Clearly, this is the prize player at this year's trade deadline.

The biggest name at this year’s trade deadline wasn’t Antawn Jamison, who is touted as the final piece that will push Cleveland to a championship. It wasn’t DeShawn Stevenson or Caron Butler, who have helped Dallas to a ten game win streak. And it wasn’t Marcus Camby, who plugged the gaping hole Portland had at center.

No, the biggest name this year was Tracy McGrady, an aging star recovering from knee surgery who not only wasn’t earning many minutes, but was asked by the Rockets to stay away from the team until they could find a trade partner.

Yes, that’s right, the most coveted trade asset this season was a player who is a mere shell of his former self. To be fair, however, the reason he was in such demand wasn’t because of his basketball skills. It was his $23 million dollar contract.

It’s a sad truth, but for many teams in the NBA, the game is more about dollars and cents than X’s and O’s. You may have heard, but there’s a recession on. Money is tight, even for millionaire owners. As often as they can, many of them are looking to cut expenses and save a little bit of money to offset costs. They can raise ticket prices to earn extra cash, or look for ways to save on hotels and airfare. But player salaries – their major expenses – are very difficult to tinker with. As per the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, players’ contracts are guaranteed. Once a contract is signed, ownership has to pay the money out, regardless of the player’s performance.

McGrady is a perfect example. When he signed his contract in 2004, $23 million per year sounded pretty reasonable. (It was actually only $21 million at the time, but slowly increased each season.) After all, McGrady was one of the league’s biggest names. He and Yao Ming were expected to anchor a new dynasty in Houston. Instead, the Rockets famously failed to escape the first round until McGrady went out for the rest of the 2008-09 season with microfracture surgery.

But when T-Mac’s performance started to fall well below his pay grade, what options did Houston have? His contract was guaranteed. They couldn’t re-negotiate with him, and they couldn’t cut him. They could have waived him, but his contract would still remain on the books, taking up salary cap space. All they could do was hold on to him, unless a trading partner appeared.

And one did, although it wasn’t until the final year of his contract. Expiring contracts are worth their weight in gold to financially struggling owners, since they come off the books at the end of the year. Once the contract expires, you can use the cap space to sign any player you want – or, more importantly, you can leave it unused and save some money. And when you’re trying to trim payroll, $23 million dollars can go a long way.

Next season, we could see another interesting situation. Portland’s Joel Przybilla, already out for the season with a torn patellar tendon, went in for surgery this week after re-injuring his knee when he slipped in the shower. (As a Blazers fan, it kills me to even type that sentence. It’s been an awful year for Portland fans.) He is unlikely to be back next year, and may be done for his career, since he’s already 30. If doctors declare his career to be medically over, most of his salary will be reimbursed by an insurance company. That gives you an expiring contract worth just over $7 million, and you even get most of the money back. You can expect teams looking to shed salary to leap at the chance to pick up Przybilla’s contract, likely giving Portland a promising young player (or players).

So is there a way to solve this? Can we make the most valuable and coveted contracts the ones belonging to the best players rather than guys who aren’t playing? One easy way to solve the problem would be to make contracts non-guaranteed. If a player is injured, let the team waive him and get him off the books, or at least buy him out at a reduced rate. If a player is playing poorly, cut him. Get rid of him and let another team pay him the market rate. This way teams aren’t hamstrung by unwieldy contracts and can rebuild quickly. Sounds good, right?

Well, the players probably won’t think so. It’s hard to imagine the players’ union voluntarily giving up guaranteed money. But the idea of a non-guaranteed contract isn’t foreign to pro sports. The NFL doesn’t guarantee its contracts to its players. If a player isn’t playing as well as the team would like, they cut him and move on. It happens all the time. Do you think that motivates guys to play a little harder? I bet it does. It’s possible, and even likely, that we’ll see ownership pushing for this when they start negotiating the new CBA next year.

That’s why expiring contracts are so valuable—it’s about the only way to cut salary, short of just waiting for players to leave in free agency. The value is in what was traded for it. Usually to get it a team has traded away longer-term contracts that would tie up that money for years to come. And while the salary dump takes a year to take effect (until that massive contract expires), it still eventually cuts the payroll and saves money.

But the real question is, is this even a problem? After all, there’s plenty of demand for large expiring contracts. Knicks fans are ecstatic that they have McGrady, because it opens up so much cap space next season for someone like LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, or Chris Bosh. And you can imagine the Rockets are excited to have McGrady’s contract off the books in exchange for a young hotshot like Kevin Martin. So isn’t everyone happy? As an analyst, I’m not, since I’m stuck reporting on inactive players as trade bait, but if it’s just me, I imagine the NBA is okay with that.

But next year, when you see teams clamoring to pick up Przybilla or New York’s Eddy Curry, who is set to earn over $11 million in the last year of his contract despite being, well, awful, you’ll know exactly why. You won’t have to like it – I probably won’t – but you’ll at least be able to understand it.

Wooo! We're in the tournament! Or, at least we're on the bubble!

March is here, and for many of us, that can mean only one thing. No, not St. Patrick’s Day, and no, not my wife’s birthday (sorry, honey), but the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship. Yes, March Madness is upon us. The tournament itself doesn’t start until March 16, so until that time, we’ll have to content ourselves with endless speculation about which teams will and will not make it into the field. 31 teams are guaranteed berths by winning their conference tournaments (or, in the case of the Ivy League, winning the regular season championship), leaving 34 at-large spots open. Some teams are obvious choices, like Kansas, Kentucky, and Syracuse, provided they don’t win automatic spots. Others are less obvious, though. Utah State is 23-6, but play in the appalling WAC. If they don’t win their conference tournament, should they still make it into the Big Dance?

