Europe Needs a Salary Cap
First, just let me say I’m writing this with the mindset that OMT could one day own a team in Europe. Personally, I could care less that Josh Childress signed with Olympiacos Piraeus and left the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. I’m not trying to keep anyone in the NBA and make Europe less competitive. Actually it is completely the opposite. It is true that Childress is going to make 4.5 million Euros in Greece next year, but what you don’t know is that organization bleeds Euros every year. Yes, they lose a ton of money each year and the only reason they exist is because of the culture to keep pouring money into them.
The NBA is obviously very profitable. The reason teams in Europe are spending is because they made good money with the Euroleague TV deal. The main reason a salary cap wouldn’t get done is because the top teams in Europe would want to keep their advantage over the lower budget teams. What I’m suggesting is that each country level league develop their own salary cap. Then teams participating in the EuroCup and Euroleague can develop their own as well. They can include exceptions like the MLE in the NBA, and they can make it a soft cap so the big teams can continue to spend. The one thing they need to do is lock in a max contract system that will prevent a team from grossly overpaying for a player.
My point is that you’ve heard what most NBA stars are saying about Europe. Basically, pay them 50 million a year and they will come over. The fact is they aren’t even getting close to half that in the NBA in most cases. Common sense suggests paying double for a player isn’t very smart. Let’s look at the Josh Childress situation. Childress is going to make 4.5 million Euros next season. For just over 1 million Euros a team could sign Marcus Fizer (Iowa State, Chicago Bulls) and Qyntel Woods. Woods is good enough to play in the NBA, but he made some mistakes after coming out of Northeast Mississippi Community College. When the cop pulled him over and asked for his license it probably wasn’t very smart to give him his Upper Deck trading card. Fizer was at one time in the running for 6th man of the year in the NBA.
The point being having a team with Fizer and Woods makes more sense at 1 million Euros than overpaying Childress to get him to leave the NBA. Plus, your team has a much greater chance of being profitable as well. I think it is great that Europe wants to challenge the NBA, but you can’t overtake the NBA unless you are making money each year. The point of this post- don’t pay double.
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