Andre Drummond to the Los Angeles Lakers. Blake Griffin to the Brooklyn Nets. LaMarcus Aldridge also to the Nets.
All were acquired after agreeing to contract buyouts. All were signed to minimum deals by their new teams — and the championship contenders became even better, and at a discount.
And that appears to be a concern for the league’s small-market teams, as relayed by Howard Beck of Sports Illustrated.
“It’s a definite concern,” a small-market executive told Beck. “Without a doubt, players that are entering the buyout market will only be looking at contending teams. And most of the time, historically, their preference has been to go to the teams in the bigger markets. … And it gives teams an opportunity to sit back and add players on minimum deals that they normally wouldn’t be able to acquire.”
The modern-day NBA definitely has its flaws, and the biggest may be that the very best players only want to play together. For that, they really can’t be blamed. There seems to be a lot of shoddy management in the NBA theses days, with multiple franchises so willing to lose and “build for the future,” as they would say.
It’s gotten to the point where the league really only needs seven or eight teams. Everyone else has sold the idea of playing the lottery and each season being a “process.”
But as one former NBA coach told FortyEightMinutes, “How about actually winning some games? Literally anyone can say they are going to be good in five years.”
Anyway, Beck’s article is focused on how the buyout market impacts the smaller markets — but also points out how it’s bad for business overall, particularly from a competition standpoint.
“This isn’t merely the gripe of small-market teams, or even a matter of opinion; the Buyout Market directly (and objectively) undermines the NBA’s entire complex system of salary caps and luxury taxes,” Beck wrote. “The whole point of all these rules is to limit how much elite talent a team can collect—and to force teams to make trade-offs and hard choices.”
You can expect the NBA to investigate how it can this rule. When there seems to be an issue, or even perception of an issue, commissioner Adam Silver has typically taken steps to address it.
And this isn’t a player issue. The players are just playing by the rules. This is a league and team issue that only the league and its teams can fix.