As much flak as the selection committee takes over where they seed teams in the tournament, they take even more when they decide which teams on the bubble to even allow into the tournament. To be fair, it’s hardly a simple process. There are a lot of ways to measure a team’s strength, and all of them do so differently. For instance, Gonzaga has a record of 24-5 this year, and plays in the equally reprehensible WCC, yet no one is questioning whether the Bulldogs will make an appearance in the tournament. Why then, the lack of love for the 23-6 Aggies?

Let’s consider each of the tools the selection committee uses and see. One major tool they use is RPI (Ratings Percentage Index). RPI essentially measures a team’s winning percentage against its strength of schedule. No one is going to argue that a win over, say, Duke, is more valuable than a win over 1-28 Marist. RPI weights those wins differently. It also takes into consideration a team’s opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage. A win over Robert Morris (20-11) or Quinnipiac (21-8) might seem solid considering their winning percentages, but if you look at their strengths of schedule, you’ll find that they reached those gaudy records by pounding on teams like Wagner (5-26). RPI helps to provide a clearer picture. Teams with an RPI of 30 or above have a solid chance at an at-large spot; any lower, and you might be sweating on Selection Sunday.

The selection committee also considers how many quality wins a team has, usually determined by RPI. If your team beats an RPI top-50 opponent, that’s a quality win. A top-25 win is even better. The committee will look at how a team performed against high quality opponents to get an idea of how they would perform in the tournament. (They also take bad losses into account, so be careful if you lost to, say, Cal State Bakersfield this year.) If you’re on the bubble, you’d better have a few quality wins to hang your hat on, or you might be watching from home.

Finally, even if you have a solid RPI and some quality wins, you’d better have 20 or more wins, especially if you’re a mid-major team. The selection committee has been willing to give teams with as few as 17 wins at-large bids (2004 Alabama, I’m looking at you here), but those are nearly always power conferences. Mid-majors usually need 20-25 wins to secure an at-large spot. If you’re hovering around 18 or 19, you stand an excellent chance of being passed over.

So once the committee uses these tools to create a list of the top 40 or so teams in the nation other than those with auto bids, they discuss which should and which should not be in the tournament. Like it or not, prestige plays a factor here. If you’re a team like North Carolina, Arizona, or Kentucky that has a rich tradition in the tournament and you’re on the bubble, you might find yourself included in the tournament even if there are other, slightly more deserving, teams.

So the teams that find themselves on the bubble are usually the 30^th-40^th best teams, after removing automatic qualifiers. These are teams that are frantically scrambling for wins at the end of the season, desperate for one last chance to impress the selection committee before they make their decision. This year, that’s teams like Illinois, Florida, San Diego State, and Dayton, who have been good, but hardly great. That also includes teams like Utah State, who have made a name for themselves by pummeling atrocious teams but have hardly been tested against power teams. The Aggies have an RPI of 32 (solid), a strength of schedule that is the 102^nd toughest in the nation (not so solid), and only one win over a top-25 RPI team (vs. no. 22 BYU in December). Put that together and their 24-6 record doesn’t look quite as impressive.

Utah State still stands a fair chance of making the tournament, even as an at-large team, but it’s nothing that I’d bet my house on. (I don’t even own a house, so I’d definitely think twice here.)

RPI, strength of schedule, and quality wins, are also great tools to use when filling out your bracket. I don’t want to give away all of my secrets here, because I’m writing an article about that in a couple of weeks, but suffice it to say that there’s one major factor the selection committee doesn’t take into account that is a major predictor of future success.

In the meantime, you can impress your friends that are fans of bubble teams by scoffing at them with disdain, saying things like, “You think your team can make the Dance with an RPI of 74? Please.”

A screenshot from Johnny Lingo, in all it's 1969 glory.

If your family is anything like mine, then you grew up watching Johnny Lingo. It’s a short film with a cheesy, heart-warming message, and I’m sure I’ve seen it upwards of fifty times. Let me tell you the story.

Johnny Lingo (that’s his name) is a shrewd Polynesian trader who goes back to his home village to select a wife. The custom was to pay the woman’s father, in cows, for his daughter—maybe one or two cows for a Nice Personality, and up to five for a looker. Johnny chooses the town’s ugliest girl, Mahanna, and everyone assumes it’s so he can get her on the cheap—until he offers and pays eight cows for her hand. Later we discover that Mahanna has blossomed into a gorgeous woman, and it was Johnny’s gift of self-worth that caused the change. Something something something, happily ever after.

The whole point of the thing is that she turns into someone actually worth eight cows—to the extent that, at the end of the movie, her father accuses Johnny of cheating him by paying only eight cows for a girl clearly worth ten (tip: don’t suggest to your wife how many cows she might be worth). Johnny, that sly dog, knew what he was getting from the beginning. He knew that Mahanna had a high ceiling, you could say. Ridiculous upside.

It’s a nice introduction to any Sunday School lesson. But it also throws into stark relief an enormous mistake that a lot of NBA GM’s make, and that we’re probably going to see a lot more of this summer. This movie’s 25 minutes of cinematic goofiness are so deeply embedded in my psyche that I’ve come to call it the Johnny Lingo Effect.

The mistake is counting on a player to grow into a contract. We’ve seen it a hundred thousand times—a player has a good season or two, maybe a good playoff performance, and a GM hurriedly gives them a massive contract that they’re not worth. The GM is trying to catch a wave… by overpaying the player now, they can lock them up for a few years. Surely the huge contract will spur the Johnny Lingo Effect, and the player will blossom into someone worth that much money.

But how often does it happen? We have a laundry list a mile long of players that haven’t lived up to the size of their contracts (are you really going to make me cite examples? Eddy Curry, Jermaine O’Neal, and Rashard Lewis come to mind without pausing to think). There are a few possible candidates, but in each case it’s still a stretch to say that they grew into their contract—and you can almost certainly say it wasn’t the money that did it. The mythical Johnny Lingo Effect is alive and well in the minds of some GM’s, but to find a player that has actually shown it is a major exception to the rule.

