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Michael Jordan has cited a number of compelling reasons for his surprise retirement in 1993, but one stands out as being completely baffling in a modern context. Jordan revealed in Episode 7 of “The last Dance“who told Phil Jackson at the time that” he had no more challenges. ”
This was a unique problem of the 1990s. In the modern NBA, new challenges arise to face the champion every year. When LeBron James was unable to beat the Boston Celtics, he joined Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in an effort to defeat them, and when James similarly intimidated Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, they teamed up to win both Golden State championships. Warriors. Super teams are not an organic element in the NBA ecosystem. They are an answer to the last superteam.
But Jordan reigned over the NBA for almost a decade and deprived many of the best championship players of that time in the process. So why didn’t Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, and Reggie Miller team up to oppose him? It is simple: the rules did not allow it. While free agents were free to do what they saw fit for most of Jordan’s career, the rules in effect at the time made it nearly impossible for superstars to use free agency to build their own contenders. To understand why, we must venture several decades back to the origins of free agency.
A brief history of free agency.
The free agency enjoyed by modern players is a relatively new phenomenon. In fact, even the limited movement of the 1990s was a huge departure from the league’s early history. The NBA did not grant any kind of free agency until 1976, and only did so to settle a 1970 lawsuit filed by Oscar Robertson.
The free agency adopted then had little in common with modern free agency. Teams were granted the right of first refusal on any contract offered to their own players, essentially making each player whose contract expired at that time the equivalent of a modern restricted free agent. If a team chose to let a player walk, the original team received compensation. That compensation was negotiated between the two teams as a kind of exchange, or the commissioner unilaterally decided if the two sides couldn’t agree.
All of this changed four years in Jordan’s career, when the 1988 CBA finally granted players unrestricted free agency once they had reached certain criteria. A victory as great as it was for players across the league did not lead to the immediate formation of superteams. In fact, superstars were very hesitant to explore free agency without restriction at first. Since the start of unrestricted free agency in 1988 and Jordan’s second retirement in 1998, only two reigning All-NBA players changed teams through free agency.
One was Dominique Wilkins, 34, who had already been traded a few months earlier. The other was Shaquille O’Neal, whose city fans infamously told him they didn’t want him back at the price he demanded. A third, Juwan Howard, tried to leave the Washington Bullets for the Miami Heat, but failed because the league ruled that the contract was illegal and that Miami had miscalculated its capitalization space.
Imagine that something like this happens today. Teams spend years planning to have limit space at a specific time because free agents change teams so often. It may have only happened twice in the first decade, but only in the summer of 2019, four different NBA players switched teams in free agency. It could easily have been more. The modern salary cap is designed to encourage player movement. However, the one that existed during Jordan’s peak, was still built around the only reality the league had known up to that point: superstars staying. As a result, he functionally bonded the overwhelming majority of superstars to his original team for the duration of his best moments. He did this through the absence of three of the most important tools in modern equipment construction.
Bird rights, maximum contracts and the luxury tax
The 1999 CBA fundamentally changed three main elements of salary. Each of the three, in their original state, played a huge role in keeping the star-free agents in one place. Those three critical boundary dynamics were:
- Larry Bird Rights: The NBA has always used some version of this rule to allow teams to exceed the salary limit to retain their own free agents. Those rules became stricter over time. In its original state, the Larry Bird exception applies to any player who has been under their previous contract for at least one year. There were no exceptions or levels. All Bird Rights were created in the same way, so a team could theoretically sign a player for a one-year contract, and then, one year later, exceed the limit to sign a significantly larger contract. The 1999 CBA altered this system into the one we have today. The current model includes three levels: Non-Bird Rights (which came after one year), Advance Rights (which come after two) and Full Bird Rights (which came after three). Full Bird Rights allows a team to re-sign their own free agents for up to the maximum. Non-bird rights and advance rights allow, in a circumstantial way, some leeway, but not so much.
