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Salary Caps and the Splitting of Labor [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-22

A change of pace this morning based on a conversation I heard on the excellent Dominique Foxworth Show. Foxworth and his producer were discussing a wide receiver who plays for the team that the producer, Charlie the Vanilla Snack (look, I don’t come up with these nicknames; I merely report) roots for. The details do not matter, but both Charlie and Foxworth lamented that the salary cap made them care about the salaries paid to their favorite players. I suspect that the owners are quite happy with that side effect, as it makes it easier for them to not be the villains.

All major sports, except baseball, in the United States have some form of a salary cap. It is primarily a way for teams to not have to compete on price for star players and to limit the amount of money that goes to the players. This has a weird effect on fans. We all now becomes experts on how much a player is “worth”, as if how they slot into the salary cap is a meaningful measure of how a player helps or hurts a team. The Blackhawks, my favorite team, are a great example of this.

During their last run of Stanley Cup championships, Brent Seabrook was an integral part of their success, a hard hitting, shut down defenseman. His last contract with the team was an overpay based on his age and relative value and the contract, due to injuries and age (father time is still undefeated, whatever LeBron James thinks). Fans turned on Seabrook to a large degree, worried about how his contract was limiting the team’s options to bring in other players to help extend the championship window. Seabrook helped bring the Cup back to Chicago for the first time in almost fifty years, then he did it twice more and fans were concerned with his salary rather than his legacy. A similar thing happened with Seth Jones.

The Hawks traded for him, gave up a lot of assets, paid him as a number one defenseman rather than the number two he is on a good team (witness his success in that role in Florida this season) and then immediately crashed and burned as a team. Fans could not stop talking about the albatross that was his contract despite the fact that he was doing exactly what a number two defenseman was supposed to do. Yes, I know things really soured when he forced his way out of town, but the pressure around his contract was present from the moment the “experts” declared him an overpay. Conversely, Alex Vlasic, a young defender who shows the promise of being a shutdown defenseman with offensive upside, is praised in part because he signed a long-term contract that will underpay him by a lot if he lives up to his potential.

And that is the nasty side effect of the salary cap. It trains fans to hate the idea that players are paid well. A player that maximizes his earnings — in a system that artificially deflates them, I might add — is seen as a bad person, not someone who is helping the team win no matter how good they are. Because if you do not balance the salary cap perfectly, if you do not underpay your top players, then it is harder to build a winning team. The salary cap has trained fans to take the owners’ side, to think of just compensation as wrong and a burden rather than something we should celebrate. It pits one group of working people against another, trains them to reject, at least in some small way, the idea of solidarity.

We should be happy when players make money. They are the ones that provide us with whatever joy sports brings to our lives. No owner ever leveled Anze Kopitar in the corner or scored a seeing eye goal to win the Cup in overtime. No owner has built a team — that is what the GM’s do. We should be celebrating when players and staff make more money, not mourning.

The salary cap is not intended to teach people to turn on their fellow workers, but I am certain that the owners do not mind it has that effect. We should remember, as sports fans, that we are not owners and what is good for owners is not necessarily what is good for us.

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