Can teams be too good at drafting?
Photo courtesy of Bill Stephan via Unsplash
In the early 2010s, the Oklahoma City Thunder was shaping up to be one of the greatest young NBA teams of the era. In 2012, led by Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden, the team advanced to the NBA Finals, where they would eventually lose to the Miami Heat in five games.
By pure coincidence, each of those three lead guys would win a Most Valuable Player award during their careers. If you didn’t know what happens next, you would think that this team had all the makings of the next great NBA dynasty.
Unfortunately for them, that 2012 NBA Finals run was the most success the Thunder would see with these core players. The very next offseason, Oklahoma City traded Harden to the Houston Rockets due to salary cap restrictions. The Thunder could only afford to offer him a four-year, $55.5 million contract which, according to ESPN, Harden was not willing to take.
The question I pose is simple: can you be too good at drafting? That question may seem silly. Of course every team’s goal would be to always draft the best player possible with each pick. However, when you consider the practices put in place by professional sports leagues, drafting that many MVPs rarely works out.
One of the limitations to drafting is the salary cap. In many professional leagues, teams are limited in the amount of money they are allowed to spend yearly. This cap serves as a sort of system of checks and balances to keep rich teams from collecting all the good players. Although the salary caps for most leagues have been steadily increasing over the years, the cap still serves its purpose to limit richer teams from effectively buying all the good players’ contracts.
The cap, however, can also inhibit teams from keeping around the superstars that they drafted. Some rules give players’ original teams the right to make the first offer. If another team makes a larger offer and the original team can’t match it, the player can take the highest offer given to them. This is what happened in 2012 with Harden and the Thunder, though OKC decided to trade him before they had to watch him leave for nothing in return.
We’ve seen the problem of having too many good players on one team pop up again recently. Currently, the San Francisco 49ers are reportedly trying to trade their star receiver Brandon Aiyuk. This is because there are many star players on the team and, in turn, just as many star player-level contracts that the Niners can’t afford.
They are already in a poor position with their payroll, and the pending free agency of Aiyuk isn’t helping. Even the present-day Oklahoma City Thunder may be destined to a similar fate to the 2012 team due to their very young core.
However, not every league has a salary cap. Major League Baseball forgoes the typical salary cap for a luxury tax system. A team’s taxes are entirely dependent on the money they spend on their roster, where teams with high payrolls have to pay more in taxes while low payrolls pay less. Although many have been critical of this system, it’s a part of the game and it would be too detrimental to the structure of the league to change it now.
For this reason, the idea of being too good at drafting doesn’t exist in baseball. With the lack of a hard salary cap, teams are at liberty to keep every good player they draft around for as long as they can. The question there becomes how much money the ownership of a team is willing to spend to keep their core.
I believe that teams can very easily get caught up in the idea of only drafting the brightest stars. But if you draft an MVP-caliber player every year, you will eventually run out of money to pay all of them. The sweet spot of drafting is combining the star-level players with practical players that complement the stars and cost much less.
We even saw that dynamic with the 2012 Thunder. Harden wasn’t able to develop into the caliber of player he would eventually become until he left for Houston, and Westbrook didn’t win his MVP award until after Durant left following the 2015-2016 season.
The point I’m trying to make here is a simple one: having too many stars is bad for all parties. Teams have to make sacrifices because of cap restrictions, players have to pack up and move because of those restrictions, and fans get robbed of special team lineups because of, ironically, their team drafting too well.