That said, Joe Johnson could be one. He wasn’t worth his pay when he arrived in Atlanta in 2005, with a freshly-minted contract of $70 million over five years. They only won 26 games in his first season there, and the year-over-year improvement was marginal (30 wins the following year, then 37, then 47). But this year, ignoring the past, the Armadillo Cowboy is a key cog on one of the Eastern Conference’s top teams. It’s true that his individual numbers haven’t changed at all this year, so maybe he hasn’t even improved at all, but it’s a lot easier to justify his solid contract when the team is gearing up for a deep playoff run.

With his free agency this summer, though, is another GM going to count on the Johnny Lingo Effect kicking in for Joe Johnson again? Probably. With so many teams clearing out big cap space without actually having a shot at LeBron James or Dwyane Wade, it’s likely that a GM will offer Johnson a max contract, with the hopes that someday he’ll be worth it. He won’t, he’s not a difference maker; talented as he is, he’s not the guy that’s going to take the team on his back and carry them to crucial wins. But you just know that some naïve GM is going to have cap space burning a hole in his pocket, and he’s going to overpay.

Amar’e Stoudemire and Rudy Gay are prime candidates, too. When all the A-level free agents are used up, look for an aspiring team (Chicago, maybe, or the Clippers) to spend too much on one of these mostly-unproven guys.

It’s tempting to think that superstar treatment would have the Johnny Lingo Effect on Stoudemire. He’s certainly a talented player, and he’s capable of putting up huge numbers. But how big will his numbers be on a slower-paced team? Will he play defense on a team that requires it? Is his ego going to get in the way (I know the answer to this one: yes). But without a substantial change, it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see much improvement from Stoudemire, though his physical skills are tremendous. He needs a mentor; he needs someone to teach him maturity and respect. He needs a couple of summers with Team USA (remember how amped up LeBron and D-Wade were after that experience?). But if he was going to blossom into a max player on his own, he would have done it by now (he’s been in the league a year longer than LeBron).

I’m a big fan of Rudy Gay, but I can’t help seeing him as more of a Scottie Pippen-type (minus the defense). If he’s planning on becoming a max-earning superstar, he should be starting now. The problem is that he doesn’t really stand out among Memphis’s starting five—and a max player needs to be a team leader, or he’s not worth his salt.

An interesting case, though, is his teammate Zach Randolph. He wasn’t worth his behemoth contract with the Knicks or with the Clippers. But suddenly, with the Grizzlies, he’s getting his 20-and-11 per game and not destroying the team. The Grizz are at .500 and just 3.5 games out of the playoffs—up from an abysmal .283 last year. He’s had his first All-Star season next to Gay, Marc Gasol, O.J. Mayo, and Mike Conley, and they’ve formed a very solid starting five. In Z-Bo’s case his success might have more to do with fitting in with his team than with actually growing into his contract, but at least you can make the argument that he’s worth his $16 million this year. Never thought I’d say that.

If the new CBA does come down with a hard cap it will cause havoc among the players, but it might all end up being for the better. GM’s are always going to overpay players, we know that. But if it becomes harder to overpay by a lot, then everyone benefits—the GM saves money and the team doesn’t tie up their financial future in one player, for starters. The player gets less money, clearly, but in the end they benefit from not having the huge contract held over their head (does anybody have good feelings toward Eddy Curry these days? Didn’t think so).

Ultimately, I think it’s fair to say that the Johnny Lingo Effect is absolutely never, in any case, worth counting on from a GM point of view. The best players in the league show their stripes early on, so it’s not really a guessing game—if a guy seems like a middling player early in his career, it’s a fairly safe bet that he’ll be middling for most of his career.

In the scene showing Johnny Lingo’s wedding, some boys hide in the bushes and taunt the not-yet-happy couple with a rhyme: “Johnny Lingo had a cow, trade it for an ugly wife. Johnny Lingo’s married now, he’ll be sorry all his life!”

Or, at least, until the contract expires.

For at least one night, America was passionate – passionate! – about hockey.

This should be a gigantic opportunity for the NHL, a league with sagging attendance, a limited fan base, and a badly damaged public image after the 2004-2005 lockout that saw the disappearance of an entire season. For the first time in a long time, people were excited about hockey. Shouldn’t the league be all over this? Shouldn’t they be herding us toward exciting games like last night’s Red Wings-Avalanche tilt?

No, of course not. The marketing geniuses that brought you the cancellation of an entire season and prevented the Stanley Cup from being awarded for the first time since 1919 (when an outbreak of influenza forced an early end to the finals after five games) not only aren’t promoting their product, they’re actively destroying their brand’s image. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is still debating whether or not he wants his players competing in the 2014 Olympics. Since the overwhelming majority of Olympic men’s hockey players also play in the NHL, prohibiting them from competing would effectively kill any chance of seeing a game with the level of talent we saw on Sunday ever again in the Olympics.

Canada's Sidney Crosby - "The Next One" - could be the key to bringing the NHL back from the brink.

Now, I understand Bettman’s point. In order to allow NHL players to compete in the Olympics, the league has to take an extended break. Without any games, there aren’t any ticket sales, which is tough to stomach for a team already hurting for revenue. I get that. But couldn’t he have chosen a different time to say this? Following up one of the greatest hockey games of all time with hand-wringing over finances doesn’t come off seeming prudent. It feels miserly.

It doesn’t help that the league, though having incredibly talented players, is at its most diluted in years. Years of expansion have turned a competitive league into an afterthought, featuring new teams in warm-weather markets like Phoenix, Atlanta, Carolina, and Nashville. Team names like the Coyotes, Thrashers, Hurricanes, and Predators don’t exactly make one think of hockey.

