of their right to earn a living based on age alone, but again, drafting playeers with no college or other high level experience hurts the game. I don’t think one and done in college is the answer either.

If I want to be an electrician, maybe my dad taught me all I need to know about wiring a house, but I still have to do the apprenticeship to get a license. So maybe that’s how I think of the NBA. Maybe you can ball, but without the apprenticeship, you don’t get a ticket to the dance.

1. Keep the luxury tax level and continue to have a soft cap over a hard cap. A soft cap is the most fair for both the owners and the players.

2. No more mid-level exceptions, bi-annual exceptions, or trade exceptions.

3. Maximum years for free agents with Bird rights is four seasons, while maximum years for free agents without Bird rights or those who change teams — except via sign-and-trade — is three seasons. There’s no need for five-year and six-year contracts

4. Simplify things by getting rid of pointless junk like trade kickers, signing bonuses, deferred salaries, et cetera.

5. Lower the annual raises for own free agents to 10% and other free agents to 7.5%.

6. Guarantee salaries for second-round draft picks at the minimum-level for one season, with a team option at the minimum-level for the second season. This way, guys like DeJuan Blair won’t be paid above scale via the MLE.

7. Don’t be the stingy NFL by fully non-guaranteeing base salaries. In the NBA, the option is already available to non-guarantee — or partially guarantee — players’ salaries. Heck, front office executives are the folks who ought to be more fiscally prudent; thus, the onus is on them to do their job.

8. Abolish cash considerations in trades.

9. A team should lose draft rights on a player if he doesn’t sign with the team over a five year period. There’s no reason that the Portland Trail Blazers should have draft rights on Marcelo Nicola, who was drafted back in 1993.

10. A team should lose its Bird rights to a semi-retired player after two years of inactivity by him. Why, again, do the Indiana Pacers have a $18,928,700 cap hold on “The Dunkin’ Dutchman” Rik Smits? It’s asininity!

11. Let 18-year-old men apply for the NBA Draft. The current age limit is unconstitutional, un-American crap—and that’s that.

Yeah, uh, that’s that.

As long as they can agree on something and avoid any “work stoppages”, I’ll be happy.

Football wants three but I think the happy medium for basketball is to require the college players to spend two years in college before becoming eligible. The legality of the age limit is established because labor law controls when the union negotiates in good faith and the limit is included in the contract. The foolishness of one and done players (they never actually have to study to play) hurts college programs and those programs spare many millions of dollars for the NBA while serving to support other non-revenue sports in the colleges.

1. Max contracts only can account for 20% of the salary cap. This would allow teams to hold on to two to three top-level talents and still have space to surround them with the appropriate role players without having to sacrifice the team’s structure or have a big 2/3 plus 12-13 rookie contracts.

2. 2nd round draft picks have a guaranteed salary of: 25% less than the salary of the position pick in the 1st round (Example: Pendergraph makes 25% less salary than Blake Griffin), in order to keep rookie contracts from overshadowing those of proven vets beng lowballed.

3. Minimum salary cap, like in the MLB, to keep teams like * cough * Memphis * cough * from running as little payroll as possible to milk the luxury tax funds and basically become profitable by running a crappy team.

4. Financially penalize players who verbally commit to a contract and then renig to sign a larger one without 48 HOUR NOTICE* by taking 10% of their new contract and donating it to the scoffed franchise’s charity of choice (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Hedo)

And I know this isn’t part of the CBA but…

5. Officials must call fouls consistently; no more of this ‘Team X has the momentum and Team Y doesn’t’ crap. If it is a foul, call it, no matter who it is or what team it’s against. Just because some team goes cold after building a 20 pt lead doesn’t mean they should lose it at the foul lne because the other team made their shots.

Allow NBA teams to draft and sign players out of high school, but then make them stay in college for four years, being paid some minimum amount, like $100k to 200k/year. Plenty enough to keep them happy but not enough to hurt the team. That way teams don’t miss out on early talent, players don’t miss out on making money when they’re young nor do they miss out on the college experience, and colleges don’t miss out on talent. Seems like a win-win to me.

Don’t change anything that would allow players to leave their original team any sooner than the current CBA.

1st round draft picks are now effectively bound to their teams for at least 5 years. The 1st round rookie contracts are 2 guaranteed years with 2 team option years. After that a player can elect to sign a 1 year qualifying offer if they wish, which makes them an unrestricted free agent after their 5th year. But more often they sign an extension for more years, or they become a restricted free agent that allows their original team to match and keep them. The player then becomes an unrestricted free agent upon completion of their 2nd contract.

