Look at other sports like the NFL and NHL that have hard caps. The NHL put in a salary cap in 2006. Guess how many players have gotten max deals since then? Exactly zero.

They let teams spend over the cap to keep their players so that creates false maxes and because teams have to compete with that they will clear space and spend the max also.

I think there has been some correction of the market now that the salaries have gone up and there are more strata between minimum and maximum, but not all that much. I just don't think "max player" is a meaningful designation.