NBA dream: Less spending, more movement

Carmelo Anthony used the leverage of his pending free agency to help force the Nuggets to trade him last season. (Damian Strohmeyer/SI)

As the players meet Friday among themselves and then with a group of owners, ESPN.com’s Marc Stein reports in this must-read piece that the league has proposed several tweaks to the old soft salary-cap structure. The key bullets:

• The institution of a sliding “Supertax” that would charge teams $2 in luxury tax for every dollar over $70 million in payroll, $3 for every dollar over $75 million in payroll and $4 for every dollar for teams with payrolls above $80 million

•  Limiting Larry Bird rights — which enable teams to exceed the salary cap to re-sign their own free agents — to one player per team per season

•  Reducing the annual mid-level exception, which was valued at $5.8 million last season, to roughly $3 million annually and limiting mid-level contracts to a maximum of two or three seasons in length as opposed to the current maximum of five seasons

•  A new “Carmelo Rule” that would prevent teams — as the New York Knicks did in February with Anthony — from using a Bird exception to sign or extend a player acquired by trade unless they are acquired before July 1 of the final season of the player’s contract

•  The abolition of sign-and-trades and the bi-annual exception worth $2 million

•  Significant reductions in maximum salaries and annual raises and a 5 percent rollbacks on current contracts.

Reminder: These are some of the ideas the league has proposed as alternatives to a hard team-by-team salary cap. Whether the players can accept them is an entirely different story, and I’ve already heard they find the 4-to-1 tax ratio — and perhaps even the 3-to-1 ratio — unpalatable.

It’s easy to get lost in the potential implications of each specific proposal. Some proposals interact awkwardly with each other, and one proposal on its own could have several apparently contradictory effects. This is a web of ideas with ripple effects both known and unknown. It is complicated.

But if you step back and look at them from a distance, you can sense the ideal the league is going for: less spending and more player movement.

The “less spending” part is obvious. Taken together, these proposals amount to an attempt at legislating a hard salary cap without actually having a hard salary cap. Even the Lakers and Knicks would think twice about spending $90 million on payroll if doing so involves paying a whopping $67 million in taxes — the approximate tax the Lakers would have paid last season under the proposal Stein outlines. (Hat tip: ESPN.com’s Tom Haberstroh.)

The prohibition on sign-and-trades and the so-called Melo Rule (a complicated thing I’ll elaborate on later) would also remove a bit of money from the system in the aggregate. Without the option of a sign-and-trade, star players seeking a new home would either have to take the richer deal their incumbent team could offer or sign for less elsewhere; there’d be no in-between option allowing the player to have his cake and eat it, too. The Melo Rule would have a similar effect on players who don’t manage to get themselves traded on the accelerated Deron Williams timetable. They wouldn’t be able to hold their team hostage in a contract year, knowing they could earn max money with a new team of their choice via either a midseason sign-and-trade (what Carmelo Anthony did) or a trade-and-extend, where their new team uses Bird Rights to offer a max-level deal.

Limiting a team to one Bird Rights player per season could force teams to choose between free agents. The Grizzlies, for instance, could not have re-signed Rudy Gay, Mike Conley Jr. and Zach Randolph in one calendar year, because they used the highest form of Bird Rights on all three players. The Thunder would face a choice between using top-level Bird Rights on Serge Ibaka or James Harden, both of whom are set to enter free agency after the 2012-13 season. Oklahoma City could get around that either-or choice by extending one player a year before the other, but you can see how this would get tricky.

These proposals are all designed to cut spending and level payrolls without the introduction of an actual hard cap — something the players claim they will never accept. And at first glance, many of these proposals appear to increase a team’s control over its players in a way that might restrict player movement. The Melo Rule and the ban on sign-and-trades, for instance, could give incumbent teams a bigger edge in keeping their own stars. If you increase the gap between what the Magic can offer Dwight Howard and what a rival team can propose, perhaps you increase the chance that he stays in Orlando after next season. Make the gap big enough, and it could work like a watered-down version of the NFL’s franchise tag.

But when you consider the entire player community, it’s just as likely — maybe more likely — that these changes will increase player movement and introduce more churn into the trade and free-agency markets. The Melo Rule, combined with the ban on sign-and-trades, might move up the trade-demand timetable by one season because a player who really wants to be dealt — and bring Bird Rights to his new team — would have to begin agitating earlier. Of course, Bird Rights only apply when a team is over the cap; a team that gets itself far enough under the cap could trade for an Anthony-type player in the final year of his contract and pay that player as much as it is allowed. In theory, such a rule would have made the Kings a legitimate contender for Anthony last season.

That’s the thing: Taken together, these changes would put a premium on cap flexibility, which could increase player churn. The Melo Rule and the sign-and-trade ban present players with a choice: Stay where you are for more money or enter free agency. The more players who enter free agency, the better it is to be under the cap.

And think about the example of the Grizzlies above: If teams can use top-level Bird Rights on just one player per offseason, they are either going to have to make difficult choices between their free agents or stagger their player contracts in such a way that only one core player gets a new deal each year. And even then, they might want to use more nonguaranteed deals — or deals that are nonguaranteed in their final season or two — in order to stay lean.

Note: An important question here is which Bird Rights are involved in this proposed one-player-per-team limit. Teams under the old CBA technically had some form of Bird Rights control over each of their free agents, though the looser controls were not actually termed “Bird” rights in the collective bargaining agreement. If the one-player-per-team limit applies to a club’s entire free-agency class every season, the amount of turnover in the mid-level market could be staggering. If the limit applies only to top-level Bird deals, the impact wouldn’t be as dramatic, though it would still apply to the Memphis and Oklahoma City examples described above.

A related question would be whether the Melo Rule could have an unanticipated chilling effect on trade-deadline activity. The Grizzlies, for instance, would be banned from using Bird Rights on Shane Battier in free agency after acquiring him from the Rockets — at least if you read the Melo Rule in the broadest and strictest possible way. Ditto for the Mavericks and their re-signing of Brendan Haywood in the summer of 2010.

But now we’re stacking hypotheticals atop hypotheticals. If you squint, you can see the league’s vision: a better grip on spending, a slightly tighter hold on true franchise players and more overall churn. I think.