It makes little sense to send the sport’s top prospects to the worst situations to start their careers.
If the goal is to promote parity around the league, just give the worst performing teams more money to spend, but allow league entrants to agree to terms with any team of their liking.
We can expect the median league entrant to have the goal of maximizing career earnings, which is a good proxy for the situation which best promotes their growth as a player, which is what’s best for the league and the sport. This will almost certainly lead to better outcomes than the status quo, which is just random with bad situations / dysfunctional franchises weighted more heavily.
If a franchise still can’t attract talent either via FA for existing players or new entrants, even despite the financial advantage, then they deserve to continue to be bad, and it will serve as a forcing function to remove the toxic culture more quickly, rather than the luck of the draft potentially shielding mismanagement from accountability.
It just gives both sides (players and teams) more optionality to achieve the best outcomes.
What’s the downside?
A bad team would likely have to pay a lot more to a good rookie to entice them and it would waste a lot of that additional cap flexibility. You’d end up with destination markets NY, LA, MIA consistently getting the best prospects because of the opportunity for better lifestyle and also raising brand endorsements. With a better talent pool to choose from at the start they’d likely end up with bird rights to more of the best players and would end up with the same teams having dynasties year after year.
You’d also run into issues with the length of their cap hike. If they spend the additional cap space for multiyear contracts and improve enough to lose that higher cap, they still have those contracts on the books and end up in the luxury tax for possibly multiple years and that’d likely force them to quickly dismantle the team. If you limited contracts to 1 year for the cap boost you’re not going to have many players wanting to sign a short term deal that if you end up doing well the team has to get rid of you to stay out of the luxury tax.
You might get a whole lot of player movement, but it wouldn’t let teams develop well and players would not like moving their families that much. It’s a very short term benefit in a long term game.
The destination market thing is a critique I expected but:
a) small markets are always going to be disadvantaged, don’t know if there’s a way around that
b) we saw just this summer IHart leaving basically equivalent basketball situations in one of the biggest markets for one of the smallest, because of them having more money to offer
c) the best way to get endorsements is to be a good player, best way to be a good player is to go to best basketball situation for you, which is market-independent
On the contracts point, yeah that’s the toughest but there are definitely ways to smooth the effect of the cap changes and/or give caveats for existing contracts