So if you want to save the NHL, I say trim the fat away. Warm-weather teams? You’re gone. That means San Jose, Anaheim, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte, Tampa, and Miami bringing us down to a manageable 20 teams. That leaves us with more talented teams that people can actually get behind. It also almost guarantees a big-name player on each team, which brings me to my second point: the NHL needs to promote its stars. Crosby is already one of the league’s biggest names, but what about Ryan Miller? I actively follow most sports so I can write articles here, and I hadn’t heard of him before last week. In fact, I didn’t know what team he played for until I looked it up just now. (Fact: Miller plays for the Buffalo Sabres.)

On top of Crosby and Miller, the NHL has a huge star in Alex Ovechkin, the two-time defending MVP. Ovechkin and Crosby already have a rivalry building, having met in last year’s Eastern Conference playoffs (featuring the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals) and in the Canada-Russia game last week. It’s hockey’s equivalent of Kobe-LeBron or Federer-Nadal. Promoting that rivalry is key to restoring the NHL brand; it worked for the NBA with Magic-Bird.

But even if you do all of that, the fact is that most Americans just aren’t interested in hockey. It still has a reputation as a Canadian or European sport. That’s fair, considering a significant amount of the players are Canadian, Russia, Ukranian, Swedish, and so on. So how do you solve that problem? I say send four teams up north, giving us an even split of 10-10 between the U.S. and Canada, and make those the two conferences. That way, every Stanley Cup final turns into a grudge match between the two countries. Players will be fighting for national honor. Wouldn’t you think more Americans could get behind that?

It’s unlikely that any of these changes will actually be made, I admit. But the fact is that the NHL needs to do something. The league is hurting. I have a friend in Phoenix who is a huge fan of any and all professional Arizona teams. He loves the Suns. He loves the Cardinals. He even loves the Phoenix Mercury, the current WNBA champions. But when I asked him if he could name a single player for the Coyotes, not only did he say no, but he told me, unsolicited, that he despises hockey.

When loathing is the first emotion your league inspires, you know you have a serious image problem.

But the league has just been handed a golden opportunity to step back into the national spotlight. This is their big chance to do something. If they don’t, we might not hear from Miller and Crosby again until the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, if even then.

Michael Jordan showed us a completely new definition of what a superstar could achieve, and in turn, he brought the NBA to new levels of marketing, appeal and popularity.

In the post-MJ era, a strike, several poor drafts, a fan-player brawl and many unlikeable superstars once again put the league in a funk, written off by a lot of America as a “thug’s game.”

Starting in 2003, the NBA began to make its way back to the top again. LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, Chris Paul, Deron Williams, Kevin Durant and Derrick Rose began impacting the league almost immediately. International stars like Yao Ming and Dirk Nowitzki started making their mark, and in turn completely changed the way the scouts and teams looked for talent.

With so many likeable young stars, and a crop of classy and talented veterans, the NBA seems to be entering a new golden age. But that doesn’t mean things can’t change in a heartbeat. As the NBA heads into the summer of 2010, a whole lot of things are afoot that could change the NBA as we know it.

Several important things happen this summer. The 2010 NBA Draft takes place June 24, and this draft that could change the composition of the NBA.

The prize? John Wall, a point guard out of Kentucky who is one of those LeBron-type players who we’ve followed since his high school days. He’s shown flashes of complete and utter brilliance on the court this year, making clutch shots, bringing his team national attention and at times completely taking over the game.

As the consensus number-one pick, the team that gets the number one pick could be in for some huge changes.

Right now, the NBA features a whole lot of great point guards. Young players like Chris Paul, Rajon Rondo, Ramon Sessions, Jameer Nelson, Jose Calderon and Derrick Rose are sharing the stage with vets like Chauncey Billups, Jason Kidd, Steve Nash, Mo Williams. A draft class featuring Brandon Jennings, Ty Lawson, Jonny Flynn, Stephen Curry, Eric Maynor and Darren Collison has only added to the crop.

Teams like New Orleans, Denver, Oklahoma City and the Orlando Magic have two PGs on their team that could be starters. So what happens when you add a once-in-a-generation talent like John Wall into the mix, particularly when a lot of these teams with good PGs are lottery teams?

New Jersey, Houston, New Orleans, the Clippers, Sacramento, Golden State and Minnesota are all lottery teams that are more than set at the point guard position. Then there’s the Utah Jazz, who own the Knicks’ first round pick and feature a pretty good player by the name of Deron Williams.

What happens if any of these teams get the number-one pick?

If you’re the Nets, Clippers, Sacramento or Minnesota, you better believe that you’ll be dumping your point guard. Devin Harris, Baron Davis, Beno Udrih and Jonny Flynn, one of those could be playing elsewhere next year. And here’s the real rub: the team dumping them needs to get rid of them quick, and for Davis and Udrih especially, it’s going to be tough to move those contracts.

But those teams aren’t really teams that are going to do any damage in the next few years.

How about if Utah gets the number one pick? They’ve got Deron Williams, who is a great PG, but simply isn’t as good as John Wall. So the Jazz have to ship him off somewhere.

What if he goes to Cleveland (assuming LeBron is there), or to a team like Memphis, who is desperately in need of a good PG? Or how about Atlanta?

He could push any one of those teams from “fun to watch, first round exit” to “dangerous team on the rise, don’t want to see them in the playoffs.”

What about the Hornets? Chris Paul is the one selling tickets there, but he’s nothing but a pure point guard, same with John Wall. If the Hornets win the lottery, there are two choices: they keep Paul and trade the No. 1 pick, or they trade Paul and keep the no. 1 pick. The no. 1 pick would become a hot commodity, and the Hornets would be able to get a pretty good player for that. We’ve seen what Chris Paul could do with a team highlighted by David West and Peja Stojakavic, what happens if they pick up a real blue-chipper, say, someone from Memphis?

