Quote:
Originally Posted by EricaLubarsky
Also by getting the max for a guy who plays only 60% of each season and 50% of each playoff, you're really preventing yourself from building that team that is so good that he's just a bonus.
|
But you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you don't give him the max, someone else almost certainly will, and then you're stuck with nothing. Honestly I think this is the single biggest problem with the NBA- the fact that there's no real sanity to the free agent market. There's just too many teams and not enough impact players to go around, so every halfway decent player gets the max.
I honestly don't know if there's a way to fix it, but I do think it exacerbates the problem that a max contract becomes an albatross on your roster the moment that player isn't playing like a star anymore. I don't like that the system punishes teams so heavily for giving out max contracts when the market is so wacky that you absolutely have to give out max contracts to stay remotely competitive. I think it would make the product a lot better if the league made it easier to move max contracts off the books if a team decides it's in their interest to do so. Bill Simmons had an idea a while back that I thought was really intriguing- make it so that trades only require salaries to match up within 50% instead of 90%. That way nobody is untraceable.