goliathfasa t1_j4hmyrl wrote on January 15, 2023 at 8:09 PM

Is it normal for sports to strip champions of titles due merely to them not participating in the league anymore?

Like if the Lakers wins an NBA title, then some contract negotiations resulted in the org exiting the league, can they just take back the title?

KongFuzii t1_j4hvujg wrote on January 15, 2023 at 9:04 PM

In combat spprts you need to defend your belt. If you dont defend you are not the champ.

12Jazz32 t1_j4hzt8b wrote on January 15, 2023 at 9:29 PM

They didn’t strip it and act as if he was never champ. It’s not removed from the records. He’s still former HW champion and will be forever. Just not reigning champ.

VinylJones t1_j4hsyao wrote on January 15, 2023 at 8:46 PM

Historically there isn’t a lot of precedent, but the closest is probably the Tour de France/Armstrong stuff or the collegiate level stuff in Basketball and Football - those titles were all vacated (Armstrong may have also been stripped, not sure, but those Tour titles were vacated meaning nobody technically “won” in the record books).

I don’t know that there is a parallel though, at least in large organized sports, it’s pretty wild for a sitting champ to literally just bail out on the organization and I don’t even know what my feelings are.

You also have, in the NBA, one of the most player-friendly arrangements in all of sport…the NBPA pulls the strings in the league, there’s a real tangible power imbalance favoring players and I’m hugely in favor of that model - I think if this ever happened in the NBA you wouldn’t even catch a whiff of a title being stripped.

SteelyBacon12 t1_j4hx0sg wrote on January 15, 2023 at 9:11 PM

Not sure the players would agree the NBA collective bargaining agreement is that player friendly. I strongly suspect the union doesn’t like individual player max and overall salary caps.

Basketball is somewhat unlike many other professional sports in that talent is relatively obvious at the time the player is signing their rookie deal. My suspicion is a baseball or fifa football style league structure (mostly without hard player or team salary caps) for the NBA would get NBA players in aggregate payed more, with high potential rookies and all stars in particular doing better enough a probable reduction in comp for the veteran role players wouldn’t swamp it.

VinylJones t1_j4i2f0g wrote on January 15, 2023 at 9:45 PM

NBA isn’t nearly at volume for those models to apply, and I think the current issue (if there is one from the player perspective, aside from the brutal schedule and wildly varying officiating quality they don’t have a ton of complaints) isn’t with the structure of contracts or the overall wealth distribution amongst them (we’re seeing $140 million contracts given to year 2, year 3 players already…and not high draft guys) it’s the distillation of league capital amongst markets.

There will never, ever, be a population that can support an Oklahoma City franchise the same way a population can support a New York franchise…and it’s bad. My team is worth $7.5 Billion - putting them in second behind the Dallas Cowboys in team valuation amongst all North American sports - and a team like the Pelicans are worth about $1.6 Billion; that essentially means the Pelicans are physically incapable of earning as much as the Warriors in a business capacity, which means ownership groups will never have the ability to spend on salary. The salary cap in the NBA is soft, it effectively does not exist when someone like Joe Lacob takes a several hundred million dollar hit in luxury taxes every year with a smile and a trophy in his hands. So right now it’s not the inability of players to get well paying contacts, it’s the lack of earning potential in individual markets and a massive disparity between the ones at the top and the rest of the league in terms of spending potential whilst still turning a profit. The owners have painted themselves into a corner.

SteelyBacon12 t1_j4i6ob7 wrote on January 15, 2023 at 10:12 PM

My thought experiment for “how player friendly is a league’s salary structure?” is basically trying to imagine what would happen if owners were banned from violating otherwise applicable labor laws (an example of such a violation would be dictating to employees who they have to work for through a draft). So I’m not sure I’d agree that the distribution of league capital is really separable from overall compensation, but I’m also not sure if you’re really arguing it’s a separate issue or not.

It seems to me that, as you observe, some owners have a willingness to spend money to win games that goes past the cap. It also seems somewhat obvious to me that, in addition to proving the salary cap is porous, such free spending owners prove that there is large unmet demand from owners for “winning.” Surely if Joe Lacob is willing to pay salary plus luxury tax, he would be willing to pay the same total amount in pure salary. Therefore I assume that (at least current period) NBA comp would rise without a cap.

The long term problem is related to the one you highlight in that, under my thought experiment, the league probably becomes even more top heavy than it is already especially with respect to major metro areas. It also become vulnerable to boom/bust overspend cycles. This may be bad for the league overall long term and bad for future players.

I’m also not 100% sure whether the luxury tax gets spent on salaries or not by teams below the cap. Like it doesn’t seem like it does necessarily but I couldn’t figure it out googling while watching wildcard games. Cheers!