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a couple of grantland reads on an otherwise slow news day.
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http://grantland.com/features/nba-trade-rumors-espn-yahoo-new-york-post-lebron-james-jason-kidd-offseason-trade-signing/
The Trade Rumor Era
Sources: The NBAs offseason has swallowed the actual season
BY BRYAN CURTIS ON JULY 7, 2014
Look, everyone knew LeBron James was opting out. Carmelo Anthony was no surprise, either. There has been only one truly brain-melting piece of news to come out of this NBA offseason, and Tim Bontemps had it. He just had to tweet it.
Bontemps is a 29-year-old reporter with the New York Post. On June 28 at around 9 p.m., he sat at a desk in the News Corp Building staring nervously at his Twitter notifications. A bunch of his followers were talking about Andray Blatches civic protest art. Which was fine. What worried Bontemps was that someone in the NBAs Twitter piranha tank Woj, Stein, Amick, Shelburne, Broussard, Windhorst knew what he knew: that Jason Kidd was engineering his exit from Brooklyn.
It was more important than any story Bontemps had written all year. Thats because the trade rumor shorthand here for any offseason transaction news has become the dominant form of NBA journalism. For everybody in my line of work, Bontemps said, the offseason has really become bigger than the regular season. The fate of Kidd and LeBron and Melo is now more important, in media terms, than the San Antonio Spurs winning the NBA title.
The chief method of putting points on the board in the Trade Rumor Era is to file a story that includes the words league source. Inserting the phrases Im told or Im hearing into otherwise anodyne sentences adds a further layer of mystery. Bontemps stuck with the former. He tweeted the Kidd news. If Twitter could have made a sound that night, it would have been that of a dozen well-connected NBA reporters suddenly crying out in terror. To quote David Aldridge: Whaaa?
This story comes out and its like boom there are 50 people making calls on it all of a sudden, Bontemps said. When a big piece of news escapes in the NBA, all the piranhas in the tank start nipping away: They confirm the news, they dispute it, they add details. (A few tweets later, they give credit to the guy who got the scoop.) Stein said the Bucks and Nets were already talking compensation. Shelburne added that the Lakers werent interested in Kidd. Woj nodded.
I cant comprehend how big this has been, Bontemps said. When I got it, I thought it was going to be a big story. I had no idea. I didnt expect it would be the lead story in sports for three days. Its been stunning. In the only game that counts, Bontemps had nailed a 3 on the opening possession.
The trade rumor has long been a part of NBA writing. Twenty years ago, you could pick up the Post, turn to Peter Vecseys Hoop du Jour column, and feast on a buffet laid out by league sources. From July 1994: Georgetown coach John Thompson (was) contacted by the Clippers regarding his interest in the coaching job.
But even in Vecseys scenery-chewing prime, when he doubled as a reporter for NBC, he was treated as an outlier on the sports page. Rumor was always a dirty word, said Chris Sheridan, who covers the NBA for Sheridan Hoops. Indeed, maybe the most remarkable thing about the Trade Rumor Era is how the rumormonger, repackaged as an insider, has moved from the periphery of sportswriting to its center. Today, if you tell someone a reporter traffics in rumor and innuendo, that persons response will be How can I follow him on Twitter?
For decades, baseball and the NFL have maintained scoop-friendly hot stove leagues in the offseason. For the NBA, the phenomenon is relatively new. I started covering the league when it was deader than crap during the summer, said former Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum.
The idea were interested in covering the NBA in July never happened before, said Ric Bucher, who writes for Bleacher Report and is the CSN Bay Area sideline reporter for the Golden State Warriors. It was Finals, draft, and then sometime around September, when guys were getting ready to come to camp, thats when you started paying attention again.
Before asking how we got here, its worth studying the Trade Rumor Era. It has acquired its own language, its own high-PER reporters, and an ever-expanding schedule. Its not just the offseason, said ESPNs Marc Stein. Its transactions, period. People love transactions. The strangeness of Steins new world began to dawn on him in January 2007, when he got massive traffic for reporting a trade. Earl Boykins had been shipped to Milwaukee.