I don’t even like the 5th year “qualifying offer” out for the player, but I suppose it is a reasonable compromise between the fan’s interest and the player’s interest. However, imagine how you would feel if Oden finally breaks through in his 4th or 5th year (after sitting out his entire first year) and then decides to leave for LA (utilizing the qualifying offer) after the 5th year?

FYI History: Originally players were bound to their team essentially forever with a “reserve” or “option” clause. That changed in 1976 with the signing of the (Oscar) Robertson Agreement. After that teams were awarded compensation (determined by the NBA commisioner’s office) if they lost a free agent through 1980. When Bill Walton left Portland for the Clippers after the 1978-79 season (which he sat out) the Blazers were awarded Kermit Washington, Kevin Kunnert, cash, and a 1st round draft pick from the Clippers. The decision was subject to a lot of controversy. The NBA office said, “Walton has such talent that his abilities are equaled by no more than one currently active center (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and perhaps a handful of all centers who ever have played in the NBA. …. If Walton in his first five years had proven as durable as Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell or Abdul-Jabbar, it would be virtually impossible to calculate his value or to compensate Portland for his loss”.

New revenue sharing model: In the next CBA, local revenue (local TV deals, ticket sales, suite sales, sponsors, etc.) should get included less into how income is distributed to the poorer teams, and instead a larger percentage of national income should get included (NBA deals with TNT/ABC/ESPN, NBA TV income, NBA store merchandise, etc.). Mavs owner Mark Cuban explained here in detail why it makes sense both to the league and the teams to avoid pressure on small teams to spend more money with an ever increasing cap than they should. (While in a declining economy that might be hard to understand, I would expect that situation to re-start in a year or two.) Using mostly the example of a hypothetical league modeled after the NFL, the real subject of his post is the NBA and he also argues why the NBA should keep a cap to stay competitive.

The bottom line problem for current cap systems is that one teams financial success can have a significantly negative impact on the financial performance of another. Rather than enjoying the success of the new stadiums in the big markets, or the big local TV or advertising deals they sign, small markets are shell shocked by the annual increases in the cap they create. Increases that they can’t possibly keep pace with.

When this happens, teams have to "give up" on their players and seasons more often in order to try to rebuild, which in turn hurts not only the fans and the league, but also the players as higher priced players lose slots to lower priced and younger players.

That’s not a good situation for anyone. Its a huge problem that needs to be solved.

Less guaranteed years, more bonuses/incentives. I’m pretty sure owners will insist on that to avoid huge albatross contracts for players that don’t perform. To compensate the players, a somewhat larger portion of profits could get distributed to the players. And players are still insured for injuries sustained while playing basketball for the team no matter when they get injured (but cap rules for medical retirements get revised a la Darius case).

Elimination of most exceptions. Teams should still be enabled to re-sign their own players (a la the Bird exception) especially those coming off rookie contracts, but have less ways to go over the cap in general.

Mandatory pension scheme. A portion of the salary (say 10%) gets deferred, invested conservatively/the league guarantees for that portion and paid out later. As overpaid as Z-Bo might have been for the Blazers, his contract that pays him out 30% of his salary as deferred compensation over 5 years afterwards isn’t dumb. Too many players are going broke shortly after their careers because they spent it all to care for an extended group of relatives, friends, fast cars, too big houses, parties, bling.

To aid with that, mandatory courses over an offseason week or weekend similar to the rookie orientation weekend in a predetermined time frame on subjects like money management, career after the career, marketing opportunities, etc. that the player attends together with his agent. The NBAPA already offers things like that (at a cost), but only the smart players take advantage of it.

Develop the NBA D-League into a true minor league. Raise pay levels to make it more competitive with European leagues. Teams owning teams. Teams owning players they can send down and call up (and not just those they just drafted). D-League draft could become an event.

Drug testing for performance enhancing drugs: League and NBAPA independent labs controlled by the WADA. More off-season tests anywhere in the country/world. List of drugs and blood levels for which you get suspended immediately for a season/following year on first offense. Suspended for 2 season following the second offense. Suspension rules for non-performance enhancing drugs like marihuana and cocaine and such can stay largely the same.

Seriously tho…I love the NBA, and I love the Blazers, but this age of paying these athletes 8 figure salaries only to have us subsidize their wages by paying 300% the cost of food and parking needs to stop. If there isn’t any kind of wage control, eventually the average fan will just get priced out and not even attend games.