Knowing the way the Hornets operate, with the bottom line at the top of the priority list, it would be more than likely that Chris Paul is sent elsewhere, probably for contracts that would help the Hornets save money.

Almost every other team would be crazy not to make a push for Paul, and imagine Paul on another team. Maybe contenders like the Lakers, Magic, Mavericks and Cavaliers go for him.

Now let’s look at the lottery teams who could really benefit from someone like John Wall.

Sacramento would have a young, dynamic frontcourt of Tyreke Evans and John Wall? Both can score, both can defend, and Wall is a great passer as well.

Memphis with a point guard would be dangerous.

Should Miami get lucky again in the lottery, a possible frontcourt of Wade and Wall would make Miami an even more attractive destination for those big name free agents.

In a league populated with young point guards, adding what could be one of the best to play the game to the league could really prove to be explosive for the right team. And with so many of the perennial playoffs teams possibly in the lottery due to off-years (Miami, New Orleans) or injury (Houston, Portland) along with teams on the rise (Memphis, Sacramento, Milwaukee, Charlotte) the possibilities for the league to get shaken up by the addition of Wall could be felt league wide.

It’s just one more thing coming up this summer that could really shape the NBA for the next decade to come. Stay tuned for more.

Incredibly, both the NBA and NFL (the country’s two most watchable leagues) are both threatening lockouts in 2011 after their respective CBAs expire. They both have the same situation on their hands—the owners want to make more money, and the players don’t want to give up the otherworldly amounts of money they’re making. Tough life.

Since they’ve both got the same tasks to accomplish, I don’t see why they don’t all get together and compare notes. Let’s get the NBA and NFL owners and unions together, and assemble one super CBA that works for any sport. Or, at the very least, they could learn from each other so they don’t make the same dumb mistakes.

Specifically, the NFL has got to figure out that using a rookie salary scale is a no-brainer. And the NBA needs to ditch the clumsy salary-matching rule for trades.

The Rookie Scale — Chalk One Up to Common Sense

Somehow the NBA got this right, and the NFL has seen it get worse and worse every year as a gigantic, wildly-gaping flaw in their CBA. In the NBA, rookie salaries are set well before draft day; your salary is determined by when you’re taken in the draft, and many rookies don’t even bother hiring an agent since there’s nothing to haggle over. Nobody holds out for more money, because there is no more money. You get what you get, or you don’t play in the NBA. And, might I add, I’ve never heard anybody complain about it.

In the NFL, though? Wow. Remember JaMarcus Russell’s draft? It was 2007, and the Raiders took him with the first pick. Their multi-million dollar contract offers weren’t enough for him, though, and he held out all through training camp—and several weeks into the 2007 season. Finally the two sides agreed, and Russell joined the team with an eye-popping $68 million contract over six years, with $31.5 million of it guaranteed.

For a bad player. JaMarcus Russell is not a good NFL quarterback. The black and silver sure thought/hoped he would be, but the point is that they shelled out that cash before he’d played a single game of NFL ball. It makes Adrian Peterson’s $40.5 million over six years look like a steal, and unlike Russell, Peterson is actually a player you’d want to have on your team. Last year’s #1 pick by the Detroit Lions, Matthew Stafford, even managed to top Russell—he’s getting $72 million over six years.

In stark, pants-wetting contrast, Blake Griffin was the NBA’s #1 pick last year. His contract? About $13.4 over three years.

Take a look at the salaries of the top ten picks from last year, and compare the NBA salaries to the NFL salaries. It’ll make your jaw drop. NBA rookie salaries also have a fourth year option and the possibility of a fifth year qualifying offer , but the maximum raise is only marginal for each year: 26-27% for the fourth, and 30-35% for the fifth (for example, Griffin’s possible contract over five years is about $27.2 million). And in the NBA, where contracts are guaranteed, a long contract can be just as handcuffing as a large one.

So, obviously the NBA’s got it right. You don’t have to pay small-country-GDP-sized salaries to newbies in the league.

The great part is that this is a concession that the NFLPA will make. Does it matter to any existing NFL players, or their union, if new rookies get paid less? They’d probably prefer it, so then their paycheck isn’t getting dwarfed by some young whippersnapper who may or may not actually even pan out as an NFL player.

So here’s a cue that the NFL can take from the NBA. Put rookies on a salary scale, and the owners can keep the money they save—which, for a #1 pick, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million over the length of the contract. Which is more money than I’ll see in the entire course of my mortal tenure.

Now let’s flip sides. As nice as the rookie scale is in the NBA, they’ve made a super boneheaded move in requiring salary matching in trades.

News Flash: Salary Matching in Trades Makes Zero Sense

If you’re not up to speed, let me fill you in. The NBA requires the combined salaries of traded players to come close to matching—the salaries of the players they receive can’t be more than 125% plus $100,000 of what they trade out. (Note: This isn’t true for teams that are under the salary cap. But that’s not even worth talking about. Last season, only the Memphis Grizzlies were under the cap.)

What this means is that NBA players get traded based on the monetary value of their salary, and not their actual usefulness as a player. Market value is thrown out the window. What if a guy signed a massive contract, and then broke both legs and one arm and was never the same again? Doesn’t matter. You can’t trade him for peanuts; he trades at his salary value.

The NFL doesn’t require this, and it makes much more sense. You can trade a player for market value, regardless of how much he gets paid. Remember when the Raiders traded Randy Moss to the Patriots in 2007? Here’s a world-class receiver, whose value had dropped because he had some serious baggage. Oakland was more than happy to trade him away for a fourth-round pick. That’s it. They used that pick to grab a cornerback, who now has two tackles in his entire career.

