Well you could really only implement this in five years time and allow for teams to plan ahead of time and there would basically have to be a hard cap in order to manage it.

Teams would Aspire to find a way to give players more money somehow. 

Also draft capital will no longer be a tradable asset. The trade market will change completely

Also a bunch of shitty franchises with cheap owners will stay shitty.

Another stupid idea brought to you buy Adam cunt silver.

Also trades. So many trades are built on the value of future draft picks and teams have already traded ones for 2032. So you’d either have to phase this in super slowly or massively screw over a bunch of teams 

Maybe it’s like, there are 18 distinct salary ranges and every team is only allowed one of each (i.e one that’s \(60-55M/year, one that’s \)54-50M, etc)

They’d still need to find ways to stop the Kawhi and Ohtani situations though

Presumably you’d still have a rookie payscale - you could build on that by giving the worst teams some sort of cap exception to be able to offer more to players.

Except every team can sign a rookie to their rookie contract regardless of cap situation.

I think the play here would be the team with the worst record still has the most money to offer the rookie they sign, but if you give the rookie a choice they would have to consider the money, the likeliness of play time, championship aspirations. Sure, you might be the best player in the draft, but if you choose to play in OKC you might be coming off the bench and don’t get the chance to highlight your talents and are getting the worse contract possible due to OKC’s record.

It would make things more interesting, at the very least.

The fundamental problem with bringing up a nuclear option is that a supermajority of owners would need to vote for it. I count at least 16 teams (Pistons, Cavs, Raptors, Magic, Hornets, Bucks, Pacers, Wizards, Thunder, Spurs, Wolves, Blazers, Grizzlies, Jazz, Pelicans, Kings) that fall between the “we have to overpay free agents to get them to come” and “free agents don’t come no matter what” categories, so eliminating the draft and the advantages of retaining players that come with it would be distinctly against their self-interest.

It’s clearly just a threat to small market teams to stop doing this or else but I do low-key think it’s the only solution that would solve tanking.

Yeah it’s a warning; he’s telling the owners he knows what the nuclear option is but it’s not on the table yet.

Knicks, Celtics, Lakers and other big market teams will dominate the NBA like Real Madrid and Barcelona dominate Spanish football (soccer)

Exactly. If they eliminated the draft then every top rookie would sign with one of like five teams. The other 25 have no incentive to agree to this.

This idea is astonishingly stupid. The entire reason teams tank is because FAs only go to 6 teams. This is the same problem.

Depends. If a rookie is allowed to get a max offer or if there is a limit for a rookie. If they can offer a max, maybe it will also prevent situation like the Thunder. It might actually bring real parity. It can also ruin a team forever.

Let’s be real. Over 20 franchises aren’t free agent destinations.

Gonna turn into the Premier League where everyone goes to the biggest teams

The NBA would become the PL or la liga with the top teams being the only ones able to compete.

Why? There would still be cap space, what is this brain dead logic of people thinking that only 3-4 teams would get every player, there would still be maxes and every other thing

Also what have Sacramento done with this current system? Make playoffs once in 20 years? Average like 25 wins get high draft picks and suck?

This is the ultimate goal for people complaining about tanking btw

Why? The cap doesn’t go away. Bad teams would have more money to spend on good rookies.

I’m glad someone cares about us. We’re so bad, the tanking teams can’t catch us in the tankathon when we try to win 😂

Yeah endorsements are quickly outpacing actual payroll and have been for a while now.

This is such a bad idea. The same 10 markets would literally always get the best talent. Because they could always trade the players that didn’t quite work out to markets that would have to way overpay for worse talent. Markets that can’t actually sign top talent, there would always be a way to make cap space for the lakers, warriors, knicks, heat and a few other teams to scoop up the real talent.

If every rookie signee gets a Bird Rights equivalent where the cap hit can’t exceed like 15 million or something then I think I could see it being competitive even for small market teams.

Like I see a totally scenario where this scheme basically always existed and LaMelo still went to the Hornets after whatever the fuck his amateur career was, just making 30 mil a few years earlier. And if the highest bid for Zion was from Portland or Utah he probably at least heavily considers it.

There are lower-key guys in the league that do actually want a “humbler” lifestyle. Miles Turner comes to mind.

Then you have european dudes who may prefer places like Denver or OKC or Utah cause you can just buy hundreds of acres less than an hour away from the stadium before you scratched NYC penthouse money (well maybe not Denver anymore lol).

All of a sudden Washington, Utah, Sacramento, and Indiana look like they’re gonna be picking high and it’s a crippling issue that needs to be changed immediately 

But he’s been a fabulous vampire

Thank god. Goodbye Blazers

Because tanking is hard to define. The only actual rules are part of the player participation policy, which is easy to work around and hard to prove Ja being broken.

It’s why the jazz fine didn’t even cite any rules and just “conduct detrimental”. Because they didn’t technically break any.

It would be a terrible idea for basically everyone but the Lakers lol.

Yeah this whole tanking thing has made the small markets have substantially better ability to compete than any other past system and any proposal I’ve seen yet. I don’t get why it’s such an issue. If you don’t want to watch your team play a tanking team you’ve got like 68 games against the 24 teams any given year that aren’t tanking.

10 is generous. It would 6-8 teams max, everyone else is farming prospects that typically go in the late 1st and then those players will leave to all play on the 6-8 teams.

Revenue would crater massively.

If you have a hard cap and no cap on salaries it might not.

And I bet my Knicks would still find a way to fuck it all up

This assume that there would be no busts. If the Knicks and lakers are locked into 19 year old busts for 4 years on big contracts they’ll be screwed

Soccer doesn’t have a salary cap. Teams with more cap space will still be more attractive to players

Then how do you combat teams being below .500 due to injuries? Or playing a very tough first full month?

It is impossible for every team to be above .500 at any point in the season

This type of thinking is probably how Trump thinks he’s able to run this country

Roughly 50% of the league is going to be below .500 even if no one tanks. There has to be a loser, even if everyone is putting in max effort. Owners aren’t going to agree to give a bunch of money back for that. 

Or limit them to lottery protected vs non lottery protected. Getting rid of them entirely seems a little extreme

It’s 100% a problem and not an “overcorrection”

The worst thing that can happen to a sport is teams losing on purpose, it’s completely awful and getting rewarded for it is even worse

In most sports in the world if you lose on purpose you get punished so heavy you are never going back to where you were

Like there’s a difference between players getting surgery, being traded away, or even resting compared to literally pulling guys in the fourth in games you’re winning.

1. This would INCREASE tanking by the other teams that didn’t pick in the top 5 last year, as their odds of landing a premium pick increase if 5 teams are ineligible for the top 5 in this year’s draft.

2. Same thing with above. You would have too many teams that would be ineligible to pick high year after year, thereby drastically increasing the incentive for other teams to tank.