- The maximum contract: Players were legally allowed to pay any amount that a team would voluntarily pay until 1999, provided that number is adjusted below the player’s salary limit or Bird Rights. There were no restrictions on the amount (Michael Jordan earned 123 percent of the salary cap for the 1997-98 season), or options (Chris Webber’s 15-year-old rookie deal included a first-year opt-out), and although the CBA of 1995 created a seven-year restriction on duration, previous contracts far exceeding it (such as Magic Johnson’s 25-year contract). The 1999 CBA created the current maximum three-tier system that we have today. Players with four to six years of experience can earn 25 percent of the limit in the first year of a new contract. Players with seven to nine years of experience can earn 30 percent in the first year of a new contract. Players with 10 more years of experience can earn 35 percent in their first few seasons. Lengths have varied over the years, but currently, a team can get five years from its own team and four years from a new one.
- The luxury tax: The NBA did not adopt any form of luxury tax until the 1999 CBA. Even then, the tax would only be paid if the league as a whole paid players more than a certain amount, not just individual teams. That was corrected in 2005, and the most punitive version in existence today was ratified in 2011. This meant that as long as a team operated within the limit rules on player acquisition and signing, they would not be penalized for spending literally none. amount of money.
So what did all this mean in terms of list building? A few things. First, generating boundary space was significantly more difficult on several levels. The highest salary in the first year that any free agent can earn is 35 percent of the salary cap. But according to Hoops Hype’s salary database, between Jordan’s first championship season (1990-91) and his last (1997-98), an astonishing 26 players earned salaries in excess of 35 percent of the cap. That list includes many players who would have liked a superstar to fight Jordan with: David Robinson (five times), Patrick Ewing (four times), Reggie Miller (twice), Gary Payton (twice), and Alonzo Mourning ( twice) everyone makes multiple appearances on that list.
In many cases, players took comical percentages of the limit. Ewing routinely assumed gigantic amounts, up to 76 percent of the limit in Jordan’s last season, though he gave the Knicks some flexibility by signing a one-year deal in 1996. That was the flexibility the Spurs, for example. , they did not have. . David Robinson cost San Antonio 46 percent in Jordan’s final season. These huge numbers not only made creating space on the lid difficult, they also made it more difficult to use. It is common sense. If Ewing can win 76 percent of the Knicks limit, then he would essentially have to accept a 50 percent cut to join a new team, even a modern max deal. The best players at the time monopolized such a ridiculous percentage of a team’s boundary space, and similarly they could demand so much of their own teams thanks to their Bird Rights, that building a superteam elsewhere would simply not be economically practical.
Superstars weren’t the only problem here. The lack of a luxury tax allowed teams to re-sign their own players with impunity. The small-market Indiana Pacers had the third-highest payroll in the NBA in the 1996-97 season. Why? Because they spent more than $ 18.7 million, just under 77 percent of the limit, on four players in the same position. They spent more on the combination of Dale Davis, Antonio Davis, Rik Smits and Derek McKey, all big men, than Toronto or Vancouver spent on their entire rosters. There was simply no reason not to. They happened to have those players. They all produced. There was no financial penalty for keeping them. So they kept them. On some level, this was happening almost everywhere. Opportunity cost leads to prudence that did not exist in the 1990s.
In some cases, players even managed to use the rules of the day to bypass the limit entirely to win contracts that simply wouldn’t be possible today. Having no time restrictions at Bird Rights meant that free agents signed short-term deals quite routinely with the unwritten understanding that in the near future, they would re-sign newer and bigger deals that made up for the money they lost. Horace Grant was the most famous example. He signed a suspicious five-year deal with the Orlando Magic in 1994. That deal paid him less than $ 2.8 million for the 1995-96 season, but included a voluntary exclusion in the summer of 1996. Grant took it, and the new Orlando deal gave him a payment of $ 14.8 million for the 1996-97 season. Under current rules, Grant would only have early booking rights, and with them he could have earned just over $ 5.3 million that Orlando season. This was another way that teams wasted cap space that they couldn’t in modern day gaming, and it wasn’t limited to players like Grant.
Chris Dudley executed such a heinous version of this plan that the league publicly called it “a blatant and transparent attempt” to circumvent the limit. The teams abused this rule so blatantly that the league even fought Dudley’s contract in court. The question arises, if such a loophole existed, why didn’t the teams use it to land superstars? It’s simple: they never made it to free agency.