Now jump back to the NBA for the contrast. When the Boston Celtics traded for Kevin Garnett, a top player who’d become unhappy with his situation, you’d better believe it wasn’t for just a draft pick. You ready for this?

The C’s traded Ryan Gomes, Gerald Green, Al Jefferson, Theo Ratliff, Sebastian Telfair, a 2009 first round draft pick (top three protected), and a conditional first round pick that had previously been Minnesota’s to begin with. The Timberwolves also got some cash. In return? The Celtics got Kevin Garnett.

Not that it ended up as a lopsided trade; the Celtics got a title out of it. But it doesn’t always work so well (obligatory nod to the Knicks for the Eddy Curry trade), and the salary-matching rules can make it prohibitively complicated to put together a good trade.

That’s why we see all these three-team deals, and situations like Zydrunas Ilgauskas in the Antawn Jamison trade; Big Z had to be included to make the salary portion of the trade work. It should have been a simple trade of a first-round pick for Jamison (and that’s what it will be after Ilgauskas is re-signed by the Cavs in 30 days), but draft picks don’t even count for a single cent toward matching. In this particular instance, scrubbing the salary-matching rules from the CBA is not only better for the players (Z can just stay with the Cavs, instead of taking a 30-day vacation) but also for the teams/owners (the Cavs get to keep Z, and don’t miss his gargantuan presence in the paint. Don’t forget, they lost three straight when he left).

It’s a goofy rule. It’s there to prevent teams from going further above the cap, but in doing so it takes some good old-fashioned capitalism out of it. If an owner wants to take on extra salary in order to boost their talent, great. If another owner wants to shed salaries to save money, like nearly every owner has been doing this year? Well, scrapping this rule would make that a whole lot easier.

The rule might also be in place to promote parity, in that down-on-their-luck teams are likely to get at least something in return for their most-salaried assets in trades. But parity hasn’t exactly been the NBA’s hallmark (go Clippers!), and the NFL has seen two of their all-time worst franchises, the Arizona Cardinals and New Orleans Saints, in the Super Bowl in consecutive years.

Score one for the NFL—here’s something the NBA can learn from.

But Yeah, It’s Not Going To Be That Easy

It all makes too much sense, though. It’s hard to see a CBA get simpler because of more negotiations. If the thing is understandable without a fistful of graduate degrees it will be a marked improvement over what we have now, in either sport.

But complex or not, hard cap or not, goofy trade rules or whatever, holy moly, let’s get this thing solved. Nobody wins in a lockout; they hold out for more money, and end up getting nothing when there’s no games. But let me be clear: I’m not nearly as worried about them as I am about myself. I don’t even want to think about enduring a summer full of nothing but baseball, only to start up a fall with no NBA. Or no NFL. Or neither, in which case I’d end up crying myself to sleep every night. I might start sucking my thumb.

So if either league needs a little help moving the discussion forward… well, I have some ideas.

"You're sending my plus-minus through the roof! I love you, man!"

When you think of the best players in the NBA, a few names come to mind, like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Dwight Howard. They score tons of points per game, and rack up assists and rebounds to boot. All three of them are All-Stars.

But when you hear names like Anderson Varejao, Al Horford, and Josh Smith, you don’t get the same image. Instead, you think of players that are talented, but not elite. Role players might be a good term for them. As impressive as he is, no one is confusing Josh Smith with LeBron James.

But look at these players through the lens of plus-minus, and everything changes.

Plus-minus is one of those terms you hear thrown around all the time, but probably don’t understand fully. Essentially, plus-minus is a measure of how well a player’s team performs while he is on the floor. If the Celtics outscore their opponent by 10 points while Paul Pierce is on the floor, then Pierce has a plus-minus of 10 for that game.

On the surface, that would seem to measure a player’s all-around contributions in a game, both on offense and defense. If Pierce is killing it on offense but routinely being burned by his man on defense, his plus-minus will be a lot lower. But, as you might expect, there are some mitigating factors here. Orlando’s Matt Barnes has one of the highest plus-minus ratings in the NBA, averaging about 4.6 per game, meaning the Magic outscore their opponents by about 4.6 points while he’s on the floor. Impressive numbers, to be sure, but anyone who watches Barnes has to wonder why a player averaging 8 points and 5 rebounds a game is rated so highly.

So what’s the deal? A quick look at Orlando’s lineups gives us our answer. Barnes plays virtually all of his minutes while Dwight Howard, a defensive menace, is on the floor. Not to downgrade Barnes’ contributions, but it’s not difficult to see your team outscore your opponent while the reigning Defensive Player of the Year is there with you.

Meanwhile, Anderson Varejao puts up very similar numbers to Barnes (8 points and 8 rebounds per game), but his plus-minus is good for fourth in the league, behind only James, Bryant, and Howard. Like Barnes, he too benefits from playing alongside a defensive presence in LeBron James. But Varejao also adds plenty of value through energy plays and defensive effort that doesn’t make its way into the box score.

So how can we weed out the pretenders and find the people that are really contributing? One way is to look at plus-minus ratings of pairs of players, showing which guys bring out the best in each other. For instance, when both James and Varejao are on the floor, the Cavs outscore their opponents by over 7 points on average. That’s a pretty healthy margin, and a sign that both are likely contributing (although it could be that only James is contributing, and that he and Varejao happen to play a lot of minutes together). Barnes and Howard make this list, too, with a combined plus-minus rating of about 5.2.

One interesting tidbit: of the top ten two-man combinations by plus-minus, the Hawks have a staggering six of them. Possibly something to remember when you’re placing bets on the postseason.