The NBA offseason no longer begins when a team wins the title. This year, the offseason began on May 18 the day Roy Hibbert scored 19 points in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals. Thats when a rival executive told Yahoos Adrian Wojnarowski that Minnesota was making noises about trading Kevin Love. Woj who has mastered the Trade Rumor Era better than anybody then posted two tweets, holding out Boston and Houston as possible destinations for Love. They were retweeted nearly 2,000 times combined. By comparison, Wojs column about Hibberts Game 1 performance was retweeted 72 times.
The Trade Rumor Era doesnt much reward insight into what happens on an NBA court. Its about the possibility of what might happen on a court in the future, provided a player is willing to sign for the midlevel exception. Oddly, thats what makes it fun. The Finals are about the Heat and the Spurs, LeBron James and Tim Duncan, said Henry Abbott, ESPN.coms NBA editor. But LeBron Jamess free agency is about everybodys imagination. Now your team may get LeBron. You can project your dreams onto it.
We havent lost adventurous basketball writers. There are several on the books at ESPN and Grantland, Chris Ballard and others at Sports Illustrated, the lovably crackpot team that blogs under the SBNation banner, and the scattered remnants of the FreeDarko army.
But even those wordsmiths write with a new lexicon. An NBA player is no longer an NBA player. A player is (in descending order of desirability) an asset, a piece, a trade chip, a salary dump, or an amnesty case. A side effect of the new basketball writing is that young piece, like outstanding length, has been desexualized.
They cease to be basketball players and they cease to be human beings, Bucher said. Owners look at players and coaches as acquisitions and goods. We fall into doing the same thing.
The Trade Rumor Era cant produce enough actual transactions to appease the masses. (Case in point: The big name on Day 1 of free agency was Wizards center Marcin Gortat.) So scoops are broken into their component parts. Its news of a sort when an NBA team expresses interest in a free agent via phone call. Then through a meeting. A big meeting is a face-to-face meeting. Insiders score points by revealing where a face-to-face meeting took place (an L.A. office building, the house of Mavs owner Mark Cuban); its length (six hours versus two); the swag on offer (Jeremy Lins uniform number, a Tobey Maguirenarrated movie trailer); who else was at the meeting (or in Derrick Roses case, who wasnt); the players mood at the meeting (Carmelo was truly engaged in the conversation); and, finally, when the meeting has ended (Carmelo meeting over). If a contract offer was extended at a face-to-face meeting, it is inevitably being mulled.
On Sunday, reporters who delight in this small ball seemed to finally have had their fill. Twitter reported that Cavs owner Dan Gilbert may have dispatched a plane to Miami; Kobe Bryant and Carmelo Anthony may have played a pickup game; and Pau Gasol may have joined them (that is, everyone but Gilbert) for dinner. This cant be what happens in a society that isnt heading into oncoming traffic, CBSs Zach Harper tweeted. Yet it was a sign of the preeminence of trade rumors that even meta writers couldnt afford to log off.
The Trade Rumor Era is powered by a network of anonymous sources. A few years ago, the piranha tank seemed to adopt the policy of overexplanation from the news pages of the New York Times (e.g., officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk on the record). But the NBA writers ornate descriptors a source familiar with the teams thinking didnt help much. Im familiar with a teams thinking. Recently, more writers have opted for minimalism: league source.
On June 26, a source told Bucher that Kyle Lowry and Chris Bosh were switching teams. After 3,500 retweets, Bucher withdrew the scoop and apologized. With the enormous demand for scoops on Twitter, readers would have quickly forgiven him anyway. What was interesting in this case, Bucher told me, is that his source sent him dozens of texts and even mimicked the language of an NBA front office telling Bucher, for instance, that his team was waiting for the second round to end. It was as if the source had inhaled the fumes of the Trade Rumor Era. An even stranger case was that of Oregonian columnist John Canzano, who reported on July 1 that Bosh and Dwyane Wade would return to Miami. Canzano even supplied the contract terms. The piranha tank barely twitched.
