The Evils of the Maximum Salary
LeBron James (wikimedia)
Dave Berri’s list of the most underpaid NBA players relies on his controversial “wins produced” theory so naturally most fans are going to disagree with it. At the same time, looking at his top two guys—Chris Paul and LeBron James—I don’t think anyone is going to disagree that these are excellent players. Nor will anyone disagree that Paul could easily secure more than his current 2008-2009 salary of $4,574,189 or that James could secure more than $14,410,581 on an open market.
And it seems to me that these kind of phenomena relating to the rookie scale and, in particular, the cap on how much you can pay an individual player are an under-discussed source of competitive imbalance in the NBA. In a world with unconstrained bidding on individual players, even if you paired with it a team salary cap, potential employers of top-flight talent would face a real choice. Of course you’d like to have James or Paul on your team, but do you really want to pay what they’re worth? The current rules essentially guarantee that those guys will be underpaid, meaning that signing them for “the max” is a no-brainer. But in an open market, you’d have to pay LeBron so much that it would seriously undermine your ability to sign other good players.
Under the circumstances the only way for a GM to build a great team would be to genuinely identify undervalued talent, not just luck into possession of a super-star who’s worth more than anyone is allowed to pay him.
49 Responses to “The Evils of the Maximum Salary”
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August 5th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
You’ve got this exactly backwards. This is a source of competitive balance. Without this, New York, LA, and Boston would sign all the best free agents much like they do in baseball and teams like New Orleans and Cleveland would have no shot at holding onto the superstars they drafted.
August 5th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
The bigger problem with this, at least as far as team construction goes, is that if you have a fixed budget to spend and your most productive players are capped at less than they’re worth, you will consistently have to overpay lesser players to sign them. The whole reason players unions readily accept rookie scales is that it increases the piece of the revenue pie available to veterans.
I leave this as an exercise for the reader to determine how this is relevant to problems that unions with large proportions of older and retired workers have with changing compensation structures and attracting younger talent
August 5th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
I think this argument rests on the presence of a salary cap (despite Matt saying “even if”) — without one you’d just wind up with the situation in MLB, as Ron pointed out in the first comment. With the salary cap but no max salary you’re in the same position as the NFL, where we have in fact seen the sort of effect Matt is talking about: superstars are often overpaid and the quality of the rest of the talent on the team suffers as a result (living in DC, I know this all too well).
August 5th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
If the players find those conditions objectionable, they should not have agreed to them when the union contract last came up for negotiation. But most likely the deal is a good one for all but the best and youngest players. And Chris Paul and Lebron James will both be as rich as Croesus soon enough.
There are a lot of ways you could make basketball compensation more robust in terms of incentivizing excellence. You could have home teams put up a portion of the gate as a purse that would go to the winner. Teams could be structured like partnerships, with franchise players as partners gradually acquiring ownership in the team, and utility players as associates playing for salaries. But basically these incentives introduce risk for both the players and owners, and everyone is making a pile of money already, so why bother?
August 5th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
This is a source of competitive balance.
No, not with the salary cap (which baseball does not have). If NY or LA offered too huge a salary, that would mean LBJ and four scrubs on the floor. It’s also why the league needed the Larry Bird rule that teams could go over the cap to retain players: because all things equal (such as max salary), players will want to go to a major market, or a place like Florida with a favorable tax structure.
Tangentially related:
In the cases of salary cap leagues, I’ve always thought that while the entry draft actually hurts competitive balance. If there were rookie free agency, a terrible NBA team with some cap room could get better quickly if they could sweep up 2 or 3 of the best rookies at once (instead of the annual situation where they hope the ball bounces right, and the one player they get works out, and so does next year’s…). Teams that have maxed out (usually the good ones) would have a hard time paying kids to sit at the end of the bench.
But this would drive the salaries of entry-level players up, so it’ll never happen. Too many bottom feeders would rather have cost-controlled suckage and not have to answer for never turning their teams around, than really try and be competitive.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
New York, LA, and Boston would sign all the best free agents much like they do in baseball
He’s suggesting that you keep the NBA salary cap but eliminate max contracts. If the Knicks wanted to go into cap hell and eliminate any ability to get free agents for years to get LeBron (which isn’t any different from what they’ve been doing, but I digress), sure. It’s not like they can just throw infinite money at whoever they want.
