I was asking because people keep writing about various issues that have differing implications as if they are the same in this thread.
The NBA could have instituted a hard cap for NBA teams (this is in theory to make a point I understand they can't do this unilaterally) at $10 million per team two years ago and the players would still have received 57% of BRI. That's the way it is. As a result the BRI discussion and the hard cap discussion are entirely different. If that were to have happened, player compensation would have been the same but the effective earnings of the players would be less transparent because the public doesn't see how money is divided out of the escrow payment among the players. Those (like CJ) who rant on and on about exorbitant player salaries are missing this fundamental distinction.
The hard cap discussion really only matters to the players to the extent it affects player movement, implies the need for non-guaranteed contracts, and affects high-end star's bargaining power (since they are largely the ones who benefit from Bird rights). Team parity is, at best, a tertiary issue from the player's perspective when it comes to a hard cap. A hard cap, from that perspective, is entirely an owner-to-owner negotiation. It's not a players vs. owners dispute on team competitiveness at all.