In the Trade Rumor Era, the premium currency isnt really a rumor at all. Its a genuine scoop, like Stephen A. Smiths called shot of James, Wade, and Bosh to the Heat in 2010. Thats better than so and so is interested in Player X, said Sheridan. Everybodys interested in good players. According to Sheridan, so many rumors sluice around on Twitter that NBA front offices have more or less made their peace with them. Everyone is talking, gossiping, peddling info. When someone like Sixers GM Sam Hinkie enforces an omert with the press, insiders ask, Whats his problem?
How did we get here? Partly its a quirk of history. When LeBron James becomes a free agent twice in four years, hes bound to launch a new form of media. I remember when Charles Barkley went to Phoenix during the summer of 92, said Jack McCallum. But Charles had wanted out of Philly for seven or eight years. And it still was done via a trade. It wasnt done with the seduction of free agency you could write about.
What has changed is that the seduction is now baked into the NBAs collective bargaining agreement. The 2011 CBA resulted in shorter contracts for the owners; it capped star salaries far below their real market value. Zach Lowe has reported that NBA bigwigs call the new reality player-sharing. If you turn your league into the NBA Trade Machine, its no surprise the rumor guy would become the leagues most valuable Twitter celebrity.
The other key factor is that transactions equate to hope, said Marc Stein. Tanking teams like the 76ers have essentially turned into one big hypothetical trade rumor, scheduled to be enacted months or even years into the future. For their fans, the season is beside the point; the offseason is where the action is.
Fans, by the way, dont much mind the Trade Rumor Era. Gone is the old lament that you cant get attached to players because theyre always changing teams. Fantasy sports have rewired our brains so that deals interest us almost as much as wins and losses. When the seasons going along, Tim Bontemps said, its why cant this guy get traded, why cant this coach get fired, why isnt this happening? Theres never any satisfaction with this is the team weve got.
And its not just fans who think this way. New-breed NBA owners like Marc Lasry and Mikhail Prokhorov demand constant roster churn to justify their exorbitant buy-ins. If you spend $400 or $500 million on a franchise, Ric Bucher said, you approach it a little bit differently than if you spent $10 million (30 years ago) because your buddy David Stern said, Hey, youll have fun with this. The moves, in turn, lead to more stories.
Finally, its worth noting that the Trade Rumor Era has been enjoyed, if not perpetrated, by the insiders themselves. A reporter is never more useless than when his sport is out of season. But what if the season never ends?
The last five offseasons have made the NBA insider indispensable. He reported on Jamess free agency; the James Harden trade; the Dwight Howard sweepstakes; and now James, Anthony, Love, and Kidd. Combine that with an uptick in interest in the league and its safe to say the NBA writer is a bigger star vis--vis his peers than he has ever been in the history of sportswriting. In retrospect, The Decision seems less like a commercial pact between player and network than a collusive agreement that the news cycle would never end.
Twenty years ago, battles between NBA beat writers were fairly opaque. You might see a scoop a few days later in your local paper, by which time the original scoopers name had disappeared and the story was attributed to press reports.
In the Trade Rumor Era, everyone is a national basketball writer. Woj competes with Stein. Stein competes with the personal trainer in Cleveland whos guaranteeing LeBron will come home. The trainer competes with message-board prophet Carl2680, who beat even Bontemps to the Kidd scoop. Twitter is their Thunderdome. The old penalty for getting beat on a story was that your editor called. The new penalty is that your Twitter followers remind you that Woj, Stein, Sam Amick, and the rest are outhustling you. Its not just that they get credit, said Bucher. But then you get ridiculed for being late, as if you somehow didnt know it was going on. And then your editor calls.
