I don't follow the NBA at all, so pardon my ignorance. I've always wondered why there are so many multi-players trades in the NBA. It's not unusual to see team A trade 3 players to team B for 2 players and a draft pick, or something like that. It seems like you never see one-for-one, or player-for-pick trades. And you almost never see those huge deals in other sports. It's always seemed odd to me that the sport with the smallest rosters has the biggest trades. What is it about the NBA that causes this to happen?
Don't know if this is related to the salary cap in the CBA or if this is strictly owners' rules, but any NBA trade requires the total salary load of the "trade" that is larger to be no higher than 115% of the salary of the "trade" of the team trading away less, at least during the season. It's partially designed to keep players in one place for their career. It also supposedly addresses the "sell-off" situations MLB and NHL teams are known to execute. I'm struggling for better wording. If you make a million a year and are traded to Portland for our lowly GM (from the wishful thinking department), the GM can't be making more than $1.15 mil, or less than $869,600 or so. I thought there were different rules out of season, especially around the draft, but it's hard for me to remember player-for-pick trades of any sort in the last few years.
Exactly. And most trades these days happen because one team's trying to dump a bad contract while the other team's trying to get more talent. So the team that's dumping contracts says "If you want our star, you also have to take these overpaid deadweights." and then, you have to add players to match the salaries. Inevitably, you end up involving 6, 7 players.
There are a ton in the NHL, mostly lower-end players for a conditionnal pick or like a 3rd-4th rounder.
Doesn't this practice make it impossible to build up a young team over time? I can imagine a fan being excited about a group of young players that a team has acquired over a few years, only to have all or most of them traded away in one fell swoop. Isn't it impossible to have chemistry or continuity when this kind of thing happens regularly?
You would have guessed correctly, though teams also have to worry about the luxury tax now. Not only do you need to match salaries in order to make a trade work and dump bad contracts, some teams actively trade for players with contracts that end at the end of the season - when the contracts expire, they have that much more salary cap space to go after free agents.
http://espn.go.com/nba/columns/stein_marc/1513591.html Mark Stein w/ESPN with a good take on how to fix the NBA, with regards to the salary cap.
You're right that it's impossible to have continuity but the teams that get involved in multi player trades are either bad teams that are starting over or good teams that are one player away from title contention - in either case, they're not giving away players who are part of a team's long term plans. You look at Dallas Mavericks, who performed a whole bunch of multi player trades in the late 90s. In the process, they went from one of the worst teams in the NBA to a legit title contender, led by three players, all acquired in trades, Nash, Finley and Nowitski. But since the Big 3 arrived, they haven't made any big trades. Here are the players they've given up since: Juwan Howard, Tim Hardaway, Wang Zhizhi and a few others not important enough for me to remember. Sonics were the biggest players in this year's trade market. The only important young player they parted with was Desmond Mason but they end up with a core of Rashard Lewis, Ray Allen and Vladmir Radmanovic, which should be around for a few years to come. Then you have teams like Bucks and Celtics, whose owners are looking to sell the franchises so for them slashing payroll is more important than putting together a competitive team.