The NBA is considering franchise tags

The latest proposal made by the NBA to its players is pretty interesting. If I were a player I would turn it down flat, but at the very least the owners are trying to do something to control themselves. The first thing they want to do is not fully guarantee long term contracts so NBA team executives cannot hand out Eddie Curry deals that doom a team to salary cap hell.

My first complaint would be why should the owners get an out from a bad contract when they are the ones who signed the deal in the first place? Of course to be fair sometimes guys get hurt or things don’t work out and the fans should not have to pay the price for that. Let’s be real honest it is the fans who end up paying both in tickets and what not and in misery when teams get stuck with a bad deal.

This league also wants to take greater steps to help smaller market teams keep their star players. The NBA is going a different route than the NFL. In the NFL a franchise tag binds that player to a team for another year for a top five salary at the position of the player. The NBA wants to allow NBA teams to designate one player for preferential contractual treatment. That would mean more overall money, more guaranteed money, and at least one extra year on their contract.

The NBA already has a system like that in place and that did not help Cleveland keep Lebron or Toronto keep Chris Bosh. In the case of James they Cavs offered him about 27 million dollars more but he took less overall money to leave. For me this is a good first step, but the NBA needs to really work on how it wants to move forward.