Also not having Draft picks to trade anymore is wild, so Mlb style trades lol.

There’s still a salary cap. If large markets get superstars they likely wouldn’t be able to afford to offer rookies the most money. They’d have to lure them with exposure for endorsements.

Let’s say you’re Darryn Peterson and the Knicks want you. They can’t offer you any money and there’s already a star pg in the building. How about the lakers - want to go play with Luka and reaves? Probably not. Would the lakers offer him a sizable contract when they desperately need 3 and d and a center? Neither Dybantsa or boozer fit either the Knicks or lakers either. So are we talking about the Miami Heat? Peterson would be great there and maybe they could offer him a typical rookie contract, but they can’t afford as much as say the Jazz. So the Jazz have a role for him and a big contract. Would he really be willing to come off the bench in a big market for tens of millions of dollars less money?

I don’t think this is as outrageous a proposal as Reddit seems to.

I also think there’s a very weird control of labor piece to the draft. Imagine being the most competitive talented person in the world in your field and being told what city you have to live in, who your boss is going to be and who your coworkers are going to be for at least 7 years. I get that they make a fortune, but damn.

Maybe a more relatable scenario- you’re the top HS student in the country and any college can draft you. The teachers may be terrible, the other students may hate you and the college may be in rural North Dakota. You are not going to become your best self.

I couldn’t care less about tanking lol

There’s still a salary cap though, it’s as likely that a small market team would have the most available cap space as it is that a large market team would.

I don’t see how paying rookies $50M a year helps any league bank accounts.

thats not really possible tho right?. if we like it less, we spend less and they do worse as a business and thus they have less money. so idk. maybe im missing something tho?

It would take time to implement. You’re right. It couldn’t be immediate.

Lets introduce snakes to control the mice population!

I think they should start simple and just remove pick protections. That leads to the most blatant type of tanking

Teams will just tank for cap space instead of tanking for draft position

How would you tank for cap space in this scenario?

You would just be bad and then have cap space. You wouldn’t try to lose games.

gutting the roster isnt really the issue that anyone cares about, sitting good players is the “tanking” that needs to be solved. incentivizing teams to keep flexible cap sheets is not a bad thing in the slightest

And this wouldn’t even fix tanking, it would just be tanking by trying to free up crazy cap space. Imagine the salary shenanigans if this was implemented. Do we still have a max salary contract? would be real fun watching 15 teams shed cap only for the Lakers to sign wembanyama type talent.

Then how would Utah and Minnesota ever get rookies? They will all be in big markets or states without income taxes…

If everyone has to adhere to the “wage scale” then rookies will just go to competitive teams or storied franchises.

Now we’re talking!!!!

No cap fr fr?

No player cap I 100% agree. Team caps should still exist which helps with parity - i.e. if Jokic is worth $80M/year, you have to pay him that which means it’ll be tougher to build a great team around him

Less measures that support poverty franchises, for sure. But yeah the Clippers sure did lay out the framework for how to dodge the cap. Good thing rich people dutifully pay their fair share of taxes…

We will see. Ballmer is prob to powerful to have anything substantial happen to him or it will be in a sense no paper trail directly linking him to all the shady dealings. Other people will be the fall guy(s). I think he’s guilty AF but that means very little. I think a few picks will get taken away and they will get fined but outside of that nothing major.

Normal cap circumvention, move on, find a new slant

Yep. It’s obviously being pushed because they have their “solution” already decided. The private equity goons have spoken and thus it will be 

How would teams consolidating power help gambling companies?

I like how it was revealed like.. 2 weeks ago that OKC was literally paying astro-turfers to push this anti-tanking stuff, specifically targeting the Jazz so they can get the Jazz’s pick and like.. everyone forgot about it.

Because of legal gambling

Yeah, I remember not showing up to plant trees.

Money is a hell of a drug.

I feel like a true no-cap setup only works if the league treats under-the-table cap circumvention the same way it treats gambling or match-fixing: zero tolerance, lifetime ban for players and execs involved. But that would never happen.

I mean, if the Lakers are willing to pay him $15 million but being in LA can set him up with a sponsorship deal (and I mean this in the perfectly legit way, not even an Aspiration situation) that’s a bit trickier.

For elite first rounders, big market teams would just promise them the world.

“You will be our number one option, we will trade our current number one option to create playing time for you.”

It’s just free upgrades for them.

Mavs for example, trade Luka for a haul (in this fake scenario, not in real life) and then replace him with Flagg.

Now you have Flagg + all kinds of assets and pieces you can surround him with, and in his prime he becomes a top 5 player just like Luka.

Not if you count endorsements and side deals.

Yeah there’s no possible way for those team to funnel more money to players…

didn’t stop the clippers.

there’s a fuck load more endorsement money available for players in LA or NY than there is for someone in Utah

BYU is an anomaly though. NBA coach and staff, deep sponsor pockets, the owner of the Jazz is a top support of BYU, Ainge is the Jazz CEO and BYU alum.

They built a business/marketing degree specifically around player brand and financial success.

They go for the ambiance, the decor

Never been to Durham huh?

They also know they’re only there for a year. no 20 year old wants to spend 45 million a year in utah

You’ll get all sorts of teams lucking in to crazy good picks. Random is fair.

San Antonio*

Yeah. at this point why even have a draft

Wait. Am I missing something? How do you get ¹⁄₁₅? Is this assuming making the playoffs put you into a separate lotto?

30 teams with assumed uniformity is ¹⁄₃₀.

Actually they wouldn’t lol they have a lot of projected cap space lol.

This doesn’t happen in college basketball so why would it be different?

Players want the bag and playing time.

Big markets hoarding players will limit their team cap and minutes

International soccer uses this system and the only teams that win the championship are the big money teams. It literally leads to what everyone thinks it does, not what you seem to think.

If everyone is a free agent, they get to choose where to go. In a draft system, the teams get to choose where the players go.

It’s obvious that cap circumvention is much more relevant in a system where the players get to choose where they go (based on that cap circumvention).

Aspiration deals only became public knowledge in the last 12 months…

I never said the current system hasn’t failed.