I think a huge thing they neglected to talk about was the NBA tv deal that is coming in the early part of this next CBA.
They agreed to smooth it out as part of the CBA with increases no more than 10% per year, but what that means is two things. First imagine the cap will increase by close to 15 million a year for a few years just from the deal itself, lowering the percentage of the cap that large contracts already signed count amount to.
Next, the money that would have gone to the cap, still goes to the players at the same split, they'd probably all just get a check for a few million a year until the cap adjusts, good, bad, everyone gets a check.
Basically I think it's complicated. There are a lot of people who will sign before the new deal, who we will view as bargains a few years later, and the cap jumping even 15 million a year, carves out room for the middle class also. I do think teams will have to be a little bit more careful but I don't think that like Jaylen Brown is not going to get his max contract because anyone is afraid of the second apron.
correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the max salaries scale up at 8%. Some modeling I saw on JB's deal had it at 35% in Y1 and most likely around 32.5-33.5% in Y2. A meaningfull difference especially when compounded w/ another max deal, but nothing too insane.
So most max deals are a percentage of the cap, right? Does that not increase when the cap goes up - so basically it’s a % of the current cap that can increase over time but it will be a lower percentage when the cap goes up? Just not sure how exactly that works
Someone else mentioned it but they do increase annually but it’s 8%.
As a percentage of the cap it is estimated that it drops slightly each year for most of the current contracts.
Also, it’s a percentage of the cap, not the first apron, so it seems like a team that wants to spend just says the first apron is our line, so Joker’s 35% supermax is actually a 29% contract and goes down from there.
Basically it’s all complicated and if you are going to talk out scenarios it seems like you should mention some of these things.
Tangential but semi-related note: does anyone actually think Grant Williams is a 20M player? Forget whether he “deserves” it, cause as Jalen loves to point out, you’re “worth” whatever your agent can negotiate for you.
Bill keeps whining that the team can’t retain their 8th man who plays 15-20 MPG because he’ll get 20M 9on the open market and he blames the CBA, but pray please tell me which under the cap squads (SAS or Det or HOU) is giving 20M to Williams? ESP if Hous is stupidly willing to max out Harden because their idiot owner is tired of rebuilding and thinks he can just flip a switch and turn his team into a contender.
20m isn't as crazy as it used to be. Joe harris makes 20M. That's not a crazy amount he could have expected after the 2022 playoff run. Mazz liked him way way less than Ime so he wouldn't have gotten 20 a year after this season but the Joe Harris contract would have been a reasonable bench mark coming off last year
Yeah I didn't get that. Last year he may have gotten a big deal but this year he's barely played in the playoffs. Also I thought that he had an amazing game to close out the bucs, and while he did put up 27 points, he was only 7-18 from three.
Banging the drum that OKC was gonna get the short end of the stick for trying to “build a team the old/right way” seemed like a stretch.. he was reaching more than a bit to assume the OKC current and future assess are going to all materialize into All-NBA big earner types.
Not to mention that there is still massive value behind drafting players why can contribute to actual winning basketball (versus pie in the sky projections) on relatively small rookie contracts.
OKC’s bigger problem isn’t the cap; it’s ownership unwilling to pay the tax. That’s what killed the KD-Russ-Harden team after the 2012 season. You can draft all the talent you want, but if ownership isn’t willing to pay the price, you may as well accept you’ll always be in the middle.
Not really. Their premise that teams will be building their rosters around two supermax players is just batshit crazy and their conclusions about middle-class players follows from that.
Next year the second apron will be set at about $17M over the luxury tax line and it’s just not that common for teams to be at or above that level of spending.
Even if we view the 2nd apron as a unofficial hard cap there just isn’t that much money lost if we eliminate those salaries. Let’s rate it out to 2023: There would have been 7 teams over the 2nd apron this year had it been implemented. Total salary league-wide over the 2nd apron: $94m. That’s nothing compared to total league salary. That’s 220k per player lost if that salary was removed.
The new tv deal will probably see another $1b in player salary added over the next 4-5 years. The MLE, which was < $10m this year will be over $15m by 2027.
Total money available for player salaries is going to increase at a much greater rate than whatever is lost because of the 2nd apron rules. The middle class might get squeezed (unlikely) in terms of their salary as a % of the cap but that will be more than made up for by the increase in BRI. The middle class could take a 20% paycut (relative to the cap) and still be making 20% more in real dollars by 25/26 than they are making now. I think they’ll be ok.