NBA writing isnt the only journalistic beat that has come to be defined by its hot stove. If every basketball writer has started to sound like Adrian Wojnarowski, then every Hollywood reporter has begun to sound like Nikki Finke. Finkes rise is instructive. She became a player by scooping the hiring and firing of executives that 99 percent of the public had never heard of the Earl Boykinses of show business. It wasnt the transactions per se that made people perk up. It was the idea that Finke purloined info from inside a closed system. Finke acquired the air of an antiestablishment hero. Todays basketball writers Woj, Stein, the whole piranha tank serve the same purpose with the NBA.
The Posts Tim Bontemps was almost bred for the Trade Rumor Era. He went to college at St. Bonaventure. During his freshman year, he began a mentorship with a Bonnie alum who was rising in sports media. The mentor was Adrian Wojnarowski. Now they go at each other on Twitter, vying for scraps of intel about pieces and trade chips, trying to find a league source who will illuminate the world. People know if they go to Woj, hes going to give em something nobody else has, Bontemps said. Thats the goal for me and everybody to catch up to.
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http://grantland.com/features/nba-miami-heat-double-standard-contract-sacrifice-lebron-james-chris-bosh-houston-rockets-free-agency/
The Miami Heat and the NBAs Double Standard of Sacrifice
Why superstar players seeking max salaries are stuck between a rock and a hard place while NBA owners are laughing all the way to the bank
BY ZACH LOWE ON JULY 8, 2014
In a time of hushed meetings and amorphous potential offers, the Rockets have transformed a thought exercise into a real thing by presenting Chris Bosh a concrete choice: take a pay cut to stay in Miami, or earn your full maximum salary over a four-year deal in Houston.
Its not quite the ideal test case for a new collective bargaining agreement designed with perhaps one eye on engineering competitive balance by making it harder for teams to retain superstar clusters. Adam Silver trumpeted that catchphrase every chance he got during the 2011 lockout, but the leagues primary goal during that torturous offseason was to transfer cash from players to owners.
Silver is sincere in his desire for greater parity, and the easiest path to achieving it is to prevent in-their-prime superstars from teaming up. The new CBA attempted to do that by installing a super-harsh luxury tax. Spend a lot on players, and youre going to face a crippling tax penalty that gets more severe as you add payroll. Superstars are expensive to sign and even more expensive to keep; the tax was crafted to make the keeping part prohibitive.
But thats only part of the story. The league also beefed up that tax so more money would flow from big-spending teams to their (mostly) smaller-market brothers, who need those tax proceeds to pad their bottom lines. It is a revenue-sharing mechanism. Any impact on competitive balance would be a happy ripple effect.
If the NBA really wanted to blow apart superteams, it would pitch extreme solutions a hard salary cap and the elimination of the ceiling on individual player salaries. But pushing for those changes might lead to another lockout and could produce unknown consequences that might sabotage the leagues goal of competitive balance.
The punitive tax hasnt led to Silvers competitive balance, but it has changed spending habits on the high end. Profitable juggernauts like the Lakers and Heat have made painful cost-cutting moves since the lockout. Even the Nets, who have spent as if their owner has no idea there are rules about spending, want to get under the tax for the 2015-16 season.
The penny-pinching isnt all about saving owners precious scratch. There are basketball reasons for the frugality. As long as there is a salary cap limiting what teams can spend, there will be a real tension between players grabbing as much money as they can and their teams ability to sign as many quality players as possible.
This puts star players in an impossible position: accept a pay cut for the good of the team or look like a glutton. When stars take pay cuts to stay together, fans rail against their collusion and call the NBA product a rigged game. When stars chase the money, fans rip them as pigs.
Meanwhile, minimum-salary players and young guys on rookie contracts literally cannot take pay cuts, and the glut of cap room that comes with shorter contracts has created bidding wars for mid-tier veterans. Stars make the most, and they are the most obvious target for savings.
