The Second Apron Destroyed The Boston Celtics!
You know who I’d like to be right about now? The guy who owns all the U-Haul trucks in Boston, cuz he just had a great month. For those of you out of the loop, we’ve seen a slew of high-profile Celtic departures. Drew Holiday was sent to Portland for Anthony Simons, while Chrisops Pzingis found his new home in Atlanta in exchange for George Nyang. Al Horford is slated to join Golden State, while Luke Cornet joins up with Wemby in San Antonio. Still, the biggest names are KP and Drew. the big additions that made the 24 Celts a championship team. Let’s be real, neither player performed admirably in the Knicks series. Drew started to show his age while KP battled an illness off the court. Still, both were well regarded both within the organization and the fan base. So, why did Boston send them out after only two seasons with the team? Well, because of the Second Apron. And isn’t that everyone’s favorite phrase nowadays? Gone are the days when the offseason revolved around putting together fun trades or making fun of Ben Simmons workout videos. Now it’s all about trying to shuffle money around to stay under this great and terrible cap. Cuz that’s what it is, a salary cap. For the first time since the 40s, the NBA effectively has hard salary caps and we’ve seen the consequences. We’ve seen former champs like Denver and Boston lose key role players because it couldn’t afford to take on the raises that those players previously would have received. I think another effect is that we’ve seen the decline of the so-called marginal max guy. You just can’t overpay dudes like you could before or easily trade away their deals. Will Jokic or Tatum or SGA still get their money? Of course. But will Zion or Zack Lavine or Trey Young? I’m not so sure. This has been an issue since Max contracts were introduced back in 99. Ideally, the better a player is, the more they should make. Sounds simple. That’s why Michael Jordan later on was making more than half of the Bull’s payroll. But with the Max, the salaries flattened at the top end of the scale. That’s why the $50 million club last season include homegrown MVPs like Curry Embiid Jokic. But it also had Bradley Beal. Now the apron might be changing that. But I have one main question today. Is this good? Like the players are still going to make their money. The owners are fine. But for all of us outside, the fans and the media, do we like what the NBA has become? Let’s talk about it. First, some clarification. In 2023, the NBA and the Players Union agreed on a new collective bargaining agreement, retaining much of the language from the 2016 agreement. However, it instituted a second tax apron. The league has had a salary cap since the 1980s. However, multiple exceptions have made this limit easier to evade than the hard cap we see in the NFL. If teams breach the luxury tax line, they pay a tax that is then redistributed throughout the league. this to prevent the likes of the Lakers and the Knicks from outfitting minnows like New Orleans and Utah. It’s something we see in non-cap sports like international football or baseball. All the best guys seem to end up in LA or Madrid one way or another. Anyway, historically, the tax only applied to spending, not really to team building. Taxpayers did receive a smaller mid-level exception, but overall, everybody still played by the same rules. The Second Apron changes this. Second Apron teams can’t do signing trades. can’t take back salaries in a trade. Their draft picks get shuffled around. In effect, it freezes their roster and prevents the kind of fringe moves that ultimately make all the difference in this league. You know what it reminds me of? The NFL. I’ve talked about this before, but basically in the NFL, the best place to be as a franchise is to have your quarterback still on their rookie salary. Because their pay is set by scale, the most important player on the roster can be severely underpaid for the first five years of their career, enabling higher spending on supporting pieces. However, when a franchise level QB does get paid, it’s at a much higher valuation, meaning cuts have to happen throughout the roster. That’s why Tyreek Hill had to leave KC for his big extension. And that’s probably why he’s not a Dolphin next season. That’s why the Bengals are struggling to pay their defensive players. It all goes back to allocating money under the cap. Something’s got to give and somebody gets the short bag. Losing those key vets to free agency means trying to find value in riskier, unproven young players. And the same thing is happening in the NBA. A team like Denver couldn’t hang on to KCP or Bruce Brown. They had to play Christian Brawn and Pwatt and hope things held together. The Warriors had to ditch Jordan P for a couple of reasons, but part of it was his money. And now the Celtics have kicked Holiday and Pzingis to the curb. And again, I got to ask, is this good? Like obviously it’s good for the owners. You know, they get to keep their costs down. You know, it’s hard out there for a billionaire. The players didn’t lose their split of Barri and salaries are still rising. But is this good for fans? We now have this arbitrary clock on teams forcing them to tear down their rosters the moment they taste success. And that makes it harder to watch guys learn their spot in the league, develop, be there for the highs, the lows, the middles. That’s definitely the case for stars. You know, Giannis, Jokic, Curry, Tatum, Brown, all of these guys have spent eight plus years with the same team. But it also means we don’t get the chance to see roll guys become household names locally. Take Mitch Robinson. Ask 10 Nick fans on the street, you’ll get 10 different opinions on him. But he’s been with the team his whole career. He’s the last remnant of the Carmelo era, and we’ve seen him go from fringe second rounder to a key role player playing real playoff minutes. He’s a guy with flaws, but he’s our guy with flaws. Now, it’s increasingly hard to develop those connections with role players. Worse still, part of me wonders if this was all intentional. I’m writing this just after the draft, and it’s already been a summer full of trades. And I do think that part of the motivation for the second apron is that it creates a lot of summers like this where a lot of money gets moved around to avoid financial penalties and we get a lot of content out of that. I mean, what was the biggest moment of last season when the whole sports world turned to the NBA? Like it wasn’t the finals. It wasn’t Nick Celtics. It wasn’t the MVP race. It wasn’t Shay’s scoring run. It didn’t even happen on a basketball court. It happened on our phones. The biggest moment undoubtedly was the Luca trade. We all went crazy. We couldn’t stop talking about it. We couldn’t stop making memes and we couldn’t stop making content about it. That’s what worries me when the trades and transactions go from accessories to the game and are instead bigger than the game itself. So yeah, that’s where I’m at on the Second Apron. Like I said in my NFL free agency video, the smartest teams are those who will know how to maneuver and use those rules to their advantage. Who will that turn out to be? We’ll see. Probably not Phoenix, though. They’ve still got some things to work out.
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