“What’s a fair amount of money to pay the best basketball players in the world? That’s something that would take a team of experts to determine, and even then it would be one part guesswork. Maybe they are paid too much. Maybe they are paid too little. Maybe the owners who lose money are victims of the economy and the cost of international expansion. Maybe they are victims of failing to control their own spending. Maybe the owners have been bleeding cash, and some of the hurt must be passed on to the players. On the other hand maybe it was just a couple of bad years, and this is all a negotiating tactic.”

Abbott wants answers for meaningless questions.  How much should a player make?  What’s fair?  Without a free market a player’s true value cannot be determined.  While there is a salary cap in place, binds on bidding for international players (gee, where does Ricky Rubio play again?), and all those trade restrictions, the value of players is guesswork at best.  (Especially considering that player value is relative to team need—Antwan Jamison represents a huge waste of money for DC but might be of value to Cleveland.)  Trades can also help to correct stupid mistakes by general managers.  Without trade restrictions, players simply move to where they are most valued.  For example, this summer Rudy Gay will be given a maximum salary (mark my words) to be the cornerstone of a franchise.  By the time the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in summer ’11 it will have become apparent that Gay can’t do the job and is just costing a team a bunch of money for limited returns.  But to a contender that’s looking for that last piece to put them over the top—the role Richard Jefferson was supposed to play for San Antonio this year—the price might be worth it.

Of course a player’s value isn’t limited to his ability to help his team win games.  It’s not unreasonable for a player’s marketability, among other things, to come into play.  And yeah, that thinking led Memphis to sign Allen Iverson, but that doesn’t mean the idea is invalid.  It just means Memphis Grizzlies management is stupid.  Also, I suspect that since there are merely thirty potential bidders (teams), with disparate spending capabilities and revenue streams, even dissolving restrictions would only give us a good, not great, sense of a player’s value.  If there were a thousand potential bidders, we’d have a more accurate valuation.  (This and the prospect of French cheerleaders are the only points for European expansion.)  But since expansion of any sort isn’t immanent, the best way I can think of to deal with this small v. big market value and ownership means disparity is to impose a powerful revenue sharing system and luxury tax.  How and how much?  I don’t know; I can’t; we can’t.  Abbott says owners are very secretive of their balance sheets.

But whether it’s a two dollars-for-dollar luxury tax or whether taxes and league revenue are distributed on a sliding scale correlating to market size, there’s a way to balance the playing field.  They don’t even need to make these details public; figure out amongst themselves how they want to split up the pot—no one other than team owners care.  Instead, the salary cap, owners/players revenue sharing plan, and other stupid aspects of the CBA makes it seem like there are moral questions to consider, like what percentage of total league revenue is it fair for the players to get.  It’s an utterly meaningless question: players should make whatever the market will bear; the balance sheets of owners are between them and the IRS.  It’s not like this thinking is so radical; Art Modell once said NFL franchise owners were Republicans who vote Socialist.

Why have owners never come up with this step?  Off the top of my head I can think of three quick possibilities:

1) they feel it’s just too complicated (and requires too much effort and annual tinkering) to come up with a tax/revenue sharing system that enables owners with a net worth of $80 million (Peter Holt – San Antonio) to compete with billionaire owners.

2) their claims of losses and hardship are complete bullsh*t and the system currently in place is very beneficial for them.  Or at the very least, the current system isn’t hurting them.  In this case, their labor negotiations are just about making more money—I don’t have a problem with this.

3) they are (as a group) far less intelligent than one might expect from some of the richest people on Earth.  This would indicate that a good number of these owners owe their fortunes to fortune—that they’re just a bunch of lucky bastards.

My guess?  A combo of all three, but more the latter two.  Yes, balancing the playing field might be tricky, but it’s doable.  But more than that, I think some owners are probably doing quite well in this system and have no interest in changing it to benefit their competition.  And there’s no question about the third, at least in some cases.  Some owners are fortunate sons—Charles Dolan’s bills are mostly inherited—and perhaps some are just incredibly lucky, and their wealth isn’t indicative of their business acumen.

Really, I wouldn’t care a wit about this stuff, if it didn’t have a direct impact on the quality of the NBA game.  But it does, and I do.