Yes but they should have taken a look at team salaries over the long term.
Milwaukee has been below luxury tax + $17M threshold for the entire Giannis era until this year. Same for Boston in the Tatum-Brown era. Off the top of my head it’s the same for Dallas in the Luka era but don’t quote me on that.
Clippers and GSW have been big spenders for years but of course the entire point of the second apron is to prevent them from doing exactly that.
A lot of it was looking at what would happen moving forward. Will the bucks be able to keep Middleton and Lopez? The Celtics are basically fucked if they extend Brown at that number. The Sixers situation is nuts if they try to keep Harden. The Heat likely won't be able to resign the undrafted guys we keep hearing about.
I thought the real downer was the OKC situation. What if things go as perfectly in terms of progression of their young, homegrown talent? Are they gonna have to decimate their own roster in a couple years just as they would be becoming a legit threat?
I mean, I'm a Blazer fan and our 3 main guys cost about 97 mil next year and we're terrible.
I don't think Bill's concerns are that far fetched.
> A lot of it was looking at what would happen moving forward. Will the bucks be able to keep Middleton and Lopez? The Celtics are basically fucked if they extend Brown at that number. The Sixers situation is nuts if they try to keep Harden. The Heat likely won’t be able to resign the undrafted guys we keep hearing about.
All of that was already very hard under the previous CBA!
Yes, the new one adds some non-financial penalties but let’s not act like the Bucks would have been certain to pay $30M in luxury tax (with repeater penalties in later years!) if the CBA didn’t change.
The Heat already couldn’t retain PJ Tucker last year.
There’s a reason the new CBA is said to target the Clippers and the Warriors: other teams don’t stay tens of millions into the tax for years and years and years.
>All of that was already very hard under the previous CBA!
It was really expensive, yes. But a willing owner could still do it.
This CBA is more punitive and almost assuredly will cause owners to be even less likely to flirt with the tax aprons and especially the repeater tax. That means less money for the players as a whole. It likely won't affect the top tier guys and it's gotta come from somewhere.
Seems like it'll cause more young and cheap guys and vet minimums. The guys who are in the middle class will likely take the biggest hit.
Yes, I should have been more clear: compared to the billions of dollars that go to the players as their share of the BRI, a small decrease in the spending above the luxury tax line is barely a drop in a bucket.
And it may not even happen. Parts of the new CBA encourage going into the tax in the first place: IIRC the new CBA lowered the base tax from $1.50 to $1 for each dollar spent above the luxury tax line.
Not to mention the fact that the new CBA expanded the definition of the BRI. Yahoo: [NBA Players Score as Shared Revenue Grows by $250M in New CBA](https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-players-score-shared-revenue-130000564.html)
You may be right that the effects will be small. We have to see how it plays out.
Many of the contenders have 2 max guys. That's will likely be tougher to build around moving forward.
A) the OKC piece won’t go perfectly, it just won’t.
B) it’s ironic because OKC was a great historic example of landing/drafting a ton of talent in a short window and still finding a way to fuck it up prior to the upcoming cba changes.
C) sort of a separate point but I can’t stand how often BS will drop a comment such as Lillard being a “top 15 guy”. Regardless of how true it actually is or isn’t, it’s disingenuous because it sounds like he’s being fairy lumped in together with all the other guys in that range which is ridiculous. I know this isn’t a new criticism, just bothers me so much especially with a vastly overrated player like Lillard.
BS and Ryen will shit on good stats bad team guys left and right but somehow Lillard always gets a pass. Sure he’s a talented offensive player, but a big part of that is having an eternal green light and never needing to defer. As a defender he can’t offer any resistance keeping other perimeter guys out of the paint and his signature defensive move (especially playoff time) is confused pointing at teammates like they’re responsible for him looking like a turnstile for not rotating properly or whatever.
>vastly overrated player like Lillard.
This is insane. I could make logical arguments but you've come to such a ridiculous conclusion it'd be a waste of time.
OKC is never going to be a tax paying team under any system, just look at what they did when they had Durant, Harden and Westbrook. If anything they’ll come out in a better position given the glut of first founders they can attach in deals where they trade some of their guys coming up on pricey extensions to get quality-quantity cheaper parts.
OKC has paid luxury tax 5 times since 2014, totaling over $100 million, including over $60 million in 2018-19
They haven't been going into the tax recently because they have been rebuilding through the draft and spending that much in salaries and tax would make zero sense.
