BREAKING! Salary Caps Screw Players

What Zack Lowe says here:

The stars can’t win, in part because the NBA has created a system in which a player maximizing his individual income makes it harder for his team to build a competitive roster around him. But are people — media, fans, GMs — overstating the difficulty of that challenge? Maybe the onus should be on teams to spend wisely enough so they can accommodate multiple star players without prodding those stars to “sacrifice” in pointed public comments.

[…]

But sacrifice is a two-way street, and every situation is a beehive of complex variables. No choice is easy, and the hero/villain lines are never as clear as we’d like. If it’s so virtuous for a great player to give up salary, why shouldn’t an owner also be called upon to lose money if it will help his team win?

Indeed, I would so further. In a context in which even a ludicrously horribly run franchise can appreciate by $2 billion in 30 years, mechanisms that force star players to take far below their market value — and even less than that if they want to maximize their team’s chances of winning — are flatly outrageous.

And please don’t talk to me about “competitive balance” (usefully critiqued here.)  People invest a lot of energy in trying to come up with alternative explanations, but here are the reasons for salary caps on both individual salaries and team salaries:

• Putting money into the pockets of the owners
• That’s it.

And this is particularly evident in the NBA, where despite all the salary restrictions there’s more chalk than the American public school system had in 1953.  (Which is not an anti-NBA comment; the extent to which top players disproportionately affect outcomes might reduce upsets but is also a primary element of what makes the league compelling to many fans.)   The first decent explanation for why LeBron James should have to take far less money than wealthy owners are willing to pay him will be the first.