SACRAMENTO — In less than 300 days, baseball’s collective bargaining agreement expires. As major league owners meet this week to plot strategy, the powers that be will consider the probable push for a salary cap. The argument in favor: If teams are limited in how much they can pay players — that is, if the Dodgers cannot spend whatever they want — fans in small markets can believe their team can win.
Tell that to the great fans of Sacramento.
The Kings have the worst record in the NBA. In a league with a salary cap, and in which the majority of teams make the playoffs, the Kings have made the playoffs once in 20 years.
Whatever this is, it is not parity.
I wanted to ask the Kings how much a salary cap really helps a small-market team, given their struggles. The Kings politely declined interviews on anything related to a salary cap, since they own the minor league ballpark in Sacramento that temporarily houses the Athletics. The Kings’ owner, Vivek Ranadivé, would like MLB to consider Sacramento for an expansion team.
So, before a game last week, I asked Kings fans about the juxtaposition: Why can’t the Kings win in a league with a salary cap intended to help them win?
“I don’t think it’s a salary cap issue,” Cheyenne Merced of Sacramento said. “I think it’s an owner issue.”
Said another fan, Devin Pasua of Sacramento: “The Kings don’t know how to spend.”
In Sacramento, the downtown arena and surrounding entertainment district are enjoyable and energetic without overwhelming fans with an assault of sound and light, and the purple beam that ascends skyward when the Kings win is a nice hometown touch.
That beats the alternative: The Kings nearly left town, first for Anaheim and then for Seattle, before Ranadivé bought the team in 2013.
“I’m glad for what he’s done to keep the team in Sacramento,” Kings fan Colin Hutchison of Woodland said. “The arena is beautiful. I love going to games for the chance to see the beam. Great food options. It’s a fun time.
“I think sports fans just want a fun time and want to see competitive sports. The Kings do one thing right. They don’t do the other right.”
In the 20-year run with that one playoff appearance, the Kings have had 10 head coaches, plus three interim head coaches. None of those head coaches lasted more than three seasons.
Eric Musselman, the first Sacramento coach in that run, lasted one season. He is now the head coach at USC.
“In the NBA, there is a salary cap and, for the most part, the same teams are winning every year,” he said.
Does that mean Oklahoma City, the champion last season and the team with the best record this season, is the small-market team that validates the NBA salary cap?
“Oklahoma City is not winning because they have a salary cap,” Musselman said. “Salary cap or no salary cap, Oklahoma City is going to win as long as Sam Presti is there.”
Presti, the Oklahoma City general manager, is basically the Andrew Friedman of NBA executives. Dodgers owner Mark Walter lured Friedman to Los Angeles and, now that Walter owns the Lakers, might well pursue Presti to run them.
Oklahoma City is not the only small-market success story in the NBA. With Gregg Popovich as head coach and R.C. Buford in the front office, the San Antonio Spurs won five NBA championships and made 22 consecutive playoff appearances.
“It’s not the cap,” Musselman said. “It’s having Tim Duncan and David Robinson, and having an owner and a coach and a GM that are aligned.
“You’ve got to find the right coach and have consistency with the coach and roll with him.”
In 13 seasons under Ranadivé, the Kings have had six head coaches and five general managers.
“They have no one to blame but themselves for their futility,” said Grant Napear, the television voice of the Kings for 32 years and now a sports talk host in Sacramento.
Napear cited the same statistic the commissioner’s office now likes to cite: the last small-market team to win the World Series was the Kansas City Royals, 11 years ago. For baseball, he believes, a salary cap would be a good thing, given the gaping revenue disparities among teams.
“Can you really have a sport where two-thirds of your teams have no chance of winning?” he said. “Is that the model of a good professional sports league?”
So, in the NBA model, why do the Kings seemingly have no chance of winning?
“The salary cap gives a team such as Oklahoma City and Indiana the opportunity to do the same thing as a franchise like the Lakers and Knicks,” Napear said, “if you have smart management, if you draft well, and if you make good trades.
“The Kings are playing by the same rules, for all intents and purposes, as the big-market teams. They have been mismanaged. They have made many, many horrible draft picks and horrible trades. That’s the reason why they are where they are: constantly firing coaches, constantly replacing their general managers.
“They have an owner who has been here over a lengthy period of time who really doesn’t do anything right.”
As an owner, it isn’t hard to do the right thing: hire the best people you can, support them however they need, and then stay out of their way.
MLB owners can consider ways to narrow revenue disparities without a salary cap. However, if MLB gets a salary cap — and there is no indication the players’ union is interested in discussing one, let alone agreeing to one — then the commissioner’s office would say it had leveled the playing field.
No team would be guaranteed a winner, but no team could point its finger at the Dodgers. If the player payroll is just about the same for every team, then success would depend in large part on the smarts of ownership and management.
Yet such smarts are not evident among all the teams in the NBA, and certainly not among all the teams in MLB. Would Branch Rickey come back to life to run the Pittsburgh Pirates, with autonomy and resources from ownership?
If you are a fan of a small-market baseball team, and you hear your owner say your team would win if only MLB had a salary cap, our friends in Sacramento would offer you three letters in response: LOL.
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