Overall, I’d say the cap is good.
Without it, you’d see the big market teams dominate everyone else, settling in for perpetually boring outcomes in the regular season and through much of the playoffs. With the cap, the talent gets shuffled and reshuffled, and even small market teams can hope to rise to the top eventually, if they play their cards right.
The cap means that you can’t rely only on hiring the best talent. The best talent gets spread around.
We talk of Golden State’s utter dominance, but the truth is they aren’t *that* much better than everyone else. They can lose on any given night. They played Memphis three times last year and lost twice, I think — against a team that really wasn’t even a contender. The gap separating the Warriors from middling teams is not very big. That’s due to the cap, mainly.
San Antonio in the playoffs just ran into some awful luck, losing first Tony Parker, then Kahwi Leonard, to injuries. Most everyone thinks San Antonio would have won some of those playoff games if they’d been healthy. Few think they’d have won four games, but the difference in effectiveness between those two teams is not huge.
The cap isn’t going away. Distributing money to players has to have a cap; else franchise values all around the league would plummet; fan interest would plummet, too, except for fans of several perpetual contenders. Profits would collapse as franchises put themselves in hock deeper and deeper to attract and retain the best players. Some franchises would simply fold, not seeing the point of continuing. Free market capitalism would lead to ruin in the NBA, and the owners and players all know it.