That TK article I just posted has some really good info in it regarding what could happen with a new CBA...
–Question: Back to the big picture–what might the owners do to prevent this from ever happening again?
–Answer: I don’t know. Certainly nothing that’s logical over the long-term, but these owners have proven regularly that they don’t know how to look at things like this over the long-term.
The Warriors will have a lower payroll this season WITH DURANT than they would’ve had without him (and re-signing their free agents like Barnes and Ezeli).
How do you legislate against a team that is lowering it’s payroll? That’s the point I don’t get and won’t ever get.
–Question: Will the owners try to break up the Warriors limiting teams to only one “max” player at a time as a way to try to force them to choose between Curry and Durant and try to deny them the chance to extend Klay in 2019 and Draymond in 2020?
–Answer: The other owners could theoretically set up a “only one max” rule, but then all Durant or Curry would have to do is take $1 or $100 less, and one of them doesn’t have a “max.”
Also, there are always unintended consequences to any move like that.
For instance, if there’s an “only one max” rule, well… Memphis just maxed out Mike Conley Jr. because Memphis had to, as a smaller-market team that has to overpay a bit to keep stars.
Oh, and Memphis also just maxed-out Chandler Parsons. That’s two max deals–so if the “only one max” rule was in effect this summer, a small-market team like Memphis very likely would’ve not been able to do this.
And probably would’ve been worse for it. There are other Memphis-like teams out there that could and should plan to do this into the future, though I imagine their owners right now don’t even know it and might vote to prevent themselves from doing it.
Which is dumb.
The market is not about “superstars,” it’s about timing and availability.
And if you limit the salary spectrum, more players will go to the larger, more attractive markets. I mean, I’m not a
Nobel Prize economist, but even I can see that.
So if you try to break up the Warriors by instituting a “only-one-max” rule, you are then actually hurting teams like Memphis or Minnesota (which has a bunch of young players who eventually will command the max) and any good team that can accumulate young talent.
Like OKC in past years, by the way.
Also: Cleveland has three max players–LeBron, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love. And Tristan Thompson is very close to the max.
Also, also: The Warriors currently only have one max player: Durant. (Klay Thompson took just less than the literal max in his extension two summers ago, Draymond took less than the max in his extension last summer.)
–Question: Still, what if the owners gang up and institute a hard cap to keep the Warriors from keeping all of these stars? Or get rid of salary limits so it’ll be hard to keep two or three stars of this magnitude in an open market with a hard cap?
–Answer: Sure, the owners could do all of those thing, but every one of those things–and other issues like possibly giving teams greater rights to re-sign their own guys–will have unintended consequences that will be about what’s happening next, not about what just happened.
The owners demanded shorter-term deals. The owners demanded salary limits. The owners demanded minimizing of sign-and-trade advantages.
All those things helped lead to the Warriors adding Durant and putting together a payroll that will be less than it would’ve been without him.
If owners allowed longer-term deals, Durant probably would still be signed in OKC. But they did away with them, because they were afraid.
And guess who just figured out how the last set of unintended consequences (from the last CBA re-do) could be used to their advantage… to land Durant?
Bad executives want to legislate backwards, because they couldn’t see what was about to happen and they don’t know how to adapt and when someone else takes advantage of it the bad executives can’t believe that what just happened isn’t the only thing that could ever happen.
Good executives look forward–and to the unintended openings created by bad executives who want to legislate backwards.