Reflections in the wake of the trade deadline
The NBA trade deadline is officially in the rearview mirror. We here at Brew Hoop did our best to keep you up to date with the ins and outs of everything that happened and could have happened.
Part of that coverage is on-court analysis, like the fit of potential trade candidates. But part of that coverage—and an increasing part—is off-court analysis, primarily in terms of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that governs the NBA: the trade candidate articles report deals that satisfy the CBA, our homepage features this excellent “one-stop shop for all your salary sheet questions,” and so on.
A broadside against this outsized role of economics in the NBA recently graced the hallowed pages of The Atlantic. You can read it here, although there will likely be a paywall (my forthcoming arguments against the article notwithstanding, they are worthy of your support, especially after bolstering their roster of journalists after WaPo ironically died in darkness).
The article starts on solid ground. As per its title, “economists took over the NBA.” I agree! See: the previously linked one-stop shop. From there, the article makes two primary arguments. The honeymoon didn’t last; I disagree with both.
Let’s start with the first: “NBA fandom has become strangely complicated.” It continues:
Closely following the sport now requires fans to have a passing knowledge of a 676-page labor agreement, an expansive vocabulary of business jargon, and a deep memory bank of contractual concepts. You can still enjoy the league passively, happily tuning in to big games and catching up on highlights through social media. But to love the NBA these days is to be drawn into a world where such simplicities, upon which sports fandom was founded, have begun to disappear.
The author even begins the final paragraph with “sports fans seeking fewer complications in their life may choose to seek more easily digestible fun elsewhere.” An example of such fun? The Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight. WOOF.
I can see where they are coming from. There is a reason that Brew Hoop covers these complications: they’re important! They shape who is on the court for the Bucks and thus shape the sport.
Yet, there is a reason that our managing editor-slash-BO$$MAN Van Fayaz refers to himself as a “cap sicko” (I prefer). Although there is a non-negligible chance that we’re all just sickos, I’ll speak for myself and dodge that label.
Rather, I identify as an econo-free fan. Am I aware that something called an MLE exists? You betcha. Could I tell you literally anything about it? Not really. I know more about Emily Blunt.
But does that mean that I “enjoy the league passively, happily tuning in to big games and catching up on highlights through social media?” No! I watch almost all of the games and write weird articles like this. The economics of basketball are but one tentacle of the oozing octopus we call the NBA, and I am more attached to the suction cups of other tentacles (like in-game entertainment).
And as it happens, some of those tentacles were roped into the article’s second argument: that economic attempts for parity reduce the league’s appeal by limiting successful (and potentially small-market) teams. In the author’s words, “winning teams with marketable stars are what captures the public’s imagination, yet the league is unintentionally kneecapping successful, and thus expensive, teams.”
That’s why the NFL, with its salary cap, has no successful teams or marketable stars. And why my imagination has been captured by the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are able to do so much with so little.
To be clear, a salary cap does not preclude greatness, and greatness bought is less inspirational than greatness earned. But there’s a catch: what if that backfires against small-market teams like ours?
The Minnesota Timberwolves, coming off their best season in decades, traded Karl-Anthony Towns—a homegrown star they’d signed to a supermax in 2022—because his contract was suddenly going to become onerously expensive. The Dallas Mavericks recently shocked the sporting world by trading Luka Dončić, widely agreed to be one of the best young players the NBA has ever seen, in large part because of a belief that his poor conditioning made an impending $345 million contract extension untenable for the franchise.
Later in the article, the author laments that “it’s hard to stomach the notion that a player such as the Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards, one of basketball’s brightest young players, must stand by and watch his team be made worse purely for preemptive financial reasons.”
No, it’s not! The Timberwolves aren’t being singled out. All teams—the Bucks included!—are being “made worse purely for preemptive financial reasons”…
…or at least they would be, were it not for the fact that the NBA, various apron shenanigans notwithstanding, doesn’t really have a salary cap. This means that the Knicks acquired KAT in part because they (quoting The Atlantic piece linked above) “have a wealthy owner apparently willing to pay a big bill over multiple seasons.” Not everyone can be great, but it’s easier for teams with deep-pocketed owners (which, to an extent, includes the Bucks!), and it’s harder for teams with owners more focused on spending money off the court than on the court.
I know that true parity can never exist. As strong as a case that Giannis makes, players will find Miami preferable to Milwaukee until the former is underwater (and maybe not even then). But all the machinations of the CBA that purport to support parity by keeping small-market teams on par with the coastal elites—supermax extensions, Bird rights, etc.—are peanuts to having an actual (and, for the players’ union’s sake, big and ever-increasing) salary cap.
So I guess I’m not an econo-free fan after all. On the plane of the NBA, I fly Basic Econo-free, where the tradeoff of no legroom is knowing that none of the other passengers have any legroom either. The MLB and its first-class passengers have lost me because of economics. The NBA hasn’t done the same, but it could keep me in my seat for good because of parity.