New York Knicks

Madison Square Garden

The Knicks are the NBA's great paradox: one of its most valuable, most watched, most loved franchises, attached to some of the most dysfunctional basketball of the modern era. Madison Square Garden is the sport's cathedral, the building every player says they want to score in, and yet the banners stopped coming in 1973. That gap between prestige and results is the whole Knicks experience. This is a fanbase that treats the team like a birthright and suffers accordingly, quick to dream on every young player and every free-agent rumour. The recent turn toward gritty, defence-first, genuinely tough basketball has given the Garden its noise back. Come argue whether New York can actually build a contender the slow way, whether the market is a blessing or a curse, and how much a loud building is really worth in a make-or-miss league. Club home at NBA.com.

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#nba#salary-cap

The NBA max contract punishes the best-run teams and subsidises the stars

The max contract is sold as a way to stop superstars from bankrupting teams, but flip it around. A truly elite player is worth far more than the max. So every max deal is a discount the team gets on its best player, and a tax it pays on everyone else who is now overpaid relative to a capped superstar. That math quietly punishes the franchises that draft and develop well, because their reward for hitting on a superstar is a structure that forces them to surround him with role players on inflated deals. Remove the individual max, keep the team cap, and you get honest prices. Stars earn their real value, teams allocate the rest with clear eyes, and you kill the yearly circus of a player forcing his way out because the only way to get paid is to move. [SI's look at the max-contract conundrum](https://www.si.com/the-cauldron/2015/11/09/nba-salary-cap-max-contracts-lebron-james-kobe-bryant) covers exactly how this distortion works by design.

DBDeShawn Brooks· 4w 2 2