Beal+PHX Agree to Buyout - PHX to S/W Beal | Beal Signs w/LAC 1+1 11mil

[omahen]

The massive buyouts make a lie of the idea that "even if you overpay a player badly, you can always trade him." With a hard cap, which LIMITS spending as a whole by the league, you can get stuck. Sometimes the best deal you make now is when you say no, and let a player walk.

I think LAC was a bit ahead of the curve in figuring it out, when they let Paul George simply walk. That seems like a no-no, to lose talent, but if your talent isn’t going to be held at a cap-efficient price, it's a killer in how it lowers your ceiling.

I think teams are going to be forced to rethink the value of players getting a supermax. The value of a max player was in getting someone whose salary is limited and he was worth more, but with a supermax AND an overall spending limit, can that supermax player whose salary now eats up so much of a limited pie really be worth more than their contract?

Thats one of my concerns with AD. With his limited availability, can he ever be worth the amount of your overall cap he will get?

Supermax was in large part designed to keep players in the teams that drafted them, not that everyone just runs to attractive destination. Even before these new aprons I thought that supermax deals are actually putting those teams in difficult situation, because while they can pay their star more and keep him, it also limits their team building options. I think the value of supermax would be, if it would only count towards the cap at the regular max value, while the supermax bonus would only be received by the player. I think this could solve a lot of issues.