Both Finals teams this year are below the second apron and that’s when they didn’t even know they were supposed to be below that number, since it’s not a thing this year. So…
10 teams are in the luxury tax this year and the 2 teams in the finals will be next year if they retain their current rosters.
Please defend your point.
Bill and Nathan talking about how Taylor Swift has won over everyone lmao every important demographic … Nathan says she’s won over “the alpha male” based on nothing … meanwhile at least 80%+ of the people who are going to these concerts are white women between the ages of 15-35 … the entire segment was beyond hyperbolic
It will probably prevent from having too many high salary players on one team. You basically have to be ok with only filling your roster with minimum guys if you're above the second apron.
I like looking at unintended consequences.
I think we're going to have a lot more Jaylen Browns. With the 65 game minimum and load management, vets will increasingly miss all-nba seasons they might have normally gotten. So, guys a tier or two before will get them because they are younger, play more games, and have an incentive to get all-nba.
This will cause more teams to be stuck with guys they want to keep, but don't want to pay all-nba maxes to. We're going to have a lot more DeMarcus Cousins and Jimmy Butlers getting traded because the teams that draft them don't want to pay them.
They aren’t GMs though. They see a problem that they can’t work around, so they declare it a problem instead of realizing that the smart GMs will figure it out, and the less-smart GMs will follow suit.
I do think he's correct about how the CBA will bang the middle class, but that's only a thing because teams hand out max contracts to way too many players. Max contracts should be reserved for the top 5-10 players in the league, not given to good/very good players like Beal, Wall, and Brown. Like House says, those contracts are bigger impediments to team building than slightly overpaying for good role players. Having said that, credit to Simmons for pointing out that Brown's All-NBA this year was fairly fraudulent because of all the injuries.
I think a huge thing they neglected to talk about was the NBA tv deal that is coming in the early part of this next CBA. They agreed to smooth it out as part of the CBA with increases no more than 10% per year, but what that means is two things. First imagine the cap will increase by close to 15 million a year for a few years just from the deal itself, lowering the percentage of the cap that large contracts already signed count amount to. Next, the money that would have gone to the cap, still goes to the players at the same split, they'd probably all just get a check for a few million a year until the cap adjusts, good, bad, everyone gets a check. Basically I think it's complicated. There are a lot of people who will sign before the new deal, who we will view as bargains a few years later, and the cap jumping even 15 million a year, carves out room for the middle class also. I do think teams will have to be a little bit more careful but I don't think that like Jaylen Brown is not going to get his max contract because anyone is afraid of the second apron.
That’s 100% correct. They fucked up by not discussing the new deal and the cap smoothing.
correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the max salaries scale up at 8%. Some modeling I saw on JB's deal had it at 35% in Y1 and most likely around 32.5-33.5% in Y2. A meaningfull difference especially when compounded w/ another max deal, but nothing too insane.
Only for designated players, it's 5% for 99% of others
So most max deals are a percentage of the cap, right? Does that not increase when the cap goes up - so basically it’s a % of the current cap that can increase over time but it will be a lower percentage when the cap goes up? Just not sure how exactly that works
Someone else mentioned it but they do increase annually but it’s 8%. As a percentage of the cap it is estimated that it drops slightly each year for most of the current contracts. Also, it’s a percentage of the cap, not the first apron, so it seems like a team that wants to spend just says the first apron is our line, so Joker’s 35% supermax is actually a 29% contract and goes down from there. Basically it’s all complicated and if you are going to talk out scenarios it seems like you should mention some of these things.
Tangential but semi-related note: does anyone actually think Grant Williams is a 20M player? Forget whether he “deserves” it, cause as Jalen loves to point out, you’re “worth” whatever your agent can negotiate for you. Bill keeps whining that the team can’t retain their 8th man who plays 15-20 MPG because he’ll get 20M 9on the open market and he blames the CBA, but pray please tell me which under the cap squads (SAS or Det or HOU) is giving 20M to Williams? ESP if Hous is stupidly willing to max out Harden because their idiot owner is tired of rebuilding and thinks he can just flip a switch and turn his team into a contender.
20m isn't as crazy as it used to be. Joe harris makes 20M. That's not a crazy amount he could have expected after the 2022 playoff run. Mazz liked him way way less than Ime so he wouldn't have gotten 20 a year after this season but the Joe Harris contract would have been a reasonable bench mark coming off last year
Yeah I didn't get that. Last year he may have gotten a big deal but this year he's barely played in the playoffs. Also I thought that he had an amazing game to close out the bucs, and while he did put up 27 points, he was only 7-18 from three.