The stars cant win, in part because the NBA has created a system in which a player maximizing his individual income makes it harder for his team to build a competitive roster around him. But are people media, fans, GMs overstating the difficulty of that challenge? Maybe the onus should be on teams to spend wisely enough so they can accommodate multiple star players without prodding those stars to sacrifice in pointed public comments.
Take what Miami has done so far in free agency. It had dreams of opening up enough cap space to make a run at a $10 millionplus player Kyle Lowry, Marcin Gortat, or someone else. Its unclear how real that dream ever was, but its mere existence represents a puzzling communication breakdown between the Heat and the Big Three.
It was just math. LeBron James wants the maximum salary, the Heat have to make Udonis Haslem whole, and Shabazz Napier and Norris Cole are due what they are due. If the Heat wanted to get $10 million under the salary cap the only realistic way for them to sign an outside free agent at that amount Bosh and Dwyane Wade could only earn something like $24 million combined next season. They were each due $20 million before they opted out.
A two-man pay cut of that scale just didnt compute, and if Miami thought it was possible, it hadnt done enough digging with the players and their agents.
So they appear to have moved on to Plan B, which might have been Plan A all along: stay over the cap and use the available exceptions for over-the-cap teams to sign useful role players. (1) The Heat used the full midlevel exception, starting at $5.3 million next season, to nab Josh McRoberts. They used the biannual exception of about $2 million to bring in what remains of Danny Grangers lower extremities. (2)
(1. There is endless confusion about this, so lets be clear: A team cannot get under the cap, use cap space to sign outside free agents, and then use the full midlevel exception. The full midlevel is only for teams that start and stay over the cap.
2. Plan B could change if the stars bolt, leaving the Heat with cap space, and several credible scenarios paint the Cavaliers as a much stronger contender for LeBron than anticipated.)
These are not exactly glamour signings, but they fit the Heats vision as a small-ish shooting and passing machine. Both players can fill the old Shane Battier/Rashard Lewis role as nominal power forwards who supplement LeBron by spacing the floor and banging with opposing bigs on defense. Sparing LeBron those bruises is part of the job description.
McRoberts is coming off a career-best year from 3-point range, and the Heat are betting it wasnt an outlier, especially since outside shots tend to be open when you play with LeBron. McRoberts is an ace passer who can put the ball on the floor and keep the machine moving Boris Diaw, but with better hair and no post game. Hes a natural power forward with experience in various defensive systems before Charlotte in which he blitzed pick-and-rolls far from the hoop a key tenet of Miamis defense.
He wont protect the rim or improve Miamis rebounding problems, but he can fit Erik Spoelstras system on both ends. The full midlevel seems a bit much unless youre convinced that McRobertss long-range shooting last season wasnt a fluke but the market for bigs suggests he was going to get this money from someone. Chris Kaman was out of shape and shot the ball damn near every time he touched it last season, and Portland is paying him nearly $5 million for next season.
Granger might be washed up. He perked up in Los Angeles, but he still logged only 10 minutes per game in the playoffs, and hes coming off endless knee and leg issues. Hes been a stout defender, and he played a lot of small-ball power forward before Frank Vogel erased that alignment from Indys playbook. In a best-case scenario, Granger would start against power forwards who dont post up, hed hit open 3s, and hed spend stretches defending some star wings to help LeBron and Wade save energy. In a worst-case scenario, hes done another uncreative Heat acquisition of a big name with aging legs.
Even these non-glam signings will require sacrifice from the Heat stars. If Miami was going this over-the-cap route all along, it could have asked LeBron, Wade, and Bosh to simply opt into their contracts, saving us the drama of tracking Dan Gilberts private plane and Savannah Brinsons Instagram account.
But it asked for the opt-outs anyway, and it did so to save money. Heres why: The new CBA includes an apron that is slotted $4 million above the tax line, which is projected at about $77 million for next season. (3) That would put the apron at $81 million. Teams are banned from exceeding the apron, even by a single penny, if they engage in certain transactions after July 1. On that list: using the full midlevel, which the Heat have apparently just done with McRoberts.