But if you’re still not convinced, there’s one more way to separate the boys from the men: adjusted plus-minus. This is a more complex statistical model that tracks a player’s plus-minus rating, but also takes into account the ability of the player’s four teammates on the court, as well as that of his five opponents. If the ’96 Bulls and I are playing the ’10 Nets, I’ll probably have a fantastic plus-minus for the game, since my teammates are so good and my opponents are so bad. Adjusted plus-minus helps take that into account and adjusts my score to reflect the fact that I’m 5’9”, completely out of shape, and a turnover machine.

As you can imagine, compiling all of that data is time-consuming, so those who take the time to put those stats together aren’t usually willing to distribute it for free. For most of us casual fans, simple plus-minus is sufficient. It gives us a good, general idea which players are contributing most (and best) in any given game. But as with any statistic, you have to take it with a grain of salt. In last night’s game between the Lakers and the Memphis Grizzlies, Kobe Bryant’s plus-minus was just 3, and was short of the 4 posted by Shannon Brown and Hamed Haddadi. Yet Bryant’s line of 32 points, 6 assists, and 7 rebounds almost doubled the combined output of Brown and Haddadi, and he made the game-winning shot, to boot.

So which player made the biggest impact on his team?

Statistics like plus-minus never tell the complete story, just like anything else. But they do help illuminate things we might not have seen otherwise, and that’s why they’re worth looking at.

Let’s review. Blake Griffin is out for the season. Baron Davis mails it in most of the time. What was supposed to be a playoff season for the Clippers has turned into a 21-33 disappointment.

And now? Mike Dunleavy has (in essence) traded defensive stalwart Marcus Camby for Drew Gooden, Sebastian Telfair for Steve Blake, and starting SF Al Thornton for an injured Travis Outlaw.

Ouch. Cancel the playoff travel plans.

Camby has been instrumental to the team’s (albeit limited) success, and he will be missed. But is it possible that Mike Dunleavy is secretly a genius, and that there’s a master plan behind all this? It’s not likely, but it’s possible.

When everything is considered, the Clippers are actually looking really good for next year. At the risk of cursing and jinxing again, this team has the potential to assemble a surprisingly relevant team for next year. The cap is on their side, and so is the draft… and oh yeah, then there’s these weird trades.

Heck yes, cap space.

Guess how many players the Clippers have on the books for next year?

Baron Davis, Chris Kaman, Eric Gordon, DeAndre Jordan, and Blake Griffin. Five.

That means they have 13 players with expiring contracts (assuming they don’t extend a qualifying offer to Mardy Collins), for a total of about $30.5 million of cap space when the summer rolls around.

To give that some context, the max contracts that LeBron James and Dwyane Wade will get will equal 30% of the salary cap. The 2010 cap was, last July, projected to be in the neighborhood of $50-$53 million; that means those max contracts will amount to $15-16 million for the first year. Not bad.

Don’t get ahead by dreaming of two max players; they still need to fill up a full roster (they need at least 12 guys total). But there is plenty of cap space for one max guy, plus a roster full of role players. And perhaps most compelling is that the players that are still around are the players you’d want to keep—Davis, Kaman, Gordon, Jordan, and Griffin, almost a starting five—and so any potential free agent acquisitions wouldn’t have to worry about joining a talentless team.

Bill Simmons seems convinced that LeBron James is going to sign with the Clippers. I think the smart money is on him staying in Cleveland, especially now that they’ve added Antawn Jamison to help him out, but the Clips make a compelling case should he choose to leave. They’ve got a solid core of talented players, the big market of Los Angeles, no face or legacy bigger than him, and their gaping roster hole happens to be at small forward—LeBron’s position.

A slim chance, yeah, but pretty compelling. And, at this rate, they’ll have a good draft pick too.

Blake Griffin and… John Wall?

It’s entirely possible that Blake Griffin’s injury is a long-term boon for the franchise.

If he hadn’t gotten injured, many predictions had the Clippers making the playoffs, if only barely, this year. It’d be nice to see—their fifth playoff appearance since being named the Clippers—but it could be a success ceiling. The Clips traditionally have a difficult time securing top-level free agents, and so it’s likely that the team wouldn’t get any better after that and Griffin’s strong play would be lost on an underachieving team.

But now? The Clippers have a unique opportunity here. They’re on track for another lottery pick; it’s a long shot, but they could get the #1 pick for the second year in a row. That would mean landing the draft’s biggest prize in point guard John Wall.

They took Griffin last year as the #1 pick and the far-and-away best prospect in the draft. If he can arrive next year and put in production on par with what Tyreke Evans, Stephen Curry, and Brandon Jennings are putting in, plus Wall? Well, this would be a good team with plenty of room to grow.

But yeah, it’s a long shot. The Clips only have a 1.1% shot at getting the #1 pick.

The Portland Trail Blazers had this opportunity two years ago, with #1 pick Greg Oden riding the pine and a .500 season giving them another lottery pick. They only had a 0.6% chance of getting the #1 pick, however, and they didn’t defy the odds—they ended up taking Brandon Rush with the 13th pick, and then trading him to Indiana for Jerryd Bayless. If they got back-to-back #1 picks, they could conceivably have both Oden and Derrick Rose.

Since the NBA-ABA merger, only two teams have gotten #1 picks in consecutive years, and only one team kept both picks—the Houston Rockets, who in 1983 and ‘84 took Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon. The Orlando Magic is the only other team to get so lucky: they took Shaquille O’Neal in 1992, then Chris Webber in 1993—but immediately dealt him to Golden State to get Penny Hardaway (which seemed to work out pretty well for them).

That all said, would the Clippers be disappointed with a top-5 pick, or even a top-10 pick? No sir. The point is that they’ve got Blake Griffin—and now they can grab another top young player.

The trades… were good?

All this amounts to a new perspective on Dunleavy’s trades.

He managed to shed Thornton and Telfair’s contracts, which opened up some cap space. It’s likely that Drew Gooden will be waived, so his salary isn’t worth fretting about. Camby’s expiring contract was traded for Blake and Outlaw’s expiring contracts, so that’s a wash financially.

