The point of having a cap is to limit trades.
Because a single roster spot means so much in basketball, with just five players to a side and a possibility for one of them to take a quarter of a team's shots nightly, trades and acquisitions mean so much more than they do in baseball and football. So in order to limit players being shipped any time a dork like Larry Brown gets a bit of a red ass, a hard salary cap is put in place to force teams to match salaries so that the trading partners (if over the cap) are bringing in as much salary as they're taking out.
And because the luxury tax is far, far more prohibitive; even if biggish owners are going over the luxury tax, you're still not seeing a gulf in the NBA like you do between the Yankees and Royals. The cheapest NBA team, the Memphis Grizzlies, was a top-five team in terms of payroll for a few years in a row at the outset of this decade. And some of the taxpayers (both this year and before) aren't exactly in hot spots. Orlando, San Antonio, and Denver come to mind.
All which makes Reinsdorf look even worse. Grabbing Alex Rios while treating his other team (the most profitable team in the NBA for the last 13 years) like the Kansas City Royals, refusing to top the luxury tax.
Because a single roster spot means so much in basketball, with just five players to a side and a possibility for one of them to take a quarter of a team's shots nightly, trades and acquisitions mean so much more than they do in baseball and football. So in order to limit players being shipped any time a dork like Larry Brown gets a bit of a red ass, a hard salary cap is put in place to force teams to match salaries so that the trading partners (if over the cap) are bringing in as much salary as they're taking out.
And because the luxury tax is far, far more prohibitive; even if biggish owners are going over the luxury tax, you're still not seeing a gulf in the NBA like you do between the Yankees and Royals. The cheapest NBA team, the Memphis Grizzlies, was a top-five team in terms of payroll for a few years in a row at the outset of this decade. And some of the taxpayers (both this year and before) aren't exactly in hot spots. Orlando, San Antonio, and Denver come to mind.
All which makes Reinsdorf look even worse. Grabbing Alex Rios while treating his other team (the most profitable team in the NBA for the last 13 years) like the Kansas City Royals, refusing to top the luxury tax.