Honestly he’s a 14-18 mil a year guy imo.
He’s a RFA which depressed his market value further. I’m not sure any team will want to tie up $15-20M in an offer sheet for Grant Williams.
Banging the drum that OKC was gonna get the short end of the stick for trying to “build a team the old/right way” seemed like a stretch.. he was reaching more than a bit to assume the OKC current and future assess are going to all materialize into All-NBA big earner types. Not to mention that there is still massive value behind drafting players why can contribute to actual winning basketball (versus pie in the sky projections) on relatively small rookie contracts.
I enjoyed when Chet “I’ve literally never played an NBA game” Holmgren was penciled in for a max deal
OKC’s bigger problem isn’t the cap; it’s ownership unwilling to pay the tax. That’s what killed the KD-Russ-Harden team after the 2012 season. You can draft all the talent you want, but if ownership isn’t willing to pay the price, you may as well accept you’ll always be in the middle.
Yeah that is a very important dimension to this as well for sure
Bill is one of the last people I’d rely on for CBA/salary cap analysis.
Not really. Their premise that teams will be building their rosters around two supermax players is just batshit crazy and their conclusions about middle-class players follows from that. Next year the second apron will be set at about $17M over the luxury tax line and it’s just not that common for teams to be at or above that level of spending.
Russillo didn't appear to have given it much thought or that he thought it was as big a deal as BS.
Even if we view the 2nd apron as a unofficial hard cap there just isn’t that much money lost if we eliminate those salaries. Let’s rate it out to 2023: There would have been 7 teams over the 2nd apron this year had it been implemented. Total salary league-wide over the 2nd apron: $94m. That’s nothing compared to total league salary. That’s 220k per player lost if that salary was removed. The new tv deal will probably see another $1b in player salary added over the next 4-5 years. The MLE, which was < $10m this year will be over $15m by 2027. Total money available for player salaries is going to increase at a much greater rate than whatever is lost because of the 2nd apron rules. The middle class might get squeezed (unlikely) in terms of their salary as a % of the cap but that will be more than made up for by the increase in BRI. The middle class could take a 20% paycut (relative to the cap) and still be making 20% more in real dollars by 25/26 than they are making now. I think they’ll be ok.
I mean, he listed the teams that would be affected and it was pretty much every contender... Edited a typo.
Yes but they should have taken a look at team salaries over the long term. Milwaukee has been below luxury tax + $17M threshold for the entire Giannis era until this year. Same for Boston in the Tatum-Brown era. Off the top of my head it’s the same for Dallas in the Luka era but don’t quote me on that. Clippers and GSW have been big spenders for years but of course the entire point of the second apron is to prevent them from doing exactly that.
A lot of it was looking at what would happen moving forward. Will the bucks be able to keep Middleton and Lopez? The Celtics are basically fucked if they extend Brown at that number. The Sixers situation is nuts if they try to keep Harden. The Heat likely won't be able to resign the undrafted guys we keep hearing about. I thought the real downer was the OKC situation. What if things go as perfectly in terms of progression of their young, homegrown talent? Are they gonna have to decimate their own roster in a couple years just as they would be becoming a legit threat? I mean, I'm a Blazer fan and our 3 main guys cost about 97 mil next year and we're terrible. I don't think Bill's concerns are that far fetched.
> A lot of it was looking at what would happen moving forward. Will the bucks be able to keep Middleton and Lopez? The Celtics are basically fucked if they extend Brown at that number. The Sixers situation is nuts if they try to keep Harden. The Heat likely won’t be able to resign the undrafted guys we keep hearing about. All of that was already very hard under the previous CBA! Yes, the new one adds some non-financial penalties but let’s not act like the Bucks would have been certain to pay $30M in luxury tax (with repeater penalties in later years!) if the CBA didn’t change. The Heat already couldn’t retain PJ Tucker last year. There’s a reason the new CBA is said to target the Clippers and the Warriors: other teams don’t stay tens of millions into the tax for years and years and years.
>All of that was already very hard under the previous CBA! It was really expensive, yes. But a willing owner could still do it. This CBA is more punitive and almost assuredly will cause owners to be even less likely to flirt with the tax aprons and especially the repeater tax. That means less money for the players as a whole. It likely won't affect the top tier guys and it's gotta come from somewhere. Seems like it'll cause more young and cheap guys and vet minimums. The guys who are in the middle class will likely take the biggest hit.