And as #3 says, you’d end up in a situation like the NFL, which I think is fine. Teams like the Redskins that overpay for free agents find themselves without the cap room to sign enough players to make a great team.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
It seems relevant to point out that the NBA has the least competitive balance of the major sports, in terms of which teams are competing for and winning the championship. Both MLB and NFL have had far more teams get to/near the top than the NBA over the past 20 years.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
The NFL and NBA are completely incomprehensible. In the
NFL, the weirdness is that a) you can cut anyone anytime
usually with little penalty, so contracts don’t mean much,
and b) the “salary cap number” doesn’t seem to be obviously
related to what the athletes actually get paid. In the
NBA, the matching-salary trade rules lead to the extreme
strangeness of trading to get a lousy overpaid player with
a big contract that expires soon – because seemingly that’s
the only way to free up cap space to go after a free agent
(and the max salary rules mean that best of the free agents
are always a bargain).
I’m happier with the MLB situation, where contracts actually
mean what they say – to the point that my team, the Red Sox,
has several times had to trade away players while still
paying part or all of their salary. As for the lack of a
salary cap, the Yankees have vastly outspent everyone else
over the last 10 years, but haven’t won. The Red Sox have
done better with significantly less money, by good drafting
and player development – Youkilis, Pedroia, Ellsbury,
Papelbon, Lester, Bard are all products of the farm system
now performing at a high level: and they’ve also traded
away excellent playerslike Hanley Ramirez and Bronson Arroyo
to fill other needs. The recent success of the low-budget
Tampa Rays also shows that salaries aren’t as important as
you might think.
I think the worst part of all this is that the rules – at
least for NFL and NBA, and probably for the NHL as well -
are simply incomprehensible and frustrating to fans, while
still failing to achieve their purported goal of competitive
balance. (Though I guess the astronomical value of franchises
shows that the rules are working well to make owners rich,
which may be the real point).
August 5th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Especially when you factor in that the most underpaid players will also be getting paid a hefty fee from Nike and so on.
Let’s call it the Shaquille O’Neal corollary. “hmm…Orlando wants to pay me a lot of money to stay here, but so will LA…and I get to be a huge star and live in LA…screw you Orlando!”
August 5th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
But do we want competitive balance? I think the NBA prefers having its superstars on teams that are championship contenders, rather than having Garnett-in-Minnesota situations where they waste away in mediocrity because they’re surrounded by terrible teammates. They probably see this as a good side effect of maximum salaries, not an evil one.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
No max salary + salary cap = superstars on shit teams. No one wants to see the best players playing w a bunch of scrubs. Every team with a legit star would resemble the current Cavs or Lakers of a few years back.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
the Yankees have vastly outspent everyone else
over the last 10 years, but haven’t won. The Red Sox have
done better with significantly less money
You’re kidding me, right? The Sox have been in the top 5 in payrolls every year I’ve followed baseball, often 2nd. Yeah, $150 mil is less than $200 mil. But it’s a hell of a lot better than the $50-70 mil that a lot of teams spend.
The reason the Yankees haven’t won (and they’ve made the playoffs almost every year, by the way; try comparing that with the bottom half of the league) isn’t because they don’t have a tremendous monetary advantage. It’s because they spend it on the wrong people – often pitchers in their mid-to-late 30s and hitters coming off steroid usage. You can’t seriously argue that any team with the Yankees’, or even the Sox’s payroll, wouldn’t have a massive advantage in competing for the playoffs.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
No max salary + salary cap = superstars on shit teams. No one wants to see the best players playing w a bunch of scrubs. Every team with a legit star would resemble the current Cavs or Lakers of a few years back.
This is pretty true. I don’t particularly want to see it myself. But you have to agree it’s better for competitive balance.