(3. The exact figures will come out this week, but sources involved in the process say earlier projections for a salary cap at $63 million and a tax line near $77 million will prove close to the mark.)
If that proves to be the case, the Heat cannot go over that projected $81 million mark. Their three stars were slated to make about $61.5 million next season before they opted out. Tack on McRoberts, Granger, Napier, and Cole, and the Heat could see the apron fluttering just ahead of them before even thinking about what it might cost to bring back Ray Allen and Chris Andersen incumbent players who, you know, actually helped last season.
In other words, the Heat asked for the opt-outs so Pat Riley could deliver this message to his stars: You have to take pay cuts, otherwise were not going to be able to bring in Josh freaking McRoberts with the full midlevel.
The apron becomes a hammer. Its a multifaceted hammer too. Cross the line, and you cant acquire a player in a sign-and-trade until the following July. Merely approach it, and it becomes harder to make trades that bring in more salary than they send out, or even sign minimum-salary players when injuries strike. It is a menace floating in the distance, the NBAs version of that veil in the Department of Mysteries.
Putting the apron in play also conveniently hard-caps the Heat just above the tax line, reducing Micky Arisons exposure to huge tax payments. Miami can spend only so much now.
The players union fears that teams are using the apron to force sacrifices from players who have already turned over so much to owners swimming in NBA cash when other available tools might allow teams to spend more. Teams are being exposed for what they are doing, says Ron Klempner, the interim executive director of the players association. It has been laid bare. They are hiding behind the rules. Teams like the Heat have the ability to bring back all their players, and give them raises, but they are choosing to go in another direction.
He continued: There is a misperception that players are being asked to cover for their teams. But I am concerned that the sacrifice they are making is not as much for the good of their teams as it is for the good of the owners.
Players sacrificing money for wins and personal comfort is not new, though stars including Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki have typically waited until a bit later in their careers to do it.
And every dollar counts. Kobe Bryant refused to take a meaningful late-career pay cut, and that decision will have consequences as the Lakers seek to construct a workable roster around him. The capped-out Nets wanted Kyle Korver last season Billy King, the Nets GM, says Korver is like a son to him but they had only a $3 million salary slot to offer, and Korver opted for about twice that in Atlanta.
But the Nets example shows that teams can spend more if they are willing to ignore the apron and get creative, Klempner says. Brooklyns payroll rocketed above $100 million last season. They ran through the apron like a high school football team tearing up one of those banners the poor cheerleaders have to hold. They punted the full midlevel exception in doing so, but they managed to find workable talents with the smaller midlevel slot that tax teams get (Mirza Teletovic, Andrei Kirilenko) and via minimum contracts (Shaun Livingston, Alan Anderson).
The Nets are anything but a model of prudent spending. They are a spook story about what can happen when a team loses all of its flexibility and patience, leaving it to desperately flip one expensive contract for an even more expensive one that runs longer.
But the Heat could have proceeded down a less frugal path, giving raises to their own free agents (via Bird rights) and digging deeper to find quality players without using the full midlevel and triggering the apron. Hell, the Heat got Allen and Battier using the smaller midlevel exception for tax teams the one they deemed not good enough to snag McRoberts this time around. Fill out the roster with that toolbox, and theres no need for the guys producing the wins to take haircuts.
Granger is going to make only about $700,000 more than his minimum salary, and he didnt produce at a rate that merits much more than that last season. McRoberts had a nice season, and the market for bigs who can shoot, walk upright, and hold a basketball is climbing fast.
But Klempners point is this: The Heat are asking their stars to forfeit millions so the team can pay McRoberts and Granger an extra $2.7 million per year combined and Arisons Carnival Cruise Lines can continue to offer the very best in overstuffed buffets and kitsch. And the Heat have opted against just re-signing their own guys because the roster they built was no longer good enough. Whose fault is that?
