As I'd pointed out earlier, a couple years ago there was an agent that said the players should used the maximum escalator each year. The reasoning was that it would force the owners and the players to try their best to increase revenues. But that is more foolhardy than aligning the cap so that escrow is minimal.
This year is one of the larger increases in cap percentage, year over year, outside the anomalies that kicked the cap from 54 to 57 percent and the one that decreased the cap from 57 to 50 percent.
IMHO, the players should have stood more firm and not used their escalator at all. I'd bet that instead of handing out all these massive contracts this year, that not using the escalator would have put the escrow throughout the year at between 6 and 7 percent, if the league's revenue projections have any merit.
After all, it's not that the escrow system is broken. It's the cap projection coupled with many teams getting to the cap ceiling that did cause large escrow withholds until this year. And I don't thing that financial advisors and agents are doing the players any favors telling them that escrow is a problem when the players generally agree to escalate the cap above projections.
Grudy,
It depends on what the PA really wants. I'm beginning to think that the negotiations went down like this:
BOG: Ok. 50%, but that is a hard 50% so we will need to have the escrow system in place, but that won't be a big deal.
PA: Sure, fine....(But not really thinking about what all that means. Only that at least they got 50%).
So, the players aren't really up to speed on what is happening. They just want as high of salaries as they can get, and they don't analyze it the way we do here, where we know that NOT using the escalator next year favors currently signed players, and it's the new free agent class who gets less, while USING it favors the new class of FAs. The players really are only looking at their paychecks.
That means that they think they are somehow losing something, and that's not fair.
Now, at the beginning, if the PA actually wanted very limited escrow withholdings, they could have simply not used the escalator, or they could have foreseen that, even with the escalator, most teams will spend closer to the ceiling than the floor, and they would have wanted the ceiling nearer the midpoint.
But I believe that, with the single-minded vision of workers everywhere, the players were and still are only looking at their own bottom line. So, they wanted high salaries, and that requires using the escalator (hence the comment we have discussed about forcing the owners to market heavily to raise HRR - which does NO such thing).
And, thus, they have brought this on themselves. They really only want high salaries. And, with that single vision, they can't see what they are doing to themselves.
And, much to my dismay, I'm sure the owners are secretly chuckling about that, because what is going to happen is that the players are going to negotiate against themselves. The owners don't care about escrow - it's not their baby. 50% of HRR is. The "Cost Certainty" that goes with that is. So, if the players argue against escrow, they will lose something else, because the owners will be happy to act as if escrow is important to them when it really isn't. This argument from the players is like giving the owners free leverage, and it's simply foolish.