What most people don’t say is that while “competitive balance” is generally considered a good thing a league in which every team was close to .500 is really boring. They don’t want complete balance, they just don’t want college football-like imbalance.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Under the circumstances the only way for a GM to build a great team would be to genuinely identify undervalued talent, not just luck into possession of a super-star who’s worth more than anyone is allowed to pay him.
Alternatively, you could field a team of top players willing to take less in order to improve the team. That’s what the NHL Penguins and Red Wings do, and I doubt many would argue they’re the two best teams in the league in no small part because their superstars are more interested in championships than making a few extra million per year.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
The reason why you have the existence of max contracts is driven more by the players than the owners. Without the limits, you would have the situation Matt describes on most teams – a few players making huge money, and the rosters filled out with the rest of the guys making very little. By putting a cap on the size of contracts, it creates the environment for the NBA to have a middle class – veterans making decent money. I think that’s probably a good thing.
From David Stern’s perspective, the owners are willing to pay the players a certain percentage of revenues. How the players choose to divide that among themselves is up to them.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Cripes, Yglesias. Spoken like a New Yorker.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Without this, New York, LA, and Boston would sign all the best free agents much like they do in baseball and teams like New Orleans and Cleveland would have no shot at holding onto the superstars they drafted.
But New York would still manage to lose somehow.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Worth pointing out that the NBA doesn’t have a salary cap, it has a luxury tax, so big-market teams can go ahead and spend whatever they want.
So you’d have to convince the union both to take the hard cap and give up the maximum salary, reducing the contract of ther average player while lining the pockets of the elite. Uhh, not likely.
Also what Chris@11 said.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
BTW, tangentially related:
http://www.sactownroyalty.com/2009/8/1/972042/the-kings-would-starve
August 5th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
It depends on how you define competitive balance. In the current NBA, power rankings don’t change much from year to year because there are a number of motivations for good players to stay on the same teams. And if you can lock in a hall of famer, that is a big edge for 10+ seasons. Ultimately, though, the rookie pay scales and draft are rebalancing because the worst teams get the top picks. And unlike the NFL, the top picks in the NBA draft are worth far more than the contracts they are paid. So with decent/average management, the trend for the worst teams in the league is to get better. Of course most of them are terrible for a reason so it doesn’t work that way…
August 5th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
A couple points in favor of the current NBA system: It makes things frustrating in an interesting way, providing plenty of fodder for analysis.
But I agree with Matt. There’s a lot of incentive from a GM’s perspective to gamble on potential and pray for a good number in the lottery and hope to land a star, but not a lot of incentive to actually identify and cultivate talent in-house over time. Or, let someone else cultivate that talent and then over-pay for it.
The Rockets this past playoffs presented an interesting case of unheralded players competing at a high level, sans stars. But it was all an accident, not a choice. The thing is, is it better to lose in the playoffs with a bunch of no-names, or lose in the playoffs with a star? Most GMs would rather lose with a star. Why? Because they can move that star’s expiring contract and essentially trade him in for another star.
In the current system, the max contract (or, if the player is disappointing, the expiring contract) mitigates a lot of the risk of deciding what to pay a given player. Maybe it mitigates too much of the risk.
Great players are always bargains. Good players are always bargains. Disappointing players are always coming off the books so that more money can be freed up to start the cycle again…and maybe luck into a great payer, but probably not.
The economic downturn is already lowering the cap. Perhaps this will force teams to think harder about who they pay and what they pay them, specifically for less-than-max talent. There’s already evidence that’s the case. Perhaps the D-league will take on a larger role as teams try to determine who can actually contribute and who just happens to be tall.
I don’t see the stars getting hurt in all this. LeBron will earn the max, no matter what that max is. It’s the Ramon Sessions of the world that need to worry. Or, it’s the 2nd-round draft picks who are trying to negotiate their first guaranteed contract. Solid players who can contribute, but they aren’t household names. Their only value is basketball value, and that’s hard for an owner to monetize.
But, from an ownership perspective, it’s a lot less work to just cross your fingers and land a good draft pick. Or call up Memphis and hijack whoever they’ve developed.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
I’ve always wondered what it would look like if the NBA and NBAPA agreed in their CBA exactly how much money had to go to the players in total, then that number was divided evenly between the teams and they were required to spend all of it. How would salaries calibrate in a league with a free market, but completely even resources for the competitors? What would the competition look like? Would teams be better off spending all their money to sign one first tier player, one second tier player, and then pennies on the rest of the guys? Or would it be better to spread your salary out to several third tier guys?
