Talk:Salary cap

Great Info - To bad it turns into a preaching editoral.

This article is a bit American-centric: the Australian Football League had a salary cap in 1984, well before the timeframe this article is discussing. I don't want to edit this article straight away in case I'm just being Australian-centric, there may be instances of salary caps being used before then. Anyone know of any? Shane King 07:19, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

The early history of professional sports (19th century - 1930s) in North America was replete with salary caps, tacit in most cases, open in a few. Mostly they were the result of tacit agreements amoung owners and the resultant "peer pressure". Once the reserve clause became a common feature, they were essentially unnecessary until it was overturned, because each player was essentially held hostage by it to his current team, and salary caps were then unnecessary until it was overturned, in the U.S. at least by a combination of collective bargaining and legal action. What I would like to know is if there were similar arrangements in professional sports elsewhere? Can you answer this?

(Of course the article is only North-American-centric due to ignorance of the authors, or at least of this one, of the practices outside of North America, and not any lack of interest or ineherent bias.)

Rlquall 17:10, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

QUESTIONS

HOW MANY PLAYERS ARE ON A TEAM AND HOW IS THE SALARY CAP DIVIDED???

It is my understanding that the salary cap in the NBA applies to the twelve-man roster (this is the number of people who "dress out" for a game; apparently there are fifteen total players on a roster now to allow for injuries, etc., but in the last three there are few salary issues as all would be playing for the contractural minimum). How to divide the money among the players is somewhat up to managment except that the NBA now has a rookie "salary scale" based on where in the draft a player is taken; obviously the earlier a player is selected, the more money he receives in his initial contract. Also, collective bargaining between the Players' Association and the NBA has put a minimum salary that can be paid a player which increases based on his years of service in the league; obviously this has cut both ways as the marginal older player is left out if his talents are lesser or equal to that of a younger player for whom the minimum salary is much less.

In the NFL, the top 53 players (the entire regular season roster) are under the salary cap. (In the NFL, four of that 53 are declared inactive for the weekend on Friday and four more three hours before the game so that generally there are only 45 active, dressed out players on the sideline at game time.) Again, as in the NBA, there are minimums based on years of service in the collective bargaining agreement between the Players' Association and the league, which causes the somewhat premature retirement of the medium and average older player. The leauge mostly leaves it to management on how to divide the salary cap among its players; if a superstar player (i.e., Peyton Manning) gets a huge proportion of the cap he may eventually find himself without other championship-caliber teams surrounding him. Of course, the biggest difference is that the NFL doesn't have the so-called "Larry Bird rule", which allows a team to exceed the cap if they are re-signing a player who has already been with the team (named for the Celtics superstar player who played for them throughout his career due to this rule). Rlquall 14:45, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Good summary. One addition: the NBA has an individual maximum salary as well, with a sliding scale depending on the years of service in the league. The maximum a fourth-year player can get is something like $9 million (with 20% annual increases beyond that), while a 10-year veteran could earn something like $17M in his first year of a new contract (again with 20% annual increases after that). Funnyhat 03:26, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)