Price Floors
Pay your NBA players almost nothing and pocket the league cheque. The floor that ended that 1990s playbook.
If you owned a basketball team in the NBA and you wanted to lose every game, the cheapest path would be to pay your players almost nothing, collect the league's revenue sharing check and rebuild on top draft picks for free. That actually was the playbook for some teams in the late 1990s. Owners pocketed the gap between league revenue and tiny payrolls, while their fans paid full ticket prices to watch a roster of two-way contracts. The league's collective bargaining agreement closed the loophole. Today, every NBA team is required to spend at least 90% of the salary cap on player wages. Any club that comes in under that floor must hand over the shortfall directly to its own players as bonus money. The effect on roster construction is striking. Teams in tieredown rebuild years still scour the veteran market for stopgap contracts.
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