Interesting thought experiment even if it will never happen.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
About competitive balance. Whether it’s a good thing or not, MLB has a lot more balance than either the NFL or the NBA..whether or not the Yankees and the Red Sox make the playoffs most of the time.
From 2001 through 2008, seven different teams won the World Series (only Boston repeated). Six other teams appeared without winning (or–13 out of 30 teams appeared in the WS in the last 8 years…the maximum possible, of course, is 16. Boston, the Yankees, and the Cardinals all appeared twice).
That’s pretty amazing, given all the rhetoric about how salary caps and slotting systems are supposed to generate competitive balance. The fact is that trying to win creates competitive balance.
#1 writes: “Without this, New York, LA, and Boston would sign all the best free agents…” Teams try to add to their ability to win. Having a second all-star shortstop adds less to a team’s ability to win that having the first one does. So, in fact 9as opposed to the emotional reaction), free agents go where they add the most value. Often this will be to teams close to, but not at. the top of the standings.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
…you could field a team of top players willing to take less in order to improve the team. That’s what the NHL Penguins and Red Wings do…
In the case of the Pens, this has helped a little, but not as much as other factors. Crosby and Malkin have both signed *very* rich contracts. For example, it’s hard to say a guy like Crosby is “more interested in championships than making a few extra million per year” when he is the second highest paid player in the league. I’m pretty sure Crosby and Malkin are also easily the highest paid duo in the league.
What Pittsburgh has done that is either smart or lucky, and which can help a teams a lot, is get high-level production from guys on rookie contracts (Fleury and Staal, though both have resigned now).
(I don’t really have any idea about the Wings salary situation, but I do know they got Hossa cheap last year. They were pretty good before he arrived, though.)
In the NHL, productive rookies go a long way towards making any GM look smart.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Scythia #18 says: “the NBA doesn’t have a salary cap, it has a luxury tax, so big-market teams can go ahead and spend whatever they want.”
This is not fully correct. A team can go over the salary cap (and thus pay luxury tax) in order to re-sign its own players. However (other than the annual “Mid-Level Exception”, which allots about $5 MM of salary per team, and the “Bi-Annual Exception”, which allots about $2 MM of salary per team) a team (i) cannot sign an outside free agent if it is over the cap, and (ii) if it is under the cap, can sign the outside free agent only to, at most, an annual salary equal to the cap room. See Article VII of the collective bargaining agreement, Sections 5 and 6.
This is why the Knicks are desperately trying to shed salaries like Eddy Curry and Jared Jefferies (and earlier, they traded Jamal Crawford and Zach Randolph) that would have obligations in the 2010-11 season. The Knicks want to sign a top star like Amare, Bosh, or LeBron in the summer of 2010, but they’re not allowed to do so if their salary obligations for 2010-11 are not sufficiently under the salary cap.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
@ 18
There are both. The NBA’s CBA is difficult to decipher, but there is a “soft” salary cap, which teams cannot exceed in order to sign another team’s free agent. I think that number is in the low-mid $50mil area right now. So, teams that are trading for useless scrubs who have enormous salaries but only 1 year left are generally trying to get as far under that number as possible.
Then there’s a luxury tax amount ($75mil? something like that?), where, if teams exceed it, they pay a dollar-for-dollar tax for every dollar they’re over that threshold AND they give up the pro rata revenue sharing distribution the league divvies out to the teams under the tax.
Teams can exceed the soft cap (with no hard cap) to resign their own free agents, and have built-in advantages over other teams in their attempts to do so – they can offer an extra year and, I think, larger raises.
