Sports blog information from USA TODAY.
While most teams improved themselves for the upcoming season, here are a few teams that made decisions with the long-term in mind.
It’s hard to distinguish a winner of the offseason that stands out from the rest this year. With the exception of a few teams, most made moves with the present in mind. Only a few made decisions that will reward them at least one year from now.
Here they are:
Salary cap expert Yossi Gozlan reacts to all the moves at the start of free agency and makes sense of all the moves from a cap perspective.
HoopsHype’s salary cap expert Yossi Gozlan is providing updates and reactions on each major event at the start of free agency.
We used ProFitX to get an idea of how much these upcoming free agents can earn next season.
Every year there are players that overwhelmingly outperform the value of their contracts. When these players hit free agency, the annual rate of their new contract increases from double for veterans to tenfold for minimum players.
We decided to look at a handful of players set to receive big raises from their 2020-21 salaries. Most of them are young players either coming off their rookie-scale contracts or minimum deals. We used ProFitX and their salary projections to get an idea of how much these players can earn next season.
Money is no guarantee of success and the New York Knicks are a prime example.
While it certainly helps to have deep pockets, as we have seen from the New York Knicks, spending money is no guarantee of success in the NBA.
Fans of teams in small markets can thank the salary cap for the parity that the league offers. Without these restrictions, teams with the most money would be able to offer the top players contracts so large that it would be challenging to maintain any semblance of competitive balance.
The salary cap is only a soft restriction and teams like New York (worth an estimated $4.6 billion, per Forbes) can still exceed it if they are willing to pay the luxury tax.
Since the luxury tax was instituted in 2002, Knicks governor James Dolan has been hit with the penalty 11 times. But the franchise has very little to show for it as they have missed the playoffs during eight of those seasons.
According to our research, teams have paid the luxury tax 167 times. But in 47 instances, they did not make the postseason. That means luxury tax teams have missed the playoffs 28.0 percent of the time. Overall, among the 21 worst teams record-wise to pay the luxury tax, New York appears five times.
Below are the other most notable seasons in which a team paid the luxury tax but still fell massively short of preseason expectations.
