What I'm proposing here allows for that exactly.

Actually, the pie analogy doesn't exactly work in the same way here. In this situation, someone with way more pie than they could ever hope to eat in a thousand years would be taking some of that pie and adding it to this one.

The league doesn't want a cap lift and this satisfies that, while also allowing for spending that could far exceed an extra $1M per team.

Hypothetically, if Spirit had $500k in cap space available, and market value on Rodman was $2m/year, under this system they could pay that. They can't with HIP.

No matter your favorite term to describe them, whether systems coach, tactician, connoisseur of a fine game model, or otherwise, these coaches need a preseason. They NEED a preseason. The structure, spacing, movement, and principles can't be taught with the time constraints of an ongoing season.

A player like that probably doesn't have to wait more than a year before they meet one or more of the criteria, so the timeline wouldn't effectively change much, but this is the most unserious way of creating that financial pathway

Anyone with a modicum of sense would simply make a call or send an email afterward to continue the conversation in a way that resembled civility and actual productivity.

Hi again. It was the US and the number was 3.

Which is actually fine! There's enough talent dispersal across the world that one nation having 3 of the best 11 is really good!

But 7 for Spain and 4 for England this year is silly. This is not a serious list.

This, though, remains an issue.

12% of the CBA's $3.5M base plus revenue sharing is going to be VERY close to this too.

I know it's been years since I was a GM in the NWSL and I'm self-aware enough to know that fewer people care what I have to share on this than ever, but I genuinely love this stuff. Complete nerd. I love helping athletes as an agent now, but I miss being the one digging for competitive advantages.

Personal opinion: going back to the system of having unbound actual salaries but max cap hits would go a long way towards solving the issue. Used to be $250k, with recent growth something like $500k is fair. Would allow higher individual salaries, yet still force cap mindfulness and league parity.

This particular issue was also inevitable when the CBA set out specific salary cap growth over the entire duration of the agreement but didn't put guardrails on individual salaries (e.g. the NHL setting min/max amounts of both team spend and AAV of contracts).

In the moment, though, the league can't allow for any team to essentially declare that it's bending/breaking a rule and that everyone just needs to deal with it. It can't work that way because, as mentioned before, teams love to push boundaries and this would incentivize *breaking* rules.

Teams, working under the fundamental principle that winning is everything, will always innovate and push/bend/break rules faster than a league can adjust and amend them to keep up. That's not inherently a bad thing and often leads to more efficient outcomes and better-designed rules after the fact.

No matter where you land on the issue of compensation (I'm absolutely in favor of higher wages across the board), no league can allow for a single team to unilaterally force rules changes at a league-wide level. It sets a suboptimal precedent that playing fair is optional, no matter the topic.

Yes, the league has the CBA-mandated ability to raise the cap so that this isn't an issue. Media rights growth will likely lead to that, but the league won't allow itself to be strong-armed into it today by way of a single club pushing through a contract that doesn't work until the change is made.

Might be correct, might not be, but it's the Occam's razor solution to why the contract can be seen as problematic by the league while still being CBA-compliant at the individual contract level.