Most teams other than the Clippers exceed the soft cap each year, but many teams, even profitable ventures like my Chicago Bulls, draw a line in the sand at the luxury tax, for obvious reasons.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
ahh, nbt right above me at 25 covered the same stuff and added the MLE info, which I left out, but is the other important way to sign players in spite of exceeding the “soft” salary cap.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Having watched the Indians lose Thome, Manny Ramirez, Sabathia, and now C. Lee and V. Martinez, I’m all in favor of any system which isn’t like MLB and which gives Cleveland a shot at keeping LeBron.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Turgidson #26 helpfully clarified an apparent error in my comment #25. (although I don’t think he read my #25 first :> ) The salary cap is set at 51% of “Basketball-Related Income”. The luxury tax line is set at 61% of “Basketball-Related Income”. The two numbers are not the same. Again, see Article VII of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
In my #29, insert the phrase “averaged across all the teams” after the phrase “Basketball-Related Income”
August 5th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Alternatively, you could field a team of top players willing to take less in order to improve the team.
The Penguins strategy was lets suck for three years so we get Two #1s – Fleury and Crosby and One #2 Malkin
If Pittsburgh doesn’t win the draft lottery in 2005 that strategy does not work out so well. Crosby& Malkin are at 8.7, Fleury at 5, Stahl at 4 and Ryan Malone is in Tampa Bay
Detroit’s recent sucess owes more to Håkan Andersson than players willing to take a discount. Hudler, Hossa and Samuelson all bolted for more $$$. “I think the salary cap has finally caught up to my hockey team” Red Wings vice president Jimmy Devellano 7/24/09
August 5th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Regarding competitive balance and the NBA versus other professional sports, I would contend that that is in no small part due to the nature of basketball.
First of all, you have five guys on the floor, rather than 9 or 11. Also, in basketball, you can have your best guy handle the ball all the time, whereas in baseball, you come up to bat every ninth time whether you are Pete Rose or Buddy Biancalana. So the advantage of having the supreme talent in the league is simply greater in basketball than it is other sports, and that leads to less parity.
No doubt it has been aided by a free agent structure that tends to keep max players with their original team.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
The NBA is a mess if not a joke because of salaries. Not only because of the usual reasons of talent mismatches and mistakes of giving huge money to the ordinary player, but the system is so skewed to the individual that it is almost impossible to build a well functioning team.
It’s probably a structural issue relating to the game itself with so few players in the game. In baseball, football,hockey or soccer, the worlds other major professional sports, no one player can have near as large an impact as a basketball superstar.
From a fans perspective the Bulls Celtics series was as good as it gets. If Garnett was in and healthy it would have been a bore. I’m not sure what to conclude from this.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Basketball has the best/fairest salary system of any of the major sports. The league is unbalanced not because of the salary structure, but because of the nature of the sport. A handful of really good players make a disproportionate impact on the success of their teams. If you are lucky enough to get a Jordan or Lebron or Kobe or Shaq or Duncan, you will be good for a number of years. That’s why the NBA is prone to dynasties. But it is still a very fair system. Small market teams like Utah, Portland, and San Antonio have had enormous success over the years. And when such teams fall on hard times (like Portland a few years back), they can regroup and rebuild through the draft and then retain those players (Roy, Aldridge, Oden) because of the rookie salary scale, the cap, and Bird rules. In other words, the NBA is unbalanced talent wise, but it is an equal opportunity league. The perennially bad teams (e.g. Clippers) aren’t bad because of salary or market restrictions; they are just poorly run organizations.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
nbt @30:
I confess, I did not read #25 first. It was one of those “start writing a post, get called away for 15 minutes, come back, finish” things.
With regard to the value (or lack thereof) of the max salary, it is certainly a pretty egregious restraint on the very best players’ ability to make their market value. I admire the NBA’s attempt to create equality of opportunity by creating the max salary and salary cap/lux tax system, but the result has been that only a handful of franchises have won the title during this “era.” So I’m not sure it’s worked. I’m also not sure what system would be better.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Well if LeBron’s salary would be so high that you couldn’t build a winning team around him, then he wouldn’t get signed. And then he’d have to agree to a lower salary.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
There will never be as much competitive balance in the NBA as in other sports for two reason:
1) There are only 5 guys on the court at any given time. The fewer guys there are, the more value there is in having one exceptional individual.
