Fake trees, fake salary cap

The Clippers await Adam Silver's judgment. More importantly, we await learning whether the salary cap is real or not.

Good morning. It's time for something completely different. Let's basketball.

As we wait for the NBA to lay down judgment on the Clippers and Steve Ballmer or not over the Aspiration salary cap circumvention scandal, it's worth thinking about what the salary cap is for.

As a part of the league's collective bargaining agreement, players are guaranteed about 50% of the NBA's basketball-related income. That includes proceeds from media rights, attendance revenue, jersey patches, merchandise sales, in-arena advertising, sponsorship deals and almost everything else. All the salary cap does is determine how those billions of dollars in player salaries are split up by team and by player. The rules govern how players can get paid all that money, and how teams compete against each other for the opportunity to pay players. Without the rules, you'd have something more akin to Major League Baseball or the English Premier League, which tends to lead to less competitive balance as richer clubs can simply spend outspend others to hoard talent. In practice, of course, spending more doesn't always work better; strong scouting and strategic roster-building play huge roles, and lower-budget teams often embrace creative methods to compete with higher-resourced opponents. But generally, in uncapped environment, you'll see a greater gulf between the top and bottom over time.

The NBA has famously been wed to the idea of competitive balance for almost two decades now, and has instituted salary cap rules to that effect repeatedly. The league made a decision during David Stern's reign that allowing high-resource teams to bulldoze the smaller-market clubs Stern's expansion and relocation scheme had embraced was not a good direction for the league, so we ended up with a beefier luxury tax regime and, eventually, under Adam Silver, the infamous aprons. This has all led to the league crowning eight different champions over eight consecutive seasons, and several franchises who hadn't won a title this century (Toronto, Milwaukee, Denver, Oklahoma City, New York) claiming one.

The question at hand when considering what Ballmer, the richest owner in the NBA, and the Clippers are credibly alleged to have done with the fake tree company and Kawhi Leonard is whether those salary cap rules that create the structure of the league itself are real or if they are fake.