So why the Camby trade? Well, it’s not something to be proud of. But trading their star PF for a backup point and an injured SF is a quick way to lose some games.

And the more games the Clippers lose, the better their chances in the draft lottery.

It’s probably unfair to say that the move amounts to tanking, as their starters are still on the floor every night (and there’s still 28 games left). But a better pick come June 24th is a very nice side effect to trading away some of the team’s best talent.

So, we’ll see what happens. If none of it pans out, then it’s par for the course for a franchise that has seen its share of personnel arrangements go bad. The best-case scenario, however, is obvious—a starting five of John Wall, Eric Gordon, LeBron James, Blake Griffin, and Chris Kaman, a dozen NBA championships, and the chance to tell the Lakers that there’s a new king of the Staples Center.

I’d like to go on record as a Clippers fan now, before that happens.

It’s a surprisingly contentious issue in the NBA. Situations like this aren’t unique to basketball, either. There are comparisons in football (fourth and one at midfield, do you punt or go for it?) and baseball (bases loaded, two outs, and their best hitter up, do you walk him to avoid possibly giving up four runs?) that cause similar crises in coaches’ minds. Numbers and statistics will give you a clear idea of what is most likely the best course of action, but there are so many variables and mitigating factors that come up in the course of play that it’s difficult to know exactly what to do.

Does fouling when you're up by three points prevent a tying shot like this from happening?

Besides, if you go with the play that looks better statistically but isn’t as common (like trying to convert a fourth and one) and blow it, the media holds you responsible afterward (think Bill Belichick).

As this column is titled “By the Numbers”, you can imagine that I’ll be looking at things through the lens of statistics, but hopefully we’ll be able to understand why a coach would be hesitant to call a play that looks great on paper.

The “foul when you’re up by three” issue has strong opinions on both sides. A lot of people think it makes sense to prevent the other team from having a chance to tie the game with a three. Others think that it’s a dangerous move, because if your opponent gets the offensive rebound, that opens up the possibility of tying the game with a two or winning it with a three.

But how likely is it that the opponent will get the offensive rebound, let alone get the shot off in time?

Let me phrase it another way: As worrisome as this scenario probably sounds, can you think of a single time you’ve seen a game end this way? I can’t, and I’ve watched a lot of NBA games.

In order to figure out how likely it is that a team could win after being fouled when down by three points, I figured I’d need to know how likely it is that a team picks up an offensive rebound from a missed free throw. Before looking at the numbers, I thought about games I’ve seen. Sure, teams pick up the offensive rebound sometimes, but it doesn’t happen often. After all, the rules are set up so it doesn’t happen very often – the defending team gets to put two of its players right next to the basket who can box out their opponents. I can think of far more games where I haven’t seen an offensive rebound from a missed free throw than those where I have.

But just because I don’t remember it happening very often doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen very often. To find how often it happens, I went through play-by-play records of 30 games from February. (I would have analyzed more for a larger sample size, but I was doing this all by hand, and you’d be surprised how long it takes to go through even just one game.) I only considered free throw attempts where there could be a rebound in play, so first attempts out of two (or second out of three) and technical free throws were thrown out.

The most common result of a free throw, as you can probably imagine, is a make. 78% of the attempts I looked at resulted in a make, which lines up neatly with NBA’s free throw average this season (77.5%). That means just 22% of the time, there’s a rebound in play. That would seem to bode well for our idea that fouling is the best strategy, but you have to remember that in this situation, the shooter is going to intentionally miss, almost guaranteeing that there will be a rebound up for grabs. So let’s ignore that first 78% and focus on those rebounds.

When there is a rebound in play after a free throw, it ends up in the hands of a defender 88% of the time. Again, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, based on the way potential rebounders are standing (defense, offense, defense, offense, with defense closest to the rim). The shot ends in an offensive rebound just 11% of the time, according to the data I was looking at (the other 1% was split between jump balls and offensive loose ball fouls, neither of which is helpful to the team trying to catch up).

Let’s think about where that puts us right now. If you let Kobe take his shot, it has a 30-40% chance of going in, depending on how accurate he has been from beyond the arc that night. But if you foul him before he has a chance to shoot, he only has an 11% chance of even taking the shot, and even that will probably be rushed, reducing the shot’s accuracy.

Foul him! We're up by three! But be careful not to foul in the act of shooting! And, uh, be sure to let some time slip off the clock!

So based on that information, why would anyone even consider letting their opponent take the shot? Well, for starters, that 11% figure isn’t quite as cut and dry as it would seem. The rebounders are expecting a missed shot, so they might find a way to get themselves in a better position to grab the ball. Second, defenders have to be careful when fouling a three-point shooter. If you foul Kobe in the act of shooting, he gets three attempts instead of just two. If you can foul him before he gets close enough to take a shot, you’re in good shape, but if he gets closer, he could be expecting the foul and might prepare himself to get a shot off.

And third, sometimes it’s just more valuable to let time slip off the clock. It’s obviously a bad idea to foul if you’re up by three with six minutes left on the clock. It’s probably worth a try if there are only three seconds to go. But what if there are ten? You probably gain more by letting some time run off the clock to prevent them from having enough time after the shot to run another play.

So, strictly based on the numbers, it seems like it’s a good idea to foul when you’re up by three, but it’s best not to make that a hard and fast rule. And now, if you see a game where a coach doesn’t have his players foul in that situation, you can at least understand why they might be hesitant to do so.

Conventional NBA wisdom holds that a team needs a few short guys and a few tall players to be successful. How To Watch Sports checks in with Cleveland Cavaliers analyst Roger Pimentel and Portland Trail Blazers analyst Sam Orme to explore these two teams who have been ravaged by injuries, losing their small guys and big guys, respectively.