Monday, January 26, 2004
A cap that fits
In the upcoming CBA negotiations the league wants "cost certainty" which appears to mean a salary cap, while the players are opposed to this concept. As a fan I'm also opposed to a hard cap for all teams because it will mean forced mediocrity. A team gets too many good players and they can't afford to keep them all under the cap. But the league wants to find a way to stop a team from spending millions on mediocrity like the Rangers. Here is my solution.
Put a salary cap on teams that don't make the playoffs. If you missed out on the playoffs last year, you can't spend as much as you want the next year. The playoff teams can spend what they want. In the examples I'm using below, the numbers don't mean much. I don't pretend to know where things should be negotiated. They are just ballpark ideas to clarify the example.
I think the best way might be to even make it a two tiered cap. Teams that have a chance at the first pick overall, can have a salary cap of $25M while teams that don't make the playoffs but don't get a chance at the first overall pick in the draft lottery get a salary cap of $30M.
This will force a bad but expensive team to rebuild. The Rangers won't be able to sign free agents. They'll have to draft and develop young players to have a hope while they can blame the league for "forcing" them to ignore the free agents.
The players association probably wouldn't object significantly to this. Usually, the teams bidding on the top free agents are the better teams in the league. The market won't change significantly. There will still be a free market with over half the teams in the league.
My solution to handling the problem of a team over the cap works like this.
A dispersal draft for all teams over the cap when training camp starts.
Each team will have to provide a list of players that when removed from the roster will get the team under the cap.
The team losing the player is still on the hook for all of his salary minus the league mininium which the drafting team will assume. This will ensure that overpaid players can be moved.
The draft will have the reverse order of the entry draft (i.e. Cup winner first then order of standings). This will pressure teams to trade for players before the draft so that the Cup winner doesn't benefit.
If the team doesn't lose enough players to get under the cap, they'll have to continue to provide players to the draft until enough players are taken to get them under the cap.
Put a salary cap on teams that don't make the playoffs. If you missed out on the playoffs last year, you can't spend as much as you want the next year. The playoff teams can spend what they want. In the examples I'm using below, the numbers don't mean much. I don't pretend to know where things should be negotiated. They are just ballpark ideas to clarify the example.
I think the best way might be to even make it a two tiered cap. Teams that have a chance at the first pick overall, can have a salary cap of $25M while teams that don't make the playoffs but don't get a chance at the first overall pick in the draft lottery get a salary cap of $30M.
This will force a bad but expensive team to rebuild. The Rangers won't be able to sign free agents. They'll have to draft and develop young players to have a hope while they can blame the league for "forcing" them to ignore the free agents.
The players association probably wouldn't object significantly to this. Usually, the teams bidding on the top free agents are the better teams in the league. The market won't change significantly. There will still be a free market with over half the teams in the league.
My solution to handling the problem of a team over the cap works like this.
