Victor Wembanyama choosing to take a discount and leave roughly $50 million on the table in his latest contract to help the Spurs build and maintain a championship team is exactly what is wrong with the system in the eyes of David Kelly, the new executive director of the NBPA (the players' union).
"Our position would be that the system should not require a player to carry all that burden," Kelly said during his introductory press conference last week. "It should not put a player in a position where he has to carry the burden in order to keep a team together. A system that does that, we have a problem."
Kevin Love was more direct, saying the second apron has essentially become a hard cap. He referenced how Brad Stevens and Boston traded away Jaylen Brown because he felt he couldn't have two supermax players together and build out a championship roster, or how the tax is already impacting decisions for the Thunder and Spurs.
"I'll tell you, selfishly, what's really f****** stupid, these aprons are f****** with the game," Love said in an appearance on The Old Man and the Three podcast. "That's on our side, [the owners] know exactly who they are that did it…
"You're telling me Oklahoma City can't keep those three guys together because of these aprons? That's bulls***. You're telling me Sam Presti, the greatest, all the things that he's done, is handcuffed because of these f****** aprons?"
To NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the system is working as designed.
"It's certainly not an unintended consequence," Adam Silver said when speaking to the media after the NBA Board of Governors meeting in Las Vegas on Tuesday. "When you have a salary system in place as we do, every general manager is going to need to make mixed basketball and business decisions. Frankly, they make them regardless of whether you have a cap. You see that in other sports. People manage budgets. People recognize that you can't — at some point, you can't have unlimited resources, whether it's for a team or any business....
"The purpose of the system is ultimately to create competition throughout the league, and from that standpoint, I think the system is working incredibly well. The goal isn't necessarily to have a different champion every year, but we've had eight different champions over the last eight years. As I've said previously, one of the things we were hoping to accomplish in this latest collective bargaining agreement was to dispel this notion that only certain markets were in a position to truly compete. We just saw a Finals between, essentially, the largest market in the league in New York and one of the smallest markets in San Antonio."
What the owners and Silver wanted was parity — and they got it, or at least closer to it than the league saw before. Fans may hate that the Thunder and Spurs, at the start of potential dynastic runs and an elite rivalry, are already having to get players to take discounts — OKC's Chet Holmgren took the exact same discount Wembanyama did — and think about breaking up their star trios, but the owners love that. If Boston feels it has to trade Brown, he just goes to another team and makes them better in the 30,000-foot view of the league.
There is a push in some circles to allow teams that draft and develop a max player — a guy who stays with his team — to get a salary cap discount so they can build around their homegrown star. For example, in Wembanyama's case, he could put the Rose Rule escalator in his contract and get 30% of the salary cap in his next deal (about an extra $10 million a year), but on the official team books, it would only count as 25%. That could help a team like Boston keep Brown and build around him (because both Brown and Jayson Tatum would qualify). It's something Warriors owner Joe Lacob brought up when he had Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green together (it was a selfish proposition on Lacob's part, but that doesn't mean it was wrong).
All of that will be part of the next CBA negotiations, but the owners like this current system. They wanted a hard cap, instead the owners got a second apron that is essentially the same thing (only one team was over it last season, Cleveland, and only one is now, Oklahoma City, and it may make a move to get below that number). If the players want to change it, what are they willing to give up in the next CBA negotiations?
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