Phx-Suns.Net

A thread for crazy reorganizational ideas to pass the time during a slow news period. For example, we have seen the interesting five-region proposal for scheduling.

Here's my crazy idea that would change the way the salary cap and draft work.

Each team would contribute a certain function of its BRI to fund a Player Compensation Treasury, which is administered by the players union and league. They also administer a Player Compensation Bank, in which each team has an account. The treasury pays an allowance into each team's account, and teams pay their players with checks drawn on these accounts.

The treasury serves as a lender of last resort if a team overdraws its account, but the terms are nasty enough to discourage teams from using that to any significant degree. They also charge each account a maintenance fee, proportional to balance, to discourage teams from hoarding their funds; better to spend it this season or trade it to a team that will.

The treasury pays various subsidies that take the place of various cap exceptions under the current system. For example, when a player has spent enough seasons with a single team, a Continuity Subsidy pays a portion of his salary directly from the general treasury; this causes players and teams to tend to stay together and performs a function similar to the Bird Exception.

Finally, the draft is replaced with a market system wherein the top pick goes to whichever team is able and willing to pay him the most. You don't get the next can't-miss superstar coming into the league by losing games or by the lucky bounces of ping pong balls. You get him by pinching your pennies. If you can win with the players you find in the bargain bin, you have earned your success and are not penalized for it.

Hopefully, this system would mean we wouldn't have a labor stoppage every seven years while negotiations drag out as players and owners haggle over every last exception. In this system, deciding how much money goes from the teams to the treasury, hopefully done at the outset of negotiations, would settle the only major players-vs-owners issue; everything else is just deciding how to divide that pie among the players.

I don't think I am fully following this Cap. How does this make the players less likely to strike?

Indy wrote:I don't think I am fully following this Cap. How does this make the players less likely to strike?

They will be so busy consulting with their lawyers and accountants to figure out how the system works to have time to strike.

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Indy wrote:I don't think I am fully following this Cap. How does this make the players less likely to strike?

i think the idea is that the amount a player is paid, or at least an upper limit, is no longer dictated by the cba but rather by the player's skill set and his worth to the teams, and to the teams' ability to manage their monies in a way that they can splurge on the right players at the right time. so it won't be a collective bargaining process anymore, but a continually individual one.

The system is intended to make a lot of things more efficient. The collective bargaining process is just one of them.

A problem with negotiation a system full of exceptions is that nothing is ever settled, because things that are settled in principle get unsettled when you start haggling over exceptions. What keeps happening is that the players and owners agree in principle to the goal amount of money to be transferred from owners to players, but still end up engaging in brinksmanship over various exceptions and luxury taxes as the player do everything they can to exceed the goal and the owners try to come under it.

With this system, once they agree on the funding of the Treasury, that issue is settled. There's very little incentive to engage in brinksmanship over the details of the subsidies and taxes because they don't affect the total amount of money going from owners to players.