NBA trades

I don’t follow basketball or NBA, but this was just too good to pass up. The “soft cap” system NBA has just makes many of their trades stranger than fiction. Here’s something from Slate:

After all the foolishness that went into making this trade happen, it’s easy to forget that Jason Kidd is going to Dallas to try to win a championship. The big winner here, though, is Keith Van Horn. Once he goes through the motions of practicing with the Nets, he’ll likely by waived and sent back home. For his trouble, he will be paid $4.3 million. The crowning irony here is that a retired player is getting a fat load of free money because of the NBA’s strict rules to control how much gets spent on salaries. Sure, that makes absolutely no sense—but this is the NBA, where backward logic rules. Now, I wonder who the Lakers could get for Karl Malone …

If NPB or MLB is ever going to implement a salary cap system, make sure to model it after the NFL or NHL systems and not the NBA absurdity (though, the NFL one produces massive multiyear deals that never materialize, could the NHL possibly have the most sensible salary cap amongst the major sports?)

Advertisement