Cap in Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports and Why the Free Market Could Save Them

In this evenhanded if slow-going sports history, sportscaster Dowbiggin (Money Players) takes a hard look at salary caps and how they affect sports. He goes through decades of owner-player relations—including Babe Ruth and the Yankees, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers—and how their expensive contracts shaped their sports. Dowbiggin is not a fan of salary caps in professional sports, calling them akin to “a Soviet-style scythe to level competition in the service of parity.” Acknowledging the often tense relationships between franchises and players, Dowbiggin nevertheless argues that “sports is perhaps the only industry where owners benefit from employees’ being in a union.” It takes a while for Dowbiggin to make his point, but it’s a convincing one: moving to a system that European soccer leagues utilize, with divisions for winning teams to chase promotion, and losers to face relegation, and teams that “get to spend what they make.” With that system in mind, he imagines, for example, how the NHL could be expanded to 48 teams, divided into two tiers, and made to allow teams to “pay partial salaries of players they trade or acquire in trades.” This is a thought-provoking look into the financial structure of North American sports. [em](Sept.) [/em]