The NBA has certainly become quite the financial playground for superstars in the league. Players like LeBron James and Kevin Durant clearly boast the skills to be franchise players, yet they insist on creating flexible yet lucrative short term deals with teams.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has expressed his concern with these types of moves, giving plenty of insight on the complexities of the issue.
“One of the unintended consequences (of doing contracts like James) I feel on behalf of the players is the fact that they end up putting themselves in this position where they’re taking enormous financial risk,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver commented on cleveland.com. “The system is designed for guys to enter into long term contracts, so, and you can only get so much insurance. So one of the unintended consequences is they take risk beyond what we would like to see them take.”
These risks do not seem to bother these athletes, as they gain an ultimate sense of flexibility with where they want to take their talents. Despite the embarrassing defeat in the Western Conference Finals, Durant still felt he had all to gain hopping on board with the Warriors. Nevertheless, Silver believes there is much more involved.
“The other thing is, the system is designed and incentivizes players to stay with the same teams,” Silver continued. “At the same time I respect free agency so if they make those decisions to leave, that’s fine too. But as I said, I’d like to talk to the union about maybe modifying the system so there’s a little bit more of an incentive to stay with your existing team.”
It would be interesting to see a system that encouraged young players to follow in the footsteps of players like Dirk Nowitzki and Tim Duncan. The story of an athlete overcoming the hardships of a competitive league is an admirable one, and hopefully we see a system in place that makes this story attractive to players.
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