The NBA Salary Cap Should Be A Hard Cap
There will always be arguments and debates about whether Major League Baseball should instill a salary cap. The NFL has a hard cap, designed for parity, and it's the most profitable league in the United States. The NBA lands somewhere between those organizations, with their soft salary cap.
The idea was supposed to help teams keep their homegrown talent, rather than lose it to free agency. It's been used and abused so hard by players and front offices, that it no longer even resembles what it was supposed to be. New aprons have been instituted to curtail spending, but one NBA executive told The Athletic's Jon Krawczynski that they'd like to see the NBA loosen its reigns on spending.
The NBA Salary Cap Makes No Sense
To understand the current lunacy regarding the NBA salary cap, it's important to understand Bird Rights. Once upon a time, the NBA thought it would be best to allow teams to go over the cap to re-sign players on its current roster. They were not able to sign players over the cap who were from other teams (in free agency).
This was so teams would not be penalized for drafting and developing players successfully. In another effort to keep players on the teams who made them, max contracts could be signed with a player's current team, but if the player chose to leave that team for greener pastures, they would get fewer guaranteed years and less money.
Players, agents, and front offices desperate to win exploited these loopholes, not to protect the team, but to make everyone rich. Players would sign lucrative, long-term, max contracts with one team, just to be immediately traded to another team. Back-door free agency ruined parity and level playing fields.
The 2024-25 NBA Salary Cap is currently a little over $140 million. There are 30 teams in the league, and on opening night, 29 of them will be over the cap (Detroit Pistons $130 million). What is the point in having a cap, if every team is allowed to go over it?
The NBA Needs A Hard Salary Cap
The league currently has aprons that are supposed to prevent overspending, but they won't work. A team in apron one (over $178 million cap) will be limited on free agents they can sign and players they can trade. Teams that fall into apron two (over $189 million), of which there are currently nine, are in for harsher restrictions.
The total sum of all the payrolls in the NBA is $5.41 billion. If that amount is divided by 30 teams, the league could have a hard cap of $180 million. There would still be 14 teams over the cap, but they would be required to trade or cut those salaries to get under by 2026. The league would benefit by more parity, and fewer "super teams".
Instead of a team like Phoenix having three super-max players, they would only be able to afford one of them, two at the most, and the talent around the league would be more equally divided. It will never happen though. Unlike the NFL owners who want to keep as much league revenue for themselves as possible, NBA owners enjoy giving away money. If it were up to them, there would be no salary cap, just like Major League Baseball.