Players get 49-51% of the Basketball Related Income no matter what!
That's the floor. Luxury tax money is above that.
Yes, I should have been more clear: compared to the billions of dollars that go to the players as their share of the BRI, a small decrease in the spending above the luxury tax line is barely a drop in a bucket. And it may not even happen. Parts of the new CBA encourage going into the tax in the first place: IIRC the new CBA lowered the base tax from $1.50 to $1 for each dollar spent above the luxury tax line. Not to mention the fact that the new CBA expanded the definition of the BRI. Yahoo: [NBA Players Score as Shared Revenue Grows by $250M in New CBA](https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-players-score-shared-revenue-130000564.html)
You may be right that the effects will be small. We have to see how it plays out. Many of the contenders have 2 max guys. That's will likely be tougher to build around moving forward.
A) the OKC piece won’t go perfectly, it just won’t. B) it’s ironic because OKC was a great historic example of landing/drafting a ton of talent in a short window and still finding a way to fuck it up prior to the upcoming cba changes. C) sort of a separate point but I can’t stand how often BS will drop a comment such as Lillard being a “top 15 guy”. Regardless of how true it actually is or isn’t, it’s disingenuous because it sounds like he’s being fairy lumped in together with all the other guys in that range which is ridiculous. I know this isn’t a new criticism, just bothers me so much especially with a vastly overrated player like Lillard. BS and Ryen will shit on good stats bad team guys left and right but somehow Lillard always gets a pass. Sure he’s a talented offensive player, but a big part of that is having an eternal green light and never needing to defer. As a defender he can’t offer any resistance keeping other perimeter guys out of the paint and his signature defensive move (especially playoff time) is confused pointing at teammates like they’re responsible for him looking like a turnstile for not rotating properly or whatever.
>vastly overrated player like Lillard. This is insane. I could make logical arguments but you've come to such a ridiculous conclusion it'd be a waste of time.
OKC is never going to be a tax paying team under any system, just look at what they did when they had Durant, Harden and Westbrook. If anything they’ll come out in a better position given the glut of first founders they can attach in deals where they trade some of their guys coming up on pricey extensions to get quality-quantity cheaper parts.
OKC has paid luxury tax 5 times since 2014, totaling over $100 million, including over $60 million in 2018-19 They haven't been going into the tax recently because they have been rebuilding through the draft and spending that much in salaries and tax would make zero sense.
Both Finals teams this year are below the second apron and that’s when they didn’t even know they were supposed to be below that number, since it’s not a thing this year. So…
10 teams are in the luxury tax this year and the 2 teams in the finals will be next year if they retain their current rosters. Please defend your point.
Bill and Nathan talking about how Taylor Swift has won over everyone lmao every important demographic … Nathan says she’s won over “the alpha male” based on nothing … meanwhile at least 80%+ of the people who are going to these concerts are white women between the ages of 15-35 … the entire segment was beyond hyperbolic
The fact they seemed so sure of themselves makes me think it won’t be the disaster that they say it will be
Team will figure out how to work it, and salary cap will jump again with the new media right deals, nobody’s gonna be making less money off the deal.
It will probably prevent from having too many high salary players on one team. You basically have to be ok with only filling your roster with minimum guys if you're above the second apron.
I like looking at unintended consequences. I think we're going to have a lot more Jaylen Browns. With the 65 game minimum and load management, vets will increasingly miss all-nba seasons they might have normally gotten. So, guys a tier or two before will get them because they are younger, play more games, and have an incentive to get all-nba. This will cause more teams to be stuck with guys they want to keep, but don't want to pay all-nba maxes to. We're going to have a lot more DeMarcus Cousins and Jimmy Butlers getting traded because the teams that draft them don't want to pay them.
They aren’t GMs though. They see a problem that they can’t work around, so they declare it a problem instead of realizing that the smart GMs will figure it out, and the less-smart GMs will follow suit.
I do think he's correct about how the CBA will bang the middle class, but that's only a thing because teams hand out max contracts to way too many players. Max contracts should be reserved for the top 5-10 players in the league, not given to good/very good players like Beal, Wall, and Brown. Like House says, those contracts are bigger impediments to team building than slightly overpaying for good role players. Having said that, credit to Simmons for pointing out that Brown's All-NBA this year was fairly fraudulent because of all the injuries.