RYAN DUNNING
Special to The Leader
Salary caps are implemented in different ways throughout professional sports. Some leagues, such as the NFL and NHL, have a hard salary cap.
Breaching this cap results in harsh penalties, such as the revocation of championships or wins. A salary cap like this appears to be the most successful in its implementation.
Since the implementation of the NFL’s $120 million cap in 2011, there have been nine different teams to win the Super Bowl in the past ten years.
In the NHL, there have been 14 different teams to make the Stanley Cup Final in that time. With such diversity in the finals, these leagues set the standard for implementation and maintenance of a salary cap.
The NBA has an interesting situation of their own. Rather than a hard salary cap, the NBA has a soft salary cap and a luxury tax on top of that.
This means that teams are allowed to break the salary cap, but only in order to maintain players already on the team. This was implemented due to a sense of discomfort from fans that their favorite players would leave when they demanded too much money.
However, any team who breaches the cap faces a fine. If teams go even further over the cap, they pay a luxury tax. This fine is then divided amongst teams in the league with lower payrolls. The NBA’s salary cap has become essentially obsolete.
Teams like the Golden State Warriors are able to assemble super teams, with players taking major pay cuts to join them.
This past offseason, NBA All-Star DeMarcus Cousins took a paycut that exceeded $10 million to join the defending champions. This means the Warriors now have a starting five comprised of exclusively NBA All-Stars.
They avoid breaching the cap by asking their best players to take slight pay cuts in exchange for a nearly guaranteed championship, while paying the rest of their team very little.
It has worked for them thus far, making the past four NBA championships and winning three of them. They’re also the heavy favorites for this coming year.
A proposed way to fix this would be switching to a hard cap, lowering the cap and raising the league minimum salary. This would create a much more even distribution of talent throughout the league by forcing players to take even bigger pay cuts if they wanted a super team.
The MLB has the loosest rules among the major professional sports, with no salary cap and only a luxury tax.
This means teams are able to pay their players as much as they want, and teams with more money and bigger markets are almost always able to out-compete the teams with less fans and less history.
This leads to common sayings about specific teams (*cough cough* Yankees *cough cough*) “buying” their teams.
This season, the Boston Red Sox have become that team. They currently have a payroll that is whopping $23 million more than the next highest team.
Not so coincidentally, they are also the top team in the league.