I know the salary cap is going down, but the way things have gone over the past 10 years, I would not be surprised to see if a corporate sponsor bought the naming rights to the RG, or if teams sold jersey space for advertising, etc.

There are a lot of good suggestions to make the game better that people are listing…I just don’t want to see anymore rising costs passed on to the consumer.

Teams should be allowed to buy out a contract like Rubio’s if they want to spend the money.

couple years they don’t earn it. I know Pritchard was asked about this but couldn’t comment on it because Stern doesn’t allow it.

Obviously, teams are losing money so there needs to be something done on the revenue side and there probably also needs to be something done on the costs side.

1. I like the idea offered above by The X-Man that max contracts should be for 20% of the total cap rather than 25%. And there should be no higher number than that for older stars — 20%, that’s it. This would make it more possible for teams to develop internally along the model that Portland is following and still keep their guys. The current system is designed to keep the league in a state of free-agent-driven limbo, which drives up player prices.

2. Revenue sharing is very important. The league should collect 1/2 of all local TV revenue and split it equally among all teams. Here’s the rationale: home teams have to have visitors to play — and that’s the league. This will still result in teams like New York and Chicago and LA having more money to play with than anyone else and there probably needs to be some additional factor to equalize markets.

3. A crackpot idea of mine that needs to be tweaked and implemented: the Universal Team Option. To eliminate the dysfunctional condition of multimillionaire former stars collecting vast sums of money to which they are not entitled by virtue of horrifically rotten long-term deals with older players (Starbury, McGrady, Steve Francis, Miles, Raef, etc. etc.), the standard player contract of all deals signed under the new CBA should contain provision for a Universal Team Option, allowing each franchise to unilaterally terminate one (and only one) contract every 2 years.

4. The rookie scale is brilliant and needs to be retained. The compensation is fully adequate without being insane, like the current situation in the NFL.

5. The soft cap/luxury tax is also an excellent principle, in that it shifts money from rich teams in big markets to poor teams in small markets. Perhaps a new 3 dollars-for-1 SuperLuxury Tax needs to be imposed for anyone flaunting the luxury tax line, say busting it by $15M or more… There are a couple teams that are going “damn the torpedoes” with regards to the luxury tax and that is outside of the spirit of the system. The idea is to keep the playing field relatively level to reduce the likelihood of there being perennial patsies throughout the league, and the slew of non-competitive games resulting therefrom…

6. It’s quite possible that the players’ share of total league revenue may have to go down a point or two. That remains to be seen. But local revenue needs to be shared better before any player “givebacks” like that are imposed.

the 30 second CliffsNotes version of the salary structure for the NFL and MLB.

1. A modified MLB rule for the age limit- Allow players to come out of high school, but if they go to college, they are not draft eligible for two seasons (at the earliest) after that point. One factor that is often overlooked in the age limit debate is that college simply is not for everyone. My cousin fiddled around college for years until finally building up the courage to tell the family he wanted to be an electrician anyway, and he has accomplished more in the two years since leaving than he did in the 5 years there. It is even more likely/common among athletes since so many of them are on the “NBA track” for a long time (see: Mayo, Ovinton J’Anthony and James, LeBron). All that’s going to happen by keeping a firm age limit are more scandals like the Mayo one and the impending Derrick Rose one at Memphis (can’t say more about that yet). Furthermore, I would add in a rule that a player wishing to leave college before that 2 year limit can play in the D-League for a salary, but must enter the draft at that 2-year timeslot.

2. Institutionally strengthen the D-League- People talk about lowering costs to owners, and I actually see a competent D-League doing that. The players do not make a ton of money and it can produce some sleeper NBA talent (like Kelenna Azubuike). What’s more, a league with a little more reasonable salaries could keep some fringe NBA talent from the US home instead of far-flung places in the world, and some of those guys develop too.

3. Fix the buy-out rules. It is borderline insane that 1st rounders are harder to buy out than 2nd rounders and it is problematic that the # is so low for 1sts. It would also be interesting to allow tweaks to the salary scale for rookies who enter the league after the year they are drafted, though it would take some work to eliminate perverse incentives for American guys doing the same.

4. Tweaking the revenue sharing system. Norsk hit this pretty well above.

I feel this is the only thing fair to my dream of Portland winning 25 straight titles.

“But Nate, I think I deserve to be out there playing!”
“I’m sure you do, Danny, but this isn’t the Pacers. Here, you’re our 3rd string SF.”

Just a semi-porous cap which you can only go over re-signing your own players and the players you draft.

