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Victor Wembanyama choosing to take a discount and leave roughly $50 million on the table in his latest contract to help the Spurs build and maintain a championship team is exactly what is wrong with the system in the eyes of David Kelly, the new executive director of the NBPA (the players’ union).
“Our position would be that the system should not require a player to carry all that burden,” Kelly said during his introductory press conference last week. “It should not put a player in a position where he has to carry the burden in order to keep a team together. A system that does that, we have a problem.”
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Kevin Love was more direct, saying the second apron has essentially become a hard cap. He referenced how Brad Stevens and Boston traded away Jaylen Brown because he felt he couldn’t have two supermax players together and build out a championship roster, or how the tax is already impacting decisions for the Thunder and Spurs.
“I’ll tell you, selfishly, what’s really f****** stupid, these aprons are f****** with the game,” Love said in an appearance on The Old Man and the Three podcast. “That’s on our side, [the owners] know exactly who they are that did it…
“You’re telling me Oklahoma City can’t keep those three guys together because of these aprons? That’s bulls***. You’re telling me Sam Presti, the greatest, all the things that he’s done, is handcuffed because of these f****** aprons?”
To NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the system is working as designed.
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“It’s certainly not an unintended consequence,” Adam Silver said when speaking to the media after the NBA Board of Governors meeting in Las Vegas on Tuesday. “When you have a salary system in place as we do, every general manager is going to need to make mixed basketball and business decisions. Frankly, they make them regardless of whether you have a cap. You see that in other sports. People manage budgets. People recognize that you can’t — at some point, you can’t have unlimited resources, whether it’s for a team or any business….
“The purpose of the system is ultimately to create competition throughout the league, and from that…
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Publish date : 2026-07-15 15:31:00
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