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!

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.

1. China doesn’t give a fuck about Palestinians. China will support whatever group gives it what it wants. Maybe that is the Palestinians, maybe it isn’t but China cares less about abstract human rights issues than the collective west. Maybe China has so far been supportive of Palestinians thus far but it seems implausible to me China “cares” about it one way or the other. I honestly believe the US political class cares more about Palestinians than the Chinese one.
2. Israel may want to normalize with Saudi, but it wants to exist more. Unless you are predicting Saudi leading an Arab block into a hegemonic position like the U.S. has now (and that idea is far fetched) it seems hard for me to believe this one changes things.
3. I would be surprised if Palestinian armed groups become powerful enough to meaningfully impede Israel’s freedom of action. Clearly it would be nice for them if they could do that, but it’s not as though Israel’s army is sclerotic in the same way Russia’s has turned out to be.
4. “Growing numbers of countries” - really I’ve seen a lot of liberal westerners get more upset about the treatment of Palestine. I’m honestly not aware of a different change in support. What are you referring to?
5. For the sake of discussion, let’s agree Israel is an apartheid state notwithstanding the fact there is a Palestinian party in Israel and Israeli citizen Palestinians can vote. What makes that inherently unstable? In South Africa’s case it was a humanitarian motivated set of sanctions, which I believe were led by the collective west as far as I can tell. In this new world order you have referenced without defining it, do you expect China to embargo Israel? As discussed that seems unlikely to me.

Because in the new world order noted multilateral institution rules enjoyers Russia and China will approve Israel “liquidating” the Palestinians? Or did you mean something else?

Honestly can’t think of a new world order where the likely outcome is Palestinians getting better treatment.