This will hopefully re-introduce parity into the league and stop pricing out the teams whose owners are not multi-billionaire’s.

Right now the luxury tax makes being a rich owner even more of an advantage than when there was no cap. In a no cap situation you just pay as much as you want to, in the luxury tax situation you pay twice as much for every dollar over the cap making really rich owners the only people who are able or willing to go over the cap. Plus having a financial incentive to field a team (the pay backs) that is under the cap, hurts the teams fans.

Every three years we see teams like Milwaukee, New Orleans, Charlotte, Memphis, Minnesota, etc. trade their best basketball players for pennies on the dollar to teams who are willing (and able) to go over the cap, so that the teams can get under the cap and be paid by the luxury tax dollars. This hurts the fans, and the fans only. How can you follow and love a player when you know that your team is going to be unable to afford to keep them in the future? Could this possibly be why these same places have a hard time selling out their arenas? I think that’s probably the case.

A semi-hard cap will keep the teams with rich owners from running rampant all over the league, and it will also keep good players on the same team, and allow the fans a chance to connect with them.

This will never happen as both groups (the rich and the poor owners) have an incentive to keep things the way they are. With rich owners liking the advantage they have, and poor owners liking the cash that they get back from the luxury tax incentives. I don’t think the players association has a feeling either way on this case, and so it’ll never get passed. But I personally hate the Expiring Contract, Pau Gasol, Kevin Garnett, Shaq, etc. trades and I think this would be a good way to get rid of them.

so I rec’d a few posts. I won’t repeat those particular ideas.

One thing that has always irked me is incentive pay for making the All-Star team (unless changes are made in how the team is selected.) Most of us are homers when we’re voting, so that automatically gives an advantage to players on large market teams. Also, many voters go for familiar names rather than who is actually playing the best. International voters also skews totals. I don’t mind bonuses for league awards like ROY or MVP, but not for fan-based “honors”.

I wish MLB had a strong commissioner like the NBA does. – Elgin

that even Donald Sterling and Michael Heisley could justify bankrolling a winner.

1) Increase revenue sharing. Level the playing field among teams a bit more.

2) Adjust the provision that describes salary being added back against the cap when players who have been ruled to have a career-threatening injury play for more than 10 games. The rule should state that the salary is only added back onto the cap if the player is signed by the same team. There shouldn’t be a loophole if the same team wants to re-sign the player at a lower figure, of course. But once the league (aided by a mutually agreed upon physician) has made their ruling and the money has come off the cap after a year, the idea that another team could influence another team’s cap situation is ridiculous.

3) Drop the 105% raise provision for players making more than the max. If their previous contract put them over the max, then the most they should be paid is 100% of their previous salary and they should not be allowed to receive any raises over the course of the new contract.

4) Some have mentioned only guaranteeing contracts to the MLE level. There’s validity in this to a point – teams need to carry responsibility as well and should not be given too many free passes. How about this as a compromise of sorts – the last year in any multi-year contract is guaranteed to the level of the average player salary (ie, the full value of the MLE) unless the player is traded, in which case the last year becomes fully guaranteed.

That may be too much to ask though………

1. Allow teams to draft anyone over the age of 18 whether he declares or not. The draftee can choose to go to college, go to the NBA, go/stay overseas, etc. Teams would own the draft rights for five years.

2. Eliminate sign and trades by requiring that no player can be traded within one full season of being signed.

3. Expand and realign the NBDL as a MLB-style minor league.

4. Build in a buyout option into every contract – say 30-50% of the remaining contract’s value.

All I care is that it gets done and there is no lockout.

Other than that it’s just the rich getting richer.

And it’s the one that will never happen.

The owners and players agree to proportionally take a cut equal to the amount of 25% of their ticket revenue to allow for ticket prices to be lowered.

So if, for example, a franchise makes $100 million in revenue and $40 million is from ticket sales and $60 million is from other sources, the franchise would cut $10 million from ticket prices and only bring in $90 million in revenue.

Same example, the franchise spends $60 million in player salaries, $30 million in other expenses and the owner gets a $10 million profit. The players salaries would be cut 14.3% to $51.42 million and the owner would also take a 14.3% cut in profit down to $8.57 million.

It’s not workable because of the differences in each franchise. Even so, it’s what I would love to see happen.

whats the difference exactly?

in the nba – they spread the wealth based on salaries and if teams cross a certain threshold

in baseball – they spread revenue?

can someone edumacate me on why revenue sharing is better than the nba luxury tax model?