2) Everyone on the court can (in theory) do everything. Have a shitty point gaurd? Have your all start 2 gaurd or Small forward bring the ball up the court and create. You have point gaurds like Kidd and Rondo who rebound. You have Skilled big men who create shots for others etc.
The combined effect of 1 and 2 is that one exceptional player can take over a game much more easily in basketball than in any other sport. Any team with Lebron on it will be a playoff contender. You can’t say the same for Tom Brady or Gabriel Messi.
As long as
-extremely good players are rare (ie. less than 30 of them in a 30 team league), and
-good players have an incentive to stay on their current teams (continuity, liking the fans/teammates, the desire to keep winning), the few teams that luck out on the few exceptional players will dominate the league.
The only way to prevent this would be to force exceptional players to leave their teams after winning a few championships. Money won’t be enough to do this (Scotty and MJ would have likely taken paycuts to keep winning rings). Making it harder to sign complementary players will have a minimal effect on competitive balance. It may sway the relative rankings of the elites, but any team with Paul, James or Duncan will be elite regardless of how weak their supporting cast is.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
I’m just replying to this because I’m a Bulls’ fan, but Scottie Pippen most certainly would NOT have taken a pay cut after 1998. He had signed a very long-term, very below-market contract around 1990 and spent most of it being bitter that the Bulls wouldn’t (and in fact, couldn’t) give him the raise he deserved. So the only way he would have stayed with the Bulls would have been to get a monstrous contract (and assurance that MJ and Phil were coming back too).
I think Reinsdorf would have paid MJ 30+ mil as long as MJ wanted it (and hated every second of it), but all the resentment between then-GM Jerry Krause and Phil/MJ/Scottie resolved itself by having them all go their separate ways. Sigh.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I’m just replying to this because I’m a Bulls’ fan, but Scottie Pippen most certainly would NOT have taken a pay cut after 1998. He had signed a very long-term, very below-market contract around 1990 and spent most of it being bitter that the Bulls wouldn’t (and in fact, couldn’t) give him the raise he deserved. So the only way he would have stayed with the Bulls would have been to get a monstrous contract (and assurance that MJ and Phil were coming back too).
Doesn’t this just prove my point? He did take a pay cut to stay with the Bulls (in his prime no less) even though who he wasn’t happy about it. Ok maybe after 6 rings he had nothing left to prove and would have cashed out. I don’t think that really hurts my argument that great players will take less money to stay on great teams. Perhaps I should have said great players will take pay cuts to stay on great teams until they prove themselves to be the greatest of all time. Then they’ll go to Portland for max deals.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
“You can’t seriously argue that any team with the Yankees’, or even the Sox’s payroll, wouldn’t have a massive advantage in competing for the playoffs.”
Money is useful. But not as useful as you might think, as the
Yankee’s vast spending on has-beens demonstrates. What’s
really hard is to predict *future* performance of players -
see David Ortiz’ batting 230 this year – in the presence of
injuries etc. And mostly what you need for success is good
pitching – and if you look at the Red Sox you’ll see a lot
on money spent on Beckett and Matsuzaka, but then Lester,
Wakefield, Penny, and Buchholz are all cheap. And Matsuzaka
hasn’t done a damn thing all season.
Then who got the World Series last year ? The Rays, with a
tiny payroll but a bunch of good young players. A high
payroll mostly gives you the opportunity to make a few
mistakes, but you still need a good farm system and a good
GM *and* quite a bit of luck to do well (the Red Sox this
year would be in deep sh*t if Lester hadn’t made such a
great recovery from leukemia).
August 5th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
@39
Pippen signed his long-term, cheap contract before the Bulls started winning championships, and I don’t remember whether they locked him up before he hit the open market, or had early signing rights (I’m not familiar with the NBA’s CBA structure at that time).
Either way, I wasn’t trying to refute your point, so much as just bitterly recalling the Bulls’ dynasty breakup.
/end tangent
August 5th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
He did take a pay cut to stay with the Bulls (in his prime no less) even though who he wasn’t happy about it.
