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Authored by Alexander Michaels - 5th September, 2008 - 1:02 pm
The NBA has a problem: its talent pool is being depleted as more and more NBA players decide to flee the United States for bigger paychecks overseas.
In this offseason alone, Josh Childress, Juan Carlos Navarro, Gordan Giricek, and others have spurned offers from NBA clubs, choosing instead to take more lucrative deals from teams in places like Greece, Russia, and Turkey.
NBA executives have responded with shrugs, dismissing this exodus as a passing issue that doesn’t pose a realistic threat to the NBA’s status as the premier basketball league in the world. And they’re probably right – at $3.6 billion, the NBA’s revenues dwarf those of the Euroleague, so as soon as NBA clubs begin to feel threatened by their overseas counterparts, they’ll look to draw upon all that money to make sure that the league retains its preeminence.
Of course, when it comes to spending money on players, there’s a huge roadblock standing in the teams’ way – the CBA. With its combination of a soft cap, the luxury tax, scaled rookie contracts, and salary-matching requirements in trades, the CBA makes it very hard for teams to buy the players they want.
According to forbes.com, the Knicks’ franchise is now worth over $600 million, but the team’s big offseason acquisition was (drum roll…) Chris Duhon. In fact, the Knicks appear to have spent most of their time this offseason trying to shed large contracts with an eye toward the 2010 free agent class. The reason, of course, is the CBA.
This is not to say that the CBA is without its benefits. After all, it’s enabled everyone at RealGM to spend countless hours fiddling with the trade checker to figure out how our teams could acquire KG or Pau Gasol. And perhaps more importantly, it creates a competitive balance in the league from which all the teams ultimately benefit.
So when Josh Smith re-signed with the Hawks this summer while the Knicks’ hands were tied, David Stern could say to Knicks' owner James Dolan, “it’s OK – maintaining a competitive distribution of talent throughout the league is good for all of us in the long run.”
The problem is that that argument loses all of its force when, instead of re-signing with the Hawks, a player like Josh Childress decides to play in Greece next year.
How do you think the Bulls organization felt when Nenad Krstic signed with Triumph Moscow? According to reports, John Paxson wanted to sign Krstic but didn’t have the cap space, so he tried to work a sign-and-trade. When that didn’t pan out, Krstic left the NBA entirely. It’s one thing for big-market clubs to lose players to other NBA teams for the sake of the league’s competitive balance; it’s something else entirely when the NBA essentially throws talent down the drain.
I don’t want to overstate the extent to which the NBA is losing out on quality players, so here’s a brief account of former NBA players who signed contracts with European clubs this summer. The list includes, among others, Carlos Arroyo, Earl Boykins, Childress, Delfino, Dan Dickau, Giricek, Krstic, Bostjian Nachbar, Navarro, and Jannero Pargo. Admittedly, none of these guys are all-stars.
Furthermore, almost all of them have signed contracts that allow them to return to the NBA without having to pay prohibitive buyout sums, so we could easily see many of them return in the next year or two. But the point is that all of them are capable of being productive members of NBA squads. Here are how some of these players measure up under RealGM’s FIC rankings:
- Childress: 80th (just above Ron Artest, Rip Hamilton, and Grant Hill)
- Delfino: 133rd (sandwiched between Linas Kleiza and Charlie Villanueva)
- Navarro: 160th (just above J.R. Smith and T.J. Ford)
- Nachbar: 193rd (just above Anderson Varejao, Yi Jianlian, and Jermaine O’Neal)
It’s hard to argue that these players couldn’t help an NBA team this coming season, and that’s exactly what the big-market teams are going to stress at the next owners’ meeting. Now that foreign teams can afford to throw enough dollars (or Euros, as the case may be) at players to lure them away from the NBA, the CBA is keeping talented players out of the league. When questioned about the recent outflow of talent, NBA executive Joel Litvin downplayed the possibility that the quality of talent in the NBA would suffer, but quickly noted that the league would “deal with” the problem if it continued to grow. “Dealing with” the problem means that, when it comes time to negotiate the next CBA, we’ll see a drastic relaxation of salary restrictions like the cap, luxury tax, and max-level contracts. And at the end of the day, the players will be taking home a much larger chunk of league revenues.
Of course, this might just be the tip of the iceberg. If European teams continue to become more popular while being able to offer players favorable exchange rates and low income taxes, the NBA might be facing more than a simple readjustment of the CBA’s salary restrictions. |
