The Economy Could Alter the Course of 2010

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↵Today, my fellow SN-er Sean Deveney reminds us that basketball happens not in a bubble, and that the struggling global economy might be a not-so-subtle factor in whatever trades go down before the deadline.↵↵I wonder, though, how different this is from other years when all but the most profligate teams are trying to avoid the luxury tax. Deveney points out that this year, the cap might be decreasing, not increasing -- the opposite trend than the one most contracts out there are structured around:↵

↵↵⇥If you’re a GM heading into the trading deadline next week, you have some big worries. You might have looked ahead to next year and planned on a payroll of $73 million, thinking you’d be comfortably under the luxury tax. But the luxury tax threshold is based on how much income the NBA earns worldwide. Because the plummeting economy has weakened the league’s revenue streams, sometime in the past few months, a pretty cold reality struck every NBA exec out there: Next year’s luxury tax threshold will probably be lower than this year’s. If you were planning on a payroll of $73 million, you’d better do some cutting, and fast.↵↵

Add in the fact that many owners have lost a ton of money elsewhere, and all of a sudden avoiding the luxury tax becomes a serious matter for these men who, once upon a time, saw it only as the mark of an inefficient business. It’s still business, but it’s personal business, not business business, or a purely personal whim.↵
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↵All that’s fine, good, and a little terrifying, but this rush to cut salaries -- a practice once reserved for only the most stingy owners -- happens to coincide with the looming transformative event known only as 2010. So even if a team were worried about appearing cheap and alienating fans, it can do so under the cover of trying to land LeBron or Bosh. Everyone’s jettisoning players, ya heard, since everyone wants a crack at that fabled free agent pool. Of course, this doesn’t work so well as an excuse to trade a member of the class of 2010. For instance, the Suns could decimate their roster if the plan was to complement Amare all over again in a year and a half. But trading away one of that summer’s prizes is a transparent move to save money, one that, even in these troubled economic times, no one wants to see dictate the course of basketball.↵