Knicks Morning News (2026.07.06)

I’m going to take the opposite position, partly because that’s what I like to do around here. 😉 I think complexity is one of the problems. They are trying to solve too many problems with too complex a set of rules and that’s what is creating those little “whack a mole” issues.

you misread my post. as very general matter i tend to agree that piling on constraints cba-style is a losing proposition. less generally you have to be joking. the underlying complexity is endemic, not constructed. it comes from having different goals (player movement, continuity, fairness, parity) that are often disconsonant, from the inherent cat and mouse exploitation game every rulebook must abide, and from the strange nature of everything that is downstream of operating a semi-monopolistic league/firm subject to the louis-schmeling paradox.

your “solution” seems facile. game players are clever. when you allow them to retain their players and also allow the best players to “move if they want to,” you are allowing teams to gather and keep the sort of superteams that violate one of the key competing interests. merely asserting that allowing teams to pay more to homegrown players is good enough is both a kludge itself and empirically inadequate to meet the league’s parity goals in most cases.

perhaps the tax could act as a sufficient counterweight? personally, i tend to prefer structuring incentives this way over the current rube goldberg apron machinery. but i have good news for you in that sense. a good bit of the second apron whining is actually scapegoating by organizations who prefer not to attribute to frugality something that can be blamed on a rule most fans do not understand. the highly progressive tax system is an enormous incentive for every owner and the predominant marginal incentive for almost every owner already. the kludges cost us ihart but i think it’s actually just the tax incentives that cost us mitch. so maybe we should just make the tax much more severe?

there are two reasons the cba doesn’t use this simpler, more market-friendly price-like mechanism of pure tax enforcement. one is that they are dealing with a very specialized preferred market segments. you often have a few owners with unusual utility curves, who might be willing to pay a very high tax price relative to other owners because of how they value marginal wins versus marginal dollars. normally this is fine because it is happy trade between owners with differing preferences, but here it creates a positional externality, allowing a superteam willing to pay massive taxes to frustrate one of the primary goals of the cba. and if you make the curve too severe such that it “appropriately” disincentivizes steve ballmer, you are wildly over-deterring more typical owners from keeping their players, rendering a system far more punitive for those teams than a mere apron would.

the other reason is that the player’s union has its own power dynamics and we can’t just wish them away. there are many outcomes the more powerful segments of the union want to favor over others that might not emerge naturally in a simpler system. everyone says they want simplicity outside the room but inside the room hardly anyone gives a shit about simplicity over ensuring that their least favorite outcome won’t happen.

pt any thoughts on my “leveling max contracts for cap purposes” idea?

one problem with this is that vet mins are small but your idea creates a lot of ghost salary, salary paid but not counted toward the cap benchmarks. bc the 51% rule acts as an anchor, under the current setup this would inherently push player salaries over that 51pct and they would have to be adjusted down from the actual contract amounts after the year. to avoid this likely unwanted dynamic you would have to reduce the cap itself. while it would be a form of money illusion to care about this as a player, they very likely would care about it nonetheless.

a second issue here is that it might be used to facilitate the very thing the nba is hoping to avoid: superteam collusion among suoermax veteran stars. maybe you want to mitigate this by only applying leveling to “homegrown” players. many teams would object that this is adding even more unfair advantage to massive luckbox teams who happened to win the wemby lottery. as it is, many would argue there is already an inherent superstar cap advantage bc the very best players like wemby and jokic are worth much more than the gaps permitted between them and the secondary max guys like siakam.

You tax ownership dollar for dollar for the privilege. So to roster a supermax player making $20M above the leveling salary, that team has to contribute an additional $20M to the revenue stream that goes directly to player salaries (in effect, increasing the salary cap.) Would that work?

ownership would never agree to that it would be doa.

I disagree. If a team could gain cap space dollar for dollar, and stay out of the aprons by doing so, why would they object to that?

bc as stated your marginal taxation requirement of adding $20m into the “player pool” for every $20m in ghost money could only correct the underlying issue by implicitly increasing the actual player share of bri above the explicit 51% cba rev share. the owners have made it clear they will never accept an implicit rev share change through any sort of mechanism like this.

But I am specifically saying that this particular tax not count as bri, but still go to players. There are clever ways of doing it…such as divvying it up among all players in a “leveled senior vet’s minimum” that doesn’t impact the cap.

zman this was my original point. if you take new owner money and give it to the players but not semantically or legally count it as a contribution toward their share of bri, this is implicitly increasing the players’ actual share of the revenue pool. this is the one thing the owners (and players as well, reciprocally) have steadfastly refused to consider. if you want a cba that sends more dollars as a percent of revenue to one side or the other you need to explicitly change bri, and that is also very hard to do.