The absence of a maximum contract not only allowed teams to pay players gigantic percentages of the limit, but also freed them to sign players with outrageously long deals. Ewing, for example, did not come to free agency until 1996, 11 years after he was recruited. His rookie contract could have lasted six to 10 years depending on the options. The duration of these contracts encouraged early renegotiation, because market conditions change during the life of those agreements. Today, player contracts are organically so short that if a player is underpaid, he will come to free agency soon enough to correct that. At that point? A player may be underpaid and still have six or seven years left on a deal. Earning more money meant committing more years. Superstars routinely signed new deals years before previous ones expire to make sure they get paid properly.
Even in the event that a team could get around all of the above obstacles and create enough headroom to sign a superstar free agent while keeping a pre-existing one on their team, they had to deal with the reality that there probably wouldn’t be any superstar out there for them to sign. Similarly, even if a player wanted to form a superior team, he had to hope that by some miracle, there was a team out there that could accommodate him. It was much simpler to force a trade, as Barkley did in 1993, allowing the player much less control over the process. The teams, on the other hand, routinely used trades that would be illegal by modern standards to build monsters before Jordan’s career.
Where did the super-teams of the 1980s come from?
Super teams were plentiful in the 1980s, and they are now. They were simply built in completely different ways. Some of the explanations are quite intuitive. There were fewer teams in the 1980s, for example, making talent more concentrated. But generally speaking, most of the best teams from that decade stacked the deck using methods that are now illegal. One such practice involves an owner so infamous that he now has a rule named after him.
Ted Stepien had no interest in rebuilding when he took over the Cleveland Cavaliers. He wanted a playoff team right away, so he traded all of his draft picks for help from veterans. That is not an exaggeration. The Cavaliers did not keep one of their first-round picks throughout Stepien’s tenure. Another team had their choice each year from 1980-86, and each team was in the top nine. In 1982, that choice was for the Lakers. It was number 1 overall. They used it to select James Worthy. Today, this would be impossible due to the aptly named Stepien Rule. It prevents teams from swapping first-round picks in consecutive years.
The Philadelphia 76ers were able to take advantage of a different kind of despair. When the ABA and NBA merged, the then New York Nets owed the Knicks a $ 4.8 million fee to enter their territory. This is a fairly standard expansion and relocation clause that still exists in many sports today. The problem was that the Nets couldn’t afford it, so they sold Julius Erving to the 76ers to pay the Knicks. Today, any new group of owners would be examined. It would have to be financially stable enough to support the franchise, and even if it wasn’t, selling players for cash is now illegal. That the 76ers were not allowed to rob a member of the Hall of Fame.
And then we have the Boston Celtics. Instead of exploiting the commercial market, they turned to the NBA Draft. With the No. 6 pick in the 1978 draft, they took Larry Bird. The only problem? Bird had not entered the draft. He remained at the school in the state of Indiana, but the Celtics were able to retain his rights and sign him a year later, after graduating. As with virtually all the other rules we’ve discussed, this one was also changed. Players cannot be recruited and still return to college. It is the second rule mentioned in this story that is named Bird.
The perfect Storm
The above moves were a staple of the 1980s. When Larry O’Brien handed over to Commissioner David Stern in 1984, the NBA went from being a somewhat illegal league to one that depended on order. When a team exploited a rule to gain an unfair competitive advantage, the NBA changed that rule to protect the balance of the sport. When Jordan started winning, the old ways of fighting a team as dominant as the Bulls were gone, but new ones that would eventually be invented were not yet possible. In other words, building a superteam was only possible through brilliant number management.
And that’s what the Bulls had. Not only did they select Jordan, but they had the foresight to select Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant on the same draft. Dennis Rodman was robbed in a trade and Pathologically underpaid pippen to maintain flexibility They identified Toni Kukoc in Europe and prioritized 3-point shooting guards alongside Jordan like Steve Kerr and Craig Hodges before the rest of the league caught up on analytics. Jordan would have won championships practically no matter what. He was so good. But that he won six with the dominant charts around him came down to his office’s ability to surround him with more talent than anyone.
In that sense, Jerry Krause was right all along. At that point in NBA history, players could not forcibly build their own dynasties. It was the organizations that won championships.
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