Are Miamis stars subsidizing so-so team management? Perhaps. Wade is at the center of this. In 2010 he was the linchpin of the entire Heatles plan, one of the three or four greatest shooting guards ever, a legend the Heat decided still merited the compensation due a legend in his prime.
Wade is still a tremendous player when healthy, but he wears down every season and his market value is nowhere near $20 million. Still, the Heat and Wade are stuck with each other, and Miami has long believed that this kind of loyalty counts for something when the next crop of star free agents comes around.
All of this brings us back to Bosh. Houston, through skillful management and plain old luck, has assembled a roster that has allowed it to offer Bosh his full max salary. Its fitting that the roster includes a feisty young point guard, Patrick Beverley, whom the Heat waived. On the flippity flip, that roster also includes Jeremy Lin, whom the Rockets chose over Goran Dragic (4) and now must salary-dump (along with a draft pick) to clear space for Bosh.
(4. You can add Lowry, but the Rockets flipped him for a first-round pick that was probably the swing piece in the James Harden trade.)
Bosh would fit beautifully in Houston. A big who can shoot 3s while doing enough big-guy stuff rebounding, defense, etc. is massively valuable. Bosh is used to spotting up, working without the ball, and yielding the lane to another post-up player key skills for anyone joining Dwight Howard and James Harden.
The Rockets pitch to Bosh centered on his defense and how he would mesh with Howard on that end, per a source familiar with the matter. Houston reassured Bosh that he is an underrated defender that all the loudmouths who deride him as soft conveniently miss him chasing pick-and-rolls 30 feet from the hoop, creating turnovers with his long arms, and fighting hard in the post.
Flash back to Houstons first-round loss against Portland, when the Rockets had to assign Howard and Omer Asik to defend LaMarcus Aldridge on the perimeter. Doing that compromised their spacing and shifted a rim protector away from the basket. Imagine how devastating they might be if they could shift those assignments to Bosh, who is taller and rangier than Terrence Jones, while leaving Howard to whack away shots near the hoop.
Again: This isnt the ideal test of whether the ultra-punitive luxury tax has really made it more difficult to keep superteams together. Bosh would be joining a similar collection of stars in Houston, a large market that doesnt appear to need much help attracting players. Bosh isnt choosing between wildly divergent salaries as he would be in a system with no ceiling on individual player compensation.
The NBA has tried to gin up free agency and player movement. Contracts are shorter, half the league has major cap room, and the tax makes it pricey to keep starry cores together. But that wasnt necessarily an altruistic gesture, a rejiggering designed to help Milwaukee and Minnesota compete with the big boys. Shorter contracts and unlimited individual player salaries could actually make it harder for small-market teams to re-sign their own stars, unless those changes came along with some added protection an NFL-style franchise tag, or some other cap mechanism.
It was a business decision to stoke interest in the summer and turn the NBA into a year-round league. It enabled more revenue sharing and something close to leaguewide profitability. An NBA team is already a damn near foolproof investment, and the national TV deal wont kick in until the 2016-17 season. Well soon reach the point when owners will make money every season and bank insane profits when they decide to sell their franchises.
Meanwhile, some fans demand that stars who currently earn artificially deflated salaries make further sacrifices for the greater good. Such sacrifices do help, especially when a star player is signing a massive deal as he enters the latter stages of his career. Carmelo Anthony is not going to be worth $30 million when hes 35, and if he signs a max deal with New York, it will be harder for Phil Jackson to construct a long-term contender around him.
Harder, but not impossible. The CBA provides team-building mechanisms for everyone, even the mega-spenders, and deep-pocketed owners could always green-light tax payments when a championship window emerges. The salary rules in the NBA are so complicated that players are losing the public relations battle because its just simpler to point to Duncan and say, Be like him.
But sacrifice is a two-way street, and every situation is a beehive of complex variables. No choice is easy, and the hero/villain lines are never as clear as wed like. If its so virtuous for a great player to give up salary, why shouldnt an owner also be called upon to lose money if it will help his team win? ___
it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. - sherlock holmes
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