11/30/11

NBA CBA Makes Me Wonder

I was pondering some of the points of the NBA's recent (tentative) CBA and thinking of how they would affect the MLB. There were a couple provisions that really interested me in terms of benefiting the current league structure. Now... whenever you compare the CBA of one league to another you are going to have the issue of comparing apples to oranges. The NBA salary cap is still soft but it's a whole lot more restrictive than the MLB salary cap. With that said one specific point made me ponder.

85% of the Salary Cap MUST Be Spent on the Payroll
(90% After 2013)


Now... this would be hard to execute in the MLB. You have some teams spending $200 Mil and some spending $30 Mil. You can't arbitrarily force the bottom paying teams to up their payroll's to $80 Mil... Or can you?

Imagine if you will that all the money from the luxury tax didn't JUST go to the bottom salaried teams. I mean we know that Pittsburgh, Minnesota and Florida have simply seen OWNER profit from the luxury tax. So what if we put a caveat that there was a MINIMUM payroll that had to be maintained to QUALIFY for luxury tax funding? Say... $60 Mil. If you are below that level the assumption is that you are making enough money of the shared TV revenue and tickets to cover your team EVEN IF you are a small market. This means the Yankees aren't paying for rich white guys to buy their wives fur coats, but that they'd ACTUALLY be paying for parity... which was the point of the luxury tax in the first place.

Thoughts?

2 comments:

Mack Ade said...

question: what is the other 15% spent on?

David Groveman said...

Smaller market teams can spend UNDER the cap to save money.