Vision of the NBA future

The economic recession is affecting everyone in the country. It is not just a middle class, lower class, Wall Street, Main Street issue. And certainly talking about it through the scope of sports is not going to really lead to any solutions to the problem.

But this is a Magic/NBA blog, so how it affects the Magic and the NBA is something that needs to be addressed.

They say sports is recession-proof. We are going to learn that this is not true this time around. Henry Abbott of TrueHoop has talked a lot about the economy and how it will affect the NBA. He had another one (linked above) Thursday.

In this increasingly murky economic world, it appears that owners are looking to slash payroll and pay as little as humanly possible -- not to just to go after LeBron James in 2010.

This means a few things.

The obvious is that free agent contracts are going to start decreasing. Teams are going to be willing to shell out money less and less.

The not-so-obvious thing is that careers might be shortening. Think about it: Veterans in the NBA are guaranteed a higher minimum salary than younger players. It would not surprise me to see teams willing to go younger rather than take on the contract of an older player.

I am foreseeing careers getting shorter as teams opt for younger minimum talent rather than older minimum talent.

I do not know if league revenues will decrease substantially. But it looks like they will a little bit. This could lead to a decrease in the salary cap. The cap is linked directly to league revenues. So again, this means contracts are going to be decreasing.

It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out next summer (and in the future. But hopefully it does not last too long.