As I understand it, he didn’t take a pay cut, he just made a very bad business decision. He comes from a very poor family and has a father who was forced to stop working due to a disability. Pippen wanted security, so he signed a long-term deal. Unfortunately, he did it during a time when salaries were going up by leaps and bounds, year over year. (Reinsdorf apparently recommended to Scottie that he not sign a long-term deal for just this reason.)He was bitter because the Bulls wouldn’t renegotiate. I think he tried to get himself traded each of the last three championship seasons.
August 5th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
richard cownie, i just wanted to join in in order to support you.
if you want to find a sport with competitive balance, baseball is your choice, not only in terms of who makes the post-season, but even more relevant, who is likely to win any single game. in baseball, more or less every team plays between .400 and .600; in football and basketball, the range is more like .250 – .750.
i also hate – let me make that clearer, HATE – the salary cap. it fills up the sports pages with silly financial stuff and even more important, it keeps great teams from ever coming into existence.
now, as someone implied above, it’s better to have a mix of adequate and good players than it is to have a mix of great and shoddy players, whereas every single phil jackson-coached championship team has been a mix of great and shoddy players, so there is a functional difference in the sports. nonetheless, we can look at european soccer, and while it is true that year in, year out, man u, chelsea, arsenal, liverpool, barcelona, real madrid, ac milan, inter milan, and juventus have a natural advantage, it is also true that man u, chelsea, arsenal, liverpool, barcelona, real madrid, ac milan, inter milan, and juventus do not win every league title, much less every champion’s league title.
in short, there’s about as much competitive balance in soccer as there is in basketball, only soccer doesn’t have a salary cap, and so you can, as we saw in barcelona this year, see a team that ranks with the alltime greats.
August 5th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
In other words, LeBron James would play out his entire career surrounded by minimum wage players, every so often making the first round of the playoffs.
August 5th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Another point to make about basketball is that very few
people have the combination of size, skill, and athleticism
to be a top-5 NBA player. Whereas baseball players come in
all shapes and sizes – Pedroia and Youkilis succeed on
hand-eye coordination rather than any obvious physical gifts.
Pedro Martinez, at his peak the most dominant pitcher of his
time, was not physically imposing.
Offhand, I’d say that each year there are about 10-15 baseball
rookies with the potential to be MVP-caliber players. But
in basketball it’s about 0-2 each year – players like Kobe,
LeBron, Shaq, or Tim Duncan are freakishly rare. As if a
baseball player came along who could hit 40 home runs a year
and pitch with a 105-mph fastball.
August 6th, 2009 at 3:23 am
I am a superstar, yet I believe in the concept of team. I believe in the selfless devotion to cause, in this instance, the cause of winning championships. I willing sacrifice and accept $15 million per year when I could be paid $22 million, because I believe the good of the team always supersedes personal gain. I… am a Superstar Socialist.
I also know that if my beloved teammates can help me win 4 or 5 championships, I will be worth in stock and options slightly more than $500 million by the time I retire. Socialists, contrary to theory, aren’t necessarily pecuniary illiterates.
August 6th, 2009 at 3:23 am
I am a superstar, yet I believe in the concept of team. I believe in the selfless devotion to cause, in this instance, the cause of winning championships. I willing sacrifice and accept $15 million per year when I could be paid $22 million, because I believe the good of the team always supersedes personal gain. I… am a Superstar Socialist.
I also know that if my beloved teammates can help me win 4 or 5 championships, I will be worth in stock and options slightly more than $500 million by the time I retire. Socialists, contrary to theory, aren’t necessarily pecuniary illiterates.
August 6th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Underpaid?
They play basketball. . .
August 6th, 2009 at 10:49 am
I’m no expert, but I think that some sort of system is necessary to level the playing field between the wealthy big market teams, and the less-wealthy small market teams. I’ve been following basketball for just a few years, but I can only understand the outlines of the current system. It seems a little too byzantine. Something has to keep things fair though.
On the other hand, I gave up following baseball because of two things: 1. the enormous unfairness in the disparity between the wealthier teams like the Yankees, and many of the smaller market teams (I was a fan of the Oakland A’s for about 30 years up until then), 2. the disgusting performance enhancing drug spectacle.