Joe Lacob is angrier than he can say without facing a fine. The Warriors’ CEO and his partners have done so much to pull the franchise out of the NBA gutter and into the lap of luxury, only to keep getting boxed in and knocked about by their fellow owners.
The NBA’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement, reached over the weekend, plants a concrete fist squarely on the nose of the Warriors. And to be fair, any other franchise willing to invest in its most valuable assets, players, for competitive purposes.
The new CBA will, quite simply, make it more difficult for a successful franchise to maintain success.
And Lacob, you might recall, went on the "Point Forward" podcast with Warriors player Andre Iguodala last summer and described the system as “very unfair.” The cost of expressing his opinion in public: $500,000.
Pardon Lacob if he’s more fiscally prudent this time around.
But he still has good and justifiable reasons for gall.
Though some of the changes coming next season are fair and astute and reasonable – we’ll get to them – the impact on Golden State’s mode of operation is painful. A system that already penalizes those who, like Lacob, are willing to invest in their assets, will become considerably more punitive.
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The old CBA penalized teams that, like the Warriors, have payrolls that send them into the luxury tax, and the penalties for each succeeding year in the tax grow exponentially. That’s where the Warriors have been for three of the last four seasons. Their luxury-tax bill last season was a few dollars north of $170 million.
The tax bill for this season should land slightly lower.
The tax bill for next season will be astronomical, as Andrew Wiggins and Jordan Poole will be in the first year of multiyear extensions.
The new CBA is structured, thanks to a second salary-cap “apron” – reportedly set at $17.5 million over the tax line – in a way that deprives the Warriors of using the taxpayer mid-level exception to sign a free agent. Had that change been in place last summer, they would not have been able to sign Donte DiVincenzo, whose salary partially is supplemented by the $6.5 million available via the TPE.
DiVincenzo is a very good player but not an All-Star. He was signed to a reasonable contract for a valuable reserve on a quality team.
And now that option will vanish.
Keep in mind that none of Golden State’s top six players arrived via a wild free-agent shopping spree. Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Kevon Looney and Poole were drafted. Wiggins was acquired in trade.
The Warriors were built as the NBA says it prefers, largely through drafting and development. Yet the new CBA will hit them with as much smoke as it does, say, the Los Angeles Clippers, whose governor, Steve Ballmer, is the wealthiest in the league – with more capital than the next two governors combined.
The combined wealth of Lacob and co-executive chairman Peter Guber is substantial but still not enough to fly that high.
The Clippers have used Ballmer’s checkbook as a cudgel to clobber the rest of the NBA. They are three years removed from committing $103 million to sign free agent Kawhi Leonard while also acquiring via trade Paul George, who was one year into a $137 million contract. Both since have signed lucrative extensions with Los Angeles.
Warriors: Draft, develop, pay.
Clippers: Shop, pay, add, pay, re-sign.
These are very different ways to run a business, and that the CBA treats them the same must chap Lacob’s backside.
Lacob is not the only member of the Golden State family to have issues with the new CBA. Green studied the concessions made by the Players Association and came away believing it was a slap upside their collective heads.
He didn’t like seeing the promised $1 million payouts for the winner of the in-season tournament slashed in half. He didn’t like seeing that teams unwilling to invest can avoid the punitive cost of teams such as the Warriors.
“Players lose again,” Green tweeted Saturday.
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One member of the family, however, expressed satisfaction with some aspects of the new CBA. Coach Steve Kerr is OK with the 65-game minimum required for individual honors.
“That’s a good number,” he told reporters Sunday in Denver. “I don’t know if it’s a better number than 64 or 66. I haven’t studied it. But it does seem like a fair barometer for a guy to win the MVP. It seems like he should play more than three-quarters of the season. Seems about right.”
It’s likely that Lacob agrees. Probably Green, too. It’s the other matters that have them seeing red emotionally and possibly even financially.