The Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) is besieged by dwindling viewership for many many reasons. One of which is the presence of farm teams, lack of parity and one-sided trades in favor of richer teams. No wonder spectators and television viewers prefer to watch college basketball tournaments than pay attention to the lack of excitement in Asia's oldest professional basketball league.
In the last 33 conferences in the PBA, the now-defunct Alaska Aces and the Rain or Shine Elasto Painters won a combined three titles. The rest of the championships were either won by a team under the San Miguel Corporation (SMC) banner or a squad with the Manny V. Pangilinan (MVP) group.
As expected, critics call for the imposition of a strict salary cap to address the the seemingly limitless capacity of marquee teams to sign multiple superstars.
In 1992, in response to the overwhelming number of players seeking extravagant contracts, the PBA adopted a salary system where teams then like Swift, Shell, Alaska, Tivoli, Pepsi, and Ginebra were limited to a PhP 12 million cap, while Purefoods and San Miguel had a cap of PhP 15 million.
Unfortunately, this seems to be not the case now.
In 2022, the contract renewal impasse between Northport Batang Pier and Greg Slaughter turned to worse as "Gregzilla" stood by his claim that the maximum offer filed by the Batang Pier with the PBA league office is not really the amount paid, at least in his case. It was actually more than that.
Slaughter wrote a Facebook comment to one of their stories stating, "I don’t know why they insist on trying to fool the public. The bottom line is this 'max offer' is not even close to what Northport was already paying me."
This certainly opened a can of worms.
According to veteran sports analyst Quinito Henson, revising the PBA's salary cap rules might just be the solution.
"We want to have a good distribution of talent, a good distribution of wealth sa PBA. I believe there has to be a serious review of the salary cap situation," The Dean said on One PH’s Power & Play recently.
It makes plenty of sense.
"We do have a salary cap of PhP 420,000 a month, but we also know that many players are getting more than that in various forms. There are endorsements and other things. I think the system now favors those teams that are super rich," he added.
Going into specifics, Henson introduced the idea of including a luxury tax in the league’s salary cap provisions to get the wealthy teams’ spending under control and at the same time, offer a lifeline to the squads that are not as affluent.
"I think there has to be a total review if you introduce a luxury tax. In other words, if they (PBA teams) want their salary to go above the salary cap, okay lang pero magbayad sila sa liga," Henson explained. "Yung luxury tax na babayaran nila will go to the league, as well as distributed to the other teams."
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