Wizards Owner fined $100,000 for talking salary cap
Written by playerpress.com, Wednesday September 29 2010
Washington Wizards majority owner Ted Leonsis made the comment on Wednesday that he expects the NBA soon will have a hard salary cap similar to the National Hockey League’s cap structure.
NBA commissioner David Stern said that is not necessarily true, and warned Leonsis that he could be punished for discussing private league business.
It did not take them long to punish Leonsis for his big mouth, the NBA announced later in the day that they had fined Leonsis $100,000 for “unauthorized public comments regarding the league’s collective bargaining negotiations.”
Before the fine was announced, Stern told the Associated Press that “We’re negotiating and that was one of our negotiating points, but collective bargaining is a negotiating process, and that was not something that Ted was authorized to say and he will be dealt with for that lapse in judgment.”
Leonsis also owns the Washington Capitals of the NHL was speaking to a group of Northern Virginia business leaders before the Wizards’ daily training camp session when he made the statement.
“In a salary-cap era, and soon a hard salary cap in the NBA like it’s in the NHL, if everyone can pay the same amount to the same amount of players, its the small nuanced differences that matter,” Leonsis said to the group.
Asked he realized what he had done, he backed off from any other questions concerning the matter only to say that the NHL’s system “is a good one.”
“It’s working,” Leonsis said. “The teams are very, very competitive. There is no way that big markets teams can outspend small market teams. So when the season starts everyone thinks their team can compete for the Stanley Cup.”
Unlike the NHL or the NFL, the current NBA salary cap allows teams to go over the cap if they are willing to pay a luxury tax penalty.
The league’s proposal to the union for a new collective bargaining agreement after the current agreement expires next year included talk of a hard cap, and the players flat out rejected it.
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