Post by Jeremiah Hill on May 29, 2017 18:07:33 GMT
I don't necessarily agree or disagree with anything you said, but of this is minor compared to the negative effects of Bird Rights. I am not even going to pretend to make it fictional because we saw it happen.
Sacramento Kings Major Assets:
Damian Lillard (possess bird rights)
Russel Westbrook (possess bird rights)
Marc Gasol (no bird rights)
I don't want to get into the fact whether or not Marc Gasol would have resigned with my team or not. Rather, let us assume that he does not resign for whatever reason.
Now, the Kings faced a situation where A. they cannot contend B. they cannot get enough value for Westbrook or Lillard because the new team will not have their bird rights. What are they supposed to do? Does this seem right to anyone? Answer that question, Brian or anyone else, and I will support BRs for more than three years. In my opinion, it is an arbitrary and capricious rule that does nothing but curtail trading.
Several of the contending teams ignored the salary cap, so we added a hard cap to prevent that from happening as much. A player can choose to leave with or without bird rights, but a team can at least some value for a player that leaves (ala Cleveland got picks for LeBron James when he left for Miami in real life) by trading away their bird rights.
Honestly, I don't see what function this rule serves.
Look at how much everyone in this league hates the cap ignoring moves I've made (like acquiring Josh Smith). I don't care at all about salary, I don't have to pay these guys. So if I'm going to be over the cap, why not be really over the cap. By having a salary of $160 million vs $100 million I'm actually increasing the money I have to play with by $60 million. These are basically the concerns of Brian Scalabrine I think. How much worse is it, when I can not only horde all the bad contracts, but I can also now re-sign them using traded bird rights? At that point, the salary cap is barely a real thing to me. In that situation the rule mattered. But now, with a hard cap, I can't play that game anymore. I have tons of expiring money next season that I could have taken advantage of but I now have to let it come off my books just to stay under the limit.
So yea.. I think the primary effect of not allowing bird rights to be traded is no longer to promote parity by preventing salary hording, but now to hurt parity because teams that know they will lose players to free agency can't get anything for them.
Why would anyone ever trade you a restricted free agent though? No one on your team outside of players you aren't gonna trade is worth a player who's good enough to resign with RFA.
You'd get to keep your guys you draft, and thats fine. But you're not gonna be able to sign random decent free agents using the I'm a contender line.