Amnesty!

I’m not sure what, maybe you lose a draft pick if the guy you cut has a high enough number on some years/salary ratio they could come up with, maybe you lose your MLE for the next offseason if it exists, maybe just a big cash penalty, I don’t know.

And the ones who have, save us, now have enough stars like Durant at OKC, Wall at WAS and Aldridge at POR that other formerly big name guys will be lured there by the chance of winning. If this comes to the table, it will go through.

Think about owners like Buss and Cuban, who would likely throw money at whoever they were allowed to throw money at. Do you think Otis Smith and RDV Sports, if faced with the choice of losing Dwight Howard to his ETO or buying another couple vets while still paying Arenas’s horrible contract and KEEPING Howard for a title run would choose to actually lose him?

If they cut the cap from $58m to $45m do you really think they’ll make it hard? No friggin’ way. Even with that amnesty clause if they’re cutting the cap by over 20% they’re going to leave in all the exceptions. As long as those exist, guys from your list that are actually worth a damn will play for contenders for the vet’s exception and MLE. Count on it.

Personally, I don’t know where you’re hearing that they’ll go to $45m right away. That’ll never work. Everyone in the league almost, would be immediately over.

Wouldn’t this kind of push come from the owners and not the league?

The owners are the league. What do you mean? As I’ve said before, I’m sure the owners are divided on a hard cap and the players are completely against it, so it’s going to be hard to make one, at least drastically (that’s why Stern has talked about a gradual shift). As for the amnesty clause, I can see about 80% of the owners and 100% of the players being in favor of that. The Pacers would be one of the teams that will not, or should not be in favor for the very obvious reasons highlighted throughout this thread. If this were a market that was attractive to free agents it would be different, but if that were the case, the financial situation here would probably be different (if we could get free agents to come here, we would have signed them by now, and our cap space wouldn’t be so abundant). I bet Larry Bird does not hope it happens.

I think you’re confused. The NBA is a collection of private businesses. They are all linked together by revenue sharing (though its model is atrociously designed and fatally flawed by the standards of other professional sports leagues). This is what makes it a league. 30 owners. One league. So think of the “league” as a corporation, and each owner is a board member of said corporation. The guy who was hired by those owners to run the league is the commissioner. So when you hear labor talks it’s really, as you put it, “Stern and Co” vs. “The Players.”

When the league and the players come together to put a new CBA in place, there will be back and forths. The players will argue one side and the league will argue the other side. As with any corporation, when the league is deciding what to propose and counter propose, they’ll vote on things to include. If they vote on the amnesty clause, chances are all the teams in the league that are over the agreed upon salary cap will vote “yes.” Then all the teams that are at or below the cap, but have a bad contract to get rid of will vote “yes.” Then all the teams who are left and are contenders will think that they can get some of the stars you named to sign for cheap, thanks to the newfound cap space the amnesty clause would provide, will vote “yes.” The teams left will be teams that don’t have cap problems, bad contracts or aren’t contenders. They will most likely vote “no.”

The hard cap will be the opposite. The contenders, and all teams with cap problems will vote “no.” The non-contenders who have been “frugal” will vote “yes.”

When Stern proposes whatever CBA they iron out to the players, the players will most likely lean toward the amnesty clause (because it will allow them to get paid twice) and away from the hard cap (because it will inevitbaly reduce their profit potential on a per-contract basis).

What in all that points to the Pacers benefitting from this? Let’s say we were on the cusp of a title. Even then, in this market, all the newfound free agents cut loose by the amnesty clause would find plenty of other teams with sudden cap space who, assuming the mid-level exception won’t go away (and I’m assuming it won’t in your scenario where they’ve lowered the cap) can pay them just as much, or just slightly less than the Pacers can. Some of those teams will be title contenders. Some will have beaches and nightlives. Some will have 2-3 times the TV audience or twice the population. Some will be located in cities with exponentially higher per capita incomes. If the cap space advantage that the Pacers have is the magic solution to combat all that’s stacked against this franchise, then the only way to get a guy like say, Brandon Roy, is to pay him way more than the mid-level exception that he’d be offered somewhere else, thus defeating the point of this whole argument! If we’re having to overpay guys that other teams didn’t want because they’d already made the mistake